The Just Checking In Podcast

JCIP #353 - Dr Ashley Frawley - Part 2

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In episode 353 of The Just Checking In Podcast we checked back in with academic, author and commentator Dr Ashley Frawley.

Ashley currently works as Senior Editor at Compact Magazine, as well as holding roles of sociologist and Visiting Researcher in the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies at the University of Kent, as well as Visiting Research Fellow at the MCC Brussels in Belgium.

We first checked in with Ashley in JCIP #253 in August 2024. 

In Ashley’s Part 1, we discussed her academic journey, the influence of Frank Furedi on her views and career, her critiques of ‘therapy culture’, her view that there is a crisis of meaning in Western society right now, an eating disorder she had from the ages of 14-21 and how she overcame it.

In the last year, Ashley has written and commented on a range of issues, including the assisted suicide debate in the UK, trans discourse, Islamism’s influence in the West and has commissioned articles in Compact, including issues like Tucker Carlson’s recent political direction and ‘black post-liberalism’. 

The most spicy recent article we saw on Compact she commissioned, which went semi-viral was by a writer called Helen Andrews called ‘The Great Feminisation’. In the article, Helen argued that Western society has been slowly feminised over the last 20 years, to the detriment of political debate, and argued that cancel culture itself is a feminine phenomenon, propagated and executed mostly by female activists. 

Naturally, we wanted to find out more and interrogate the pros and cons of this argument, as well as covering other issues Ashley has spoke about through a mental health lens. 

As always, #itsokaytovent

Please find links to all the articles we discussed in the podcast below: 

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SPEAKER_00

Hi Venters, welcome back to another episode of the Just Checking In Podcast. I'm your host, Freddie Cocker, and this podcast is brought to you by Vent, a place where everyone, but especially men and boys, can open up about their mental health issues, break down stigmas, and start conversations. In each episode, I check in with a special guest. We have a natta and a chat about all things mental health, as well as anything and everything else they are passionate about. If it helps that person with their mental health, we discuss it. In this episode, I'm checking back in with academic, commentator and author Dr. Ashley Frawley. Ashley currently works as senior editor at Compact Magazine, as well as holding roles of sociologist and visiting researcher in the Centre for Parenting Cultural Studies at the University of Kent, as well as visiting research fellow at the MCC Brussels in Belgium. I first checked in with Ashley in JCP 253 in August 2024. In Ashley's Part 1, we discussed her academic journey, the influence of Frank Faradi on her views and career, her critiques of therapy culture, her view that there is a crisis of meaning in Western society right now, an eating disorder she had from the ages of 14 to 21, how she overcame it, and reflected on it on the pod. In the last year, Ashley has written and commented on a range of issues, always spicy, including the assisted suicide debate in the UK, trans discourse, Islamism's influence in the West, and has commissioned articles in Compact, including issues like Tucker Carlson's recent political direction and black post-liberalism. The most spicy recent article I saw on Compact, which piqued my interest and went semi-viral, was one by a female writer called Helen Andrews, which was called The Great Feminization. In the article, Helen argued that Western society has been slowly feminized over the last 20 years to the detriment of political debate, and she argued that cancel culture itself is a feminine phenomenon, propagated and executed mostly by female activists. Naturally, I wanted to find out more and interrogate the pros and cons of this argument, as well as covering other issues Ashley has spoken about through a mental health lens. Ashley is critical of the article in some parts and also agrees with the article in other parts, and before the article, we talk about issues that Ashley has spoken about publicly, as well as compact articles she has written and published herself. So this is how part two of my conversation with Dr. Ashley Frawley went. Ashley, welcome back to the Just Checking In Pod. Thank you so much for letting me check back in with you. You've had a very busy year since we last checked in. How are you on this Friday morning?

SPEAKER_01

I'm good. Have I ever not had a busy year? I think I actually remember the last time that I was relaxed was 2007. I can actually remember the day. Finished my undergraduate degree and I was like, what do I do now? And that was the last moment I was ever relaxed in my life.

SPEAKER_00

You've written lots of great articles in the last three years and commissioned many more, and we're going to dive into all of them, or at least some of them. So without further delay, are you ready to start the show and talk all about them?

SPEAKER_01

Let's do it.

SPEAKER_00

Let's start this part two, Pod Ash, by checking back in with your academic journey. Because in the last year and a half, you've talked about a lot of issues. You've commissioned a lot of articles on other issues on Compact. So what's happened and what are some of the issues you've been talking about?

SPEAKER_01

Oh my. Well, I don't exactly remember when it was that we spoke, specifically what month it might have been, because so much has happened and so much has changed. But yeah, definitely with Compact, boy, I feel like I won the lottery with that one. It's such a great publication and just so much fun to be a part of. And it forces me constantly. This is a very difficult thing for me to kind of negotiate, but to constantly try to see the merits of points of view that I disagree with, which I am naturally predisposed to. I enjoy debate, although it frustrates me a lot of the time. I have always felt that my ideas come out stronger as a result of debating people. You know, I'm the type of person that likes to argue in the pub. That's my like it's like my hobby. I really enjoy that. And I come across quite a lot of pieces where I fundamentally disagree with the premise. I think it's completely wrong. And I can't say, no, I'm not going to publish this just because I disagree. I have to think, like, well, did this challenge me? Did this make me think about things in a new and different way? And I really like pieces that try to criticize Marx because I'm like, okay, here we go. Like, change my mind. Tell me I've been wrong all these years, or make me think about how to counter what you're saying and make my ideas stronger. And very few pieces actually succeed in this. Maybe I'm maybe I'm too indoctrinated. I've been really enjoying that. And I think the general kind of trajectory of the magazine and what I have been trying to kind of commission on is thinking through in a deeper way some of the economic questions that confront us from a lot of different angles, you know, things like Trump's tariffs. On the one hand, you know, who's whispering in his ear, but also maybe there's some kind of deeper logic that even those whispering in his ear aren't aware of. What are they what are they actually trying to do here? And it's not just with tariffs, it's things like the underlying quote unquote logics that lead to warfare and so on. So that's what I've been really, really interested in. I've got a few pieces that I've commissioned coming out. So yeah, it just gives me that opportunity. And then I can write whatever I want, anything that I want, in short form. And I have the freedom to make them, well, I try anyway, to make them beautiful. And I have never had that before. You know, people just didn't get what I was trying to do, and they would often take stuff out, which is fair enough. That's not my own fault because maybe I wasn't, I wasn't clear enough. Like my through line wasn't clear enough, and editors just didn't get it. But like trying to hone the craft and explain the world as I see it to people, try to give people a sense of the optimism and the horror that I feel looking at the world and its possibilities, both good and bad. It's the only opportunity I've ever had to do this exactly as I want to. So it's been fantastic.

SPEAKER_00

The first issue we're going to discuss, and it's one that you've spoken about personally online and in articles, is assisted dying. And it's become a big topic in the UK, not just due to the assisted dying bill in England, but at the time of recording, there was also a bill that was struck down in the Scottish Parliament, which you'll be aware of. I spoke to Alicia Duncan, a Canadian commentator and author who's been speaking about the horrors of Canada's made system. I'm sure you're well aware of that. Oh, yeah. And I remember a tweet you posted in response to comments from former Chief Medical Officer Sir Chris Whitzie. He was speaking about this issue, and you said suicide prevention is for healthy people. Everyone else's lives are worth just that little bit less. So tell me about your perspective on this wider issue then.

SPEAKER_01

I mean, where to start? Yeah, I mean, that's exactly it. I spoke with Roger Foley about this. So this kind of trajectory of how I became interested in this, I have a libertarian streak. I often think of myself or describe myself as a libertarian communist, which sounds like a contradiction in terms, but I think if you do understand the dialectic, it makes sense. And is the only kind of human ethics-preserving ethos or trajectory that one can have. So I believe in the ability of human beings to be autonomous and to choose the course of their lives to judge, not just do whatever they want. You know, there's a difference between liberty and libertinism, but I believe in the capacity to judge. That doesn't mean people always judge, right? But I believe in the capacity to judge. It's kind of a natural issue that you would be in favor of from that perspective. And I just had been, I didn't advocate for it. I was just sort of passively in favor. I saw it passing in Canada. I did nothing. I said nothing. I wasn't involved in it at all. And then little by little, these stories start coming through. And I started having to really re-examine what I thought this was really about. The first inkling I had that something was wrong was my very good friend since childhood, her older brother was diagnosed with MS in his late 20s. And he gradually became more and more disabled. And toward the end of his life, he was communicating with like a picture board. But he wanted to live. And he had been a musician and he was still writing music. You know, through certain accommodations, he was able to continue living. That was worthwhile to him. But every time that he got sick, so he was in an assisted living facility, every time that he got sick, the nurses would neglect him. Like, this is the end for you, you know. Like his mother was pleading, like she couldn't be there all the time, was just pleading. Like the nurses are not helping him, they're not helping him. And he was sending her messages, Mom, they're gonna kill me. Like, I'm gonna die here. Not literally gonna kill me, but like through neglect, because they just were like, Why are you still alive? Like there was a clear kind of sense of that that they just didn't value. And every illness that he got, they were like, Well, this is the end for you, this is really the end of the line. And he was like, No, I want to fight. And I was like, something is wrong here, right? My husband is Greek, and when I told him some stories about, you know, how people view, and I've done a lot of interviews as I've researched this, and when I tell him some of the things that people tell me, he's utterly, utterly horrified. Because years ago I had said to him, Oh, you know, this is really awful thing to say, but it's just goes to show you what a lot of people think and what drives this kind of movement. I was like, if I have Alzheimer's or something like that, I wouldn't be upset if you just, you know, wheeled me off a cliff, you know. And in my head, I was like, I would be doing something good for you because I wouldn't want to burden you with that. So, like just a passive observer, you're like being disabled with Alzheimer's, that's just the worst possible thing you could possibly have. But you're thinking about it for yourself, right? So you don't think like, oh, I want to kill this disabled people, but you are kind of saying that. But you think you're okay because you're you're saying it for yourself. I said this to my husband, and he looked at me with utter horror and he was like, No, I would take care of you. I realized not only was that in thinking that I was being selfless, I was actually being selfish because I was depriving him of what he thought was his responsibility to me, which was to take care of me if one day I can't take care of myself. And the thought that if the tables are turned, that I would want to kill or like end the suffering of this man who has cared for me all these years, who I've known since I was 19 years old, who's never said a bad word to me, always been kind and wonderful to me, that I would not want to care for him is awful. And I think it was, although I the way that I approached this is entirely secular, there was a I can't remember who it was, a religious figure who said, I want to be a burden on my loved ones as I die. And I want them to be a burden on me. It's called love. And that is exactly right, you know. And and I, you know, I was talking to my mom about this, who's Canadian. Well, I'm Canadian obviously, but um, my mom still lives in Canada. She's just the most like apolitical person possible. And I just kind of mentioned it, and she goes, Oh, well, you know, people don't want to be a burden, you know. And I was like, you know, that's that's how people think. It's just very passive. Like, oh, when you become ill, you are a burden on other people. And the right thing to do is to get made. And I was like, Mom, your mother was ill with cancer for the two years before she died. You took care of her. Was she a burden on you? No, no, of course not. Well, why would you say that? Why would you just take that for granted? So it completely changes the way, not changes, but it defers to the worst possible views of aging, of becoming disabled, and it devalues specifically those lives and sees them as burdensome. And unfortunately, I had these ideas, even though, like, you know, as a sociologist, you learn about the disability rights movement and so on, and social model of disability, and I teach this. Even I had these residual ideas in my head until you know my husband looked at me with horror and I realized what I actually had been saying and thinking in my mind all this time, and what by extension that meant I thought about people with disabilities. It's just an awful thing. So, anyway, I spoke with Roger Foley. This was the story that was the decisive turning point in my thinking and what made me an activist, I suppose, but like actively writing, speaking out against it, speaking with ministers. My claim to fame, Nicola Sturgeon directly cited me as having changed her mind about quote-unquote assisted dying. Anyways, the story that changed my mind was Roger Foley. And if you don't know it, he has a disability that makes it very, very difficult. He's um basically has to stay in a hospital bed. At this point, he's in hospital. He needs very, very complex forms, forms of 24-hour community care, which are costly. So he was admitted to hospital several years ago and has not been able to leave hospital because they will not give him the community care that he needs. And they were treating him extremely badly in hospital and he became suicidal. And he, thinking like, Oh my gosh, I'm having these terrible thoughts of suicide, I should probably talk to somebody, goes and says, I'm feeling suicidal. And they go, Oh, well, we can arrange that for you. So if he was an able-bodied person, you would go, Oh, that's terrible. But because he's disabled, you go, Oh, we'll do that. If you are disabled and suicidal, your life is literally at risk in Canada. And I have tried to explain this to Canadians, they cannot see it anymore. They can no longer see that this is wrong. And I think it comes down to the loss of meaning in life for anything else beyond the self and well-being and happiness. So, you know, so I've written about this in my books, but if a personal sense of well-being is your purpose in life, then becoming ill isn't something that you sort of move through or incorporate into your purpose. It is a loss of purpose entirely. It becomes an existential threat. And I don't want to name any names, but recently I saw this happen when an elderly family member became ill. And uh I don't want to kind of criticize the family, but it really shocked me how quickly they wanted her to die. And it was like they didn't want her to die. And we say this like we don't want our loved ones to suffer, right? But it was like as soon as that diagnosis happened, they were like, death with dignity, death with dignity. And I think death with dignity, unfortunately, is a euphemism for death without becoming disabled. When people say, Oh, I want to keep my dignity, they're saying, I don't want to become dependent on others. I don't want to be a burden, I don't want to have to be taken care of. But I think we underestimate, and we had a piece in Compact about this from a wheelchair user, and it's um titled, I'm a wheelchair user, my life is worth living. And he talks about how when you become disabled, you have to adapt to this. And that's a difficult thing. And it's at that point of adaptation that people are most at risk. It's at that point of transitioning from being able-bodied to having to accept the reality of disability that people are most at risk. And it was like, yeah, immediate. Well, there's just, we don't really know what to do with this new information. It's best to die now. Right. And again, you know, my husband and I talked about this. He was really horrified. He's like, Don't you say hope dies last. Don't you say that? Sorry, I don't want to insult my husband by doing his accents. Anyway, so yeah, I think there's a lot of this kind of uncertainty around disability, these unspoken kinds of devaluations attached to the fact of becoming dependent and being disabled. No doubt these things are difficult. And people will often talk about pain and suffering. But actually, if you look at studies of why people access assisted dying, assisted suicide euthanasia, it's uh fear of becoming incapacitated and fear of being a burden are the number are much higher on the list than pain. And it's often the anticipation of these things that is much more debilitating than the actual thing itself. So, like people, especially lobbyists, will hit that button pain and suffering, pain and suffering, pain and suffering, but it's not usually pain that leads people to assisted suicide, it's the fear of being a burden. Anyways, going back to the story of Roger Foley, it got significantly worse than simply saying, Oh, we can arrange that for you, and him being kind of stunned by that. But they actually began to kind of evangelize around it, like this would be you expressing your autonomy. This is the ultimate form of autonomy. And he was almost won over. He was almost convinced and for a short period of time became kind of evangelical around it before he suddenly snapped out of it and was like, wait a minute, no, I don't want assisted death. I want assisted living. I would not be in this situation if I could have assisted living. So you can go onto my YouTube channel and watch the interview that I did with him, and he tells the story in a lot more detail. And I play some of the recordings as well. So he actually tried to cancel the meeting with the mate assessment, and it went ahead anyway. And when he's in that mate assessment, he asks about assisted living, and they're like, We're not going to talk about that. We're just going to talk about assisted death. And they tell him about how much his hospital stay is costing and how much they're going to charge him if he wants to keep staying in the hospital or he can die. And he has that recorded. So he actually had the wherewithal to record that. And you have to think like how many people don't think to do that? So, yeah, all of this made me realize something really horrible is going on. And I should have seen it sooner. I should have seen it sooner. What I said, these underlying ideas about disabled people's lives, older people's lives, and it's also just a very basic sense that these lives are costly. And if you go into the literature, and the more that you read, the more this comes out, more or less, you know, there's all this stuff about autonomy, autonomy, autonomy. And immediately I was like, oh, really? How interesting. Because we're just coming out of COVID here. And I didn't hear a lot about autonomy. That was like the worst thing possible. And in my research, you know, I've often talked about how autonomy is considered risky and the ideal subjectivity is heteronomy, which is decisions that are made always through a connection to authorities. Oh, you're always thinking, like, what's the rule? What's the rule? What's the list of things I should be thinking about here in order to make a decision? So that I think that's the heteronymous subject is actually prize. So all of a sudden everybody starts shouting about autonomy. I thought that's funny. I don't believe that for half a second. Suddenly, and I remember I was on Times Radio, you know, I do like paper reviews, and the first issue was assisted dying. And the other speaker I'm with is like, oh yeah, autonomy, autonomy, commercial break. The next issue is obesity. Suddenly, he's like, we need to really make sure we dampen down the because you know, people aren't actually making choices here. It's very difficult. You know, studies show that you're not really making this choice. I was like, oh, that's really funny because suddenly autonomy is gone when people might make the wrong choice. But you believe in autonomy when it's the choice you want them to make. And like if you read uh Kevin Ewell's book, uh, who I've actually got an interview with him on my channel as well, he talks about how one of the most celebrated made pieces, like assisted dying pieces in favors, like the unanswerable case, literally says, it's amazing that a country experiencing such an unaffordable, unaffordable rise in aging and age-related problems, is even bothering debating this. Like it's amazing. Why are you like, we can't afford all these old people? You know?

SPEAKER_00

Uh you said the quiet power out loud there, yeah. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01

So I could go on and on and on with examples of this, but I realized we are not becoming more. It's not the belief in human autonomy and the ability to choose that's driving this. It's a lack of belief in the value of human life. And if you even say like the value of human life, that strikes people as religious. Like even forwarding that there's something special about human beings, which to me seems obvious. Like we are having this conversation. A dolphin is wonderful, but it's not doing this. Like, you know, Carl Sagan, we are the universe is coming to know itself. Like that is extraordinary. That is extraordinary. But no, if you talk about the value of human beings, that sounds religious and meaningless to us. And people have no problem comparing us to dogs. Like, while we put dogs down, why not humans? I mean, we don't let our dogs suffer. Yeah, you don't give dogs cancer care. Very rarely are you gonna pay for a dog's chemo. You don't want to clean up after them when they become incontinent. You don't want 24-7 care for a dog. Fine, okay, it's all right, it's a dog, not a human, okay? We used to aspire to treat humans as greater than animals. Now that sounds unbearably hubristic to us. So I think that is a huge part of it and a huge part of why I'm desperately trying to show people this is the wrong path to go down. And we've been down this path before, we should know better.

SPEAKER_00

Before we talk about the centerpiece of this check in and the reason I asked you to come on again, Ashley. Is you wrote a very interesting article on Compact called The Fall of Maternal Liberalism, which was shaped around the election of President Donald Trump for a second term, and an idea you argued that it was a rejection of maternal liberalism versus this kind of rebelling form of masculinity. And I remember you put a quote in there from a Democratic Party strategist who said after the election, quote, white men without college degrees are going to ruin the country. So, A, what are the kind of tenets of the argument in more detail? And B, that kind of struck me as not only just like blatant classism, but also I don't think that stereotype would be allowed to be said politically about any other social demographic without consequence.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I mean, the most powerful and consequential prejudice is the prejudice against the working class. And it's the last acceptable one too. Yeah. So in that piece, I talk about something that I have been preoccupied with for a long time. And I've written a couple of pieces that advance this line of reasoning. So generally, across all of my work, what I am interested in is how we make sense of what it is to be human, what it means to be human, how we should be, how this fits into our understandings of social problems, and how we then deal with them. So there is this sense, and I explained this in my second book, that most social problems ultimately come down to an inability of the subject to adequately manage itself. And as more and more, you know, this is what sociologists call a sociopathology perspective, it bleeds into eugenics, it bled into like a mental hygiene movement. But essentially, and I think I may have explained this in the first interview that we did together, but I'll just explain it again. It's the sense of like, if you ever took like a sociology class at A level or in North America, like grade 11 or whatever, you would probably have learned about organic analogies of society, right? So the society is like a body and the unhealthy parts are like a cancer or sickness. So the job of the sociologist, as an early 20th century, like 1907 or 1905 textbook of sociology put it, is to act like a doctor, that you diagnose the ailment of the social body and you provide a cure. And so they would be like, obviously that the Italians are idiots and imbeciles, and therefore the solution is to figure out, to adequately diagnose the ailment of the Italian character, you know, this sort of thing. And the Irishman has a natural predisposition, predilection for jollity and drink, and this means that he will always be. And therefore, we simply must uh figure out how to cordon off this illness from the rest of society and stop it from spreading. And there were obviously unkind versions of this, although they were often framed very kindly, which was eugenics and uh sterilization and things like that. So that's like the ugly version of it. But the argument that I make in the book is that that kind of thinking, while it has lost its obvious character, continues to this day through much more uh rhetorically opaque methods of putting this across, through layers of fawning and sympathy. And, you know, when it comes to like indigenous people, instead of being like the indigenous mother naturally lacks the ability to raise the good liberal citizen being closer to nature and much more like an animal, you know, this sort of now they're like the indigenous mother is unable to raise children because colonialism has cut her off from the sacred role of womanhood. And I wrote a paper about this. You can go and have a look at it. It's called Supporting the Sacred Journey, where I dissect a lot of these discourses, where they're like fawning and they seem to be blaming themselves and saying it's not your fault, but they are saying like it is your fault. Like you would solve these problems if you could be a better mother.

SPEAKER_00

It's bigotry of low expectations, isn't it? Exactly in reverse.

SPEAKER_01

It's worse than that, though. It's worse than that because they're still saying, like, it's your fault. It's not like the poverty, the lack of infrastructure, the like distance from mainstream society and norms, the policies that are in place. No, no, no. All you need is psychological help and parenting classes. We're gonna solve these problems. The attitudes toward the colonized abroad are always very similar to the working classes at home. It's a very similar kind of idea, like we'll fix you with parenting classes and so on. Not the structure of society, not the unequal like distribution of resources, not the, you know, dwindling pay packages, blah, blah, blah, the fact that we're all fighting over fewer and fewer jobs. No, no, no, no, no. You just need to be more resilient. And it'll be like mental health is the worst thing affecting all of us. And if we could just go in and prevent people and make them more resilient, what they're really saying is like, you're the problem. You are the problem. So that's what kind of drives a lot of my work. I'm interested in that construction of the subject as the central problem, that there's something about humans that we are just unfixable. Because all of these interventions over like a hundred years haven't fixed these problems, right? We still have inequalities, we still have poverty, we still have economic crises, you know, things have got better, but there are problems that persist. And these individualized interventions don't work because the structure of society hasn't changed. And instead of being like, oh, well, maybe we're wrong, maybe it's not human stupidity or, you know, whatever kind of words they put that in now, they go, Oh, wow, humans are worse than we thought. And they become much more pessimistic and much more heavy-handed in their interventions. So one of the areas where I find that this expresses itself is in gender or gendered expectations of the subject. So one of the kind of areas that gets the blame for social problems is gendered expectations of men and women. And over time, what has happened is that so-called feminine subjectivity, which is actually the stereotypical feminine that generations of feminists have fought against, this notion that women are by nature closer to nature, passive, emotional, body conscious, these things that were used as reasons to keep women out of public life historically, like a woman is too, you know, driven by her emotional whims and this sort of thing.

SPEAKER_00

Essentialist. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. All of these things that feminists were like, no, there's nothing essential about women that makes them unsuited to public life and suited more to the private sphere. They're like, actually, ladies, all that stuff that we used to insult you with, no, no. Now I'm gonna say that, but I mean it as a good thing. I mean, you're so emotional, but I mean that as a good thing. We need more emotion in public life. Can you imagine if we had more women leaders? We'd have more compassion and caring, which is so insulting. So insulting and essentialist. No, as a leader, in fact, like one of my problems is that I was raised by my dad, so I didn't get a lot of that feminized socialization. So, like I'm not surprised. I interrupt people all the time. Like, I'm horrible. I have a lot of like quote unquote masculine socialization. So as a leader, I definitely would not be compassionate and carry. I'm like hyper-rationalist. Anyway, but there's nothing about a woman, but that kind of socialization is now seen as a good thing. The that socialization that kept women back, no, that's great. I'm men too. You should be like that. You should adopt these forms of feminized subjectivity. You should emote, you shouldn't keep it all inside. And the reason why this feminine subjectivity has become so powerful is because it is easier to govern. It is a subject that is better suited to the needs of neoliberal, post-liberal governance, whatever you want to call it. The reason why you're supposed to talk to somebody, as I explained in my second book, is so that you can put it all in the open and then that narrative that you put forward can then be moved to an acceptable script. And it's sometimes it's like literally a script, like you are thinking this, you should think this. Like it's sometimes it's like literally that. So feminine subjectivity is considered to be more governable because women are expected to be and socialized to be nice, kind, passive, not to demand too much in the workplace. Men, the 19th century was the century of the movements of working men. And these were some of the most volatile and disruptive forms of well, movement, but also quasi-revolutionary outlooks. And they were driven by men, because this these were movements of working men at the time, even though women were working as well. Anyway, and so there's this idea of like, oh, there's this like masculine energy behind this, men demand too much, and the whole like gender pay gap thing was like men put forward that men overvalue themselves, right? And women undervalue themselves. But it's like we should bring men down, and women should, you know, ask for more. Yes, be more assertive, yes, true. But there was a sense of like, no, men are the ones who are asking too much. No, no, no. Women and men both should be demanding it all, everything, because it's their labor that's running the world. It is their labor that is the source of profit. All of us should be demanding it all. But it's like, oh no, women, you are like exactly right in your outlook. You are grateful for being exploited. You know, I've seen this again and again and again, and I've seen this come up in like hiring. A lot of times, people will prefer to hire a woman because they are not going to be as disruptive. They are good team players, and they will work long hours if they can. Like even Karl Marx talks about this in Capital Volume One, where he says, like, the capitalist loves the female worker because she's desperate. She's got kids to feed, she's very easy to exploit. And this is the way that it is. Women will work like all hours around childcare to feed their kids. Women will do that. And unfortunately, that's probably the only feminine socialization that I have had. And it's partially because I wasn't middle class, I was poor working class. That when I got into academia, I was not at all picky. I couldn't believe that I got an academic job. I was shocked. I was like, I'm gonna, you know, chew gravel my whole life. Like my life is always gonna be difficult. I just expected that. And to have got the job that I wanted, I was shocked. And I was so grateful. I was working like 18 hours a day. I would take on all the teaching. I one year I taught 10 classes. 10 classes. Insane. And like the way also that I teach and lecture, it's like I write a 5,000-word essay for every single lecture. I'm sure that my 5,000-word essay lectures are still being used by other lecturers at that university. I'm sure I wrote basically the whole sociology curriculum. It's crazy. And it got to a point where I was pulling an all-nighter once a week or twice a week. Like I would just work right through the night, continue working into the next day, and then sleep the next night. That's insane. And men would not do that. So they were like, I'm not doing that. No, but I was like, oh, I'm not good enough. I'm, you know, I better like, you know, not let anyone know, you know, you they call this imposter syndrome. But like, I was just so grateful that I had a job. You know, and women will tend to do this much more than men. So women become this ideal subject because they're much more passive, they feel much more grateful. And then if you go into like health, they're much more body conscious. And this, you know, is a really negative thing. Like it really holds women back. It's awful that you are like so much your body and your value is so much your body. But it's like, oh no, that's a good thing, ladies. And like men too, you should also be like that because you know, women get sicker, men die quicker. So men, you should also be body conscious and constantly surveil yourself and be breast awake.

SPEAKER_00

That's the well-being industry, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01

Yes, exactly. And women are the biggest buyers of that. And it's like, well, men too, step it up. That is what I was getting at with the fall of maternal liberalism, that a feminized subjectivity is the ideal subjectivity across institutions, across work, and increasingly in governance. You want a more feminized subject. But it is a stereotypical feminine, and it is a feminine that has held people back because it makes women easier to control. And we should think about that when we talk about the ideals of like emotiveness and sharing and all these sorts of things, because they are at the end of the day about bringing your emotions in line with an acceptable script that is less volatile, more predictable, and easier to govern.

SPEAKER_00

Well, speaking of feminization, the reason we are checking in once more is I saw an article published on Compact by a woman called Helen Andrews. It was called The Great Feminization. It provoked huge debate online and in certain circles, semi-viral, if you will, as an article. And as you educated me off air, Ashley, this is actually something which women themselves have been speaking about for just over a decade. So an academic called Sarah Moore, for example, was writing about this as far back in 2010 from a less essentialised perspective than what we'll discuss. And in health sociology, this thesis is something called the feminization of health. There's an education equivalent called the feminization of education. So, what does the great feminization actually mean in reality? And I imagine I don't tend to indulge in standpoint theory, but I imagine it was probably important that a female writer wrote this to kind of ensure its legitimacy in a way.

SPEAKER_01

Maybe. I mean, it's not it's Helen came to us with that piece. So but yeah, maybe if a man wrote it, we might have, I don't know, been more reluctant. I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_00

Would have gone more viral.

SPEAKER_01

Possibly, yeah. I guess it would have like a different tone to it, more like disgruntled man, I suppose, as opposed to like a woman being like, hey, maybe this is what's going on. And maybe I would be a beneficiary. I don't know. Yeah, so it's a really great piece, The Great Feminization. And she basically talks about how cancel culture and all these sorts of things coincide with the enormous movement of women or the enormous change in the demographic makeup of a lot of workplaces and professions leaning more toward women through DEI and this sort of thing. And this led to a cancel culture situation because of the way that women behave. And then she brings in some like she doesn't say this literally, but I see this all the time to the point where I reduce it to this meme in my mind of like, and the reason is because in the Savannah Grasslands and I hate that so much. I'm sorry, Ellen. It's a great piece, but that's the kind of theorizing I can't stand. And because I've got a background in anthropology, I'm always like, oh yeah, and like what about the San Bushmen? Why don't they do that? Is it because in the they were in a different part of the Savannah Grasslands? Like there's so many cultures around the world, so many different ways of doing things. And yet we're like, but our culture was formed on the Savannah Grasslands, you know, millions of years ago. It's always this kind of like armchair evolutionary psychology. And I just really reject the biological essentialist basis. I think the general outlook is probably correct that there is a correlation between a lot of this, uh, a lot of the move of women or the changing demographics and the rise of like cancel culture and ultra conformity and quasi-leftist bias. It's not actually leftist, it's actually right-wing, as I explained in a piece for Unheard some years ago. But anyway, this seemingly left-wing bias and seeming caring that was actually a cover for the most awful sniping. But I think that what actually happened is that those in power wanted this. Management wanted this, they loved it. They wanted more women in positions for the reasons that I just explained because they like female subjectivity. Women sociologically, culturally, their role is often guardians of morality. They will be the ones who are like, you know, sweeping the church pews, this kind of thing. That's what women have historically done. They are often institutional guardians as well. And we are socialized to play this role. I will like say over and over and over, we're socialized to play this role. Not everybody plays this role. We all actively and selectively engage with the culture we ultimately call our own. But typically women are invited more and more to play this role in society. And so when you get more and more women into these positions, they tend to do that. They become the guardians of morality as they have been socialized to do. And management likes it because it keeps people online, it uh creates a certain culture that is conducive to conformity and so on. The feminine subjectivity is a heteronymous subjectivity, a subjectivity that doubts itself constantly and is constantly looking for the rules and guidelines for how to live and how to think and how to feel. And uh women are socialized to have that kind of heteronymous subjectivity, and especially now where autonomy is considered risky. And if you want to know more about what I keep saying about autonomy being considered risky, I very much recommend Chandler and Reed's The Neoliberal Subject book from 2016, very good. They um explain this kind of shift and they call it neoliberal, but I call it post-liberal. And like Chandler himself calls it post-liberal sometimes too across different publications. But I think post liberal is a better way of talking about it because it is really the end of that enlightenment project of this liberal subject, where the subject that needed to know itself, to dare to know, to dare to think for yourself, to question authority was necessary to fell feudalism to the ground. But once you kind of let that genie out of the bottle, it almost also felled the bourgeoisie to the ground in 1848, year of revolution, and onward up till the end of the 19th century. So once you empowered that subject, that subject was like, okay, well, I'm also gonna want a say over the things that ultimately govern my life, which is the economy. And they're like, oh no, no, no, we didn't mean that kind of autonomy. So then people had to be educated out of this autonomy. They have to learn to doubt themselves, to learn to trust the experts and to stay in their lane, particularly the working class. And feminine subjectivity is a handmaiden to this often. You learn to stay in your lane, not to speak up, to make yourself small, all that kind of stuff that feminists have always talked about. But now this is like, no, actually, that's really good. And when women are encouraged to speak up, it's in the name of institutions, not against them. And I know this because it was horrible being in an institution, not being like that, not being like performative, caring, and all this kind of stuff. I was like constantly denounced by my co-workers. And like it was horrible. It's fine. I don't care. I had academic freedom, I have academic freedom. It doesn't really matter, but it was pretty funny to be constantly denounced like this. I wasn't a good woman. I wasn't a good female, I wasn't the ones that you want. I wasn't the one that would sit on all the boards and write up all of the Athena Swan. Sorry, I shouldn't talk like this. I'm never gonna work in academia again. I wasn't, you know, sitting on all these like things and denouncing people. And also I noticed that the good men were doing that. And the performatively good men were like canceling people as well, which was quite interesting. Like the most horrible people. Always the way. Yeah. Most horrible people you can possibly imagine in this like performative caring for the vulnerable, canceling students and stuff, working class students. It was disgusting to see. But yeah, this is what the institution wants, you know. And I think that was unfortunately left out of Helen's otherwise excellent piece. I just personally don't like the essentialism, and I think you can understand it a lot better in terms of the particular historical context in which in which we find ourselves and the changing ideals surrounding subjectivity and how you are supposed to be, and how this has shifted from a masculine subject to a feminine subject for particular reasons that I've tried to explain.

SPEAKER_00

In the piece, Helen gives some examples, like you've said, of cancel culture. The earliest one that she quotes is Larry Summers in January 2005. Larry Summers has been cancelled again, but for different reasons that I won't go into on this podcast. And she also gives an example of Barry Weiss. Now, I've been an avid listener of Honestly's podcast for a long time. I think it's stopped, sadly, now because she's got her big role at CBS. I don't agree with everything Barry says, but she certainly puts out some spicy opinions and spicy guests, which I do enjoy. The one thing that struck me about the piece was when she covered Barry's resignation from the New York Times and she was quoting kind of some of the female colleagues who were kind of bullying Barry in essence. Was there a danger of the article demonizing femininity altogether? Are there many also wonderful facets of femininity that she could have championed as a counterbalance or not?

SPEAKER_01

No. Here's the thing: I completely reject this idea of attaching desirable traits to gender. I think that is a stupid thing to do because you wind up essentializing because it's like women are this, women are wonderful, and then it's like women must be wonderful. That's the flip side of women are wonderful. Women are so great because they're so caring. And then if you're not, oh, you are screwed. You know, so like if you are not kind, be kind, be kind, and then they will eat you alive if you don't play that role. So this is the thing. I think there are lots of it depends on the context what makes a particular attribute in an individual useful or or not useful in a given time. But I think that the autonomous subject, which was associated with masculinity erroneously, is the more powerful subject. The rational, autonomous, reflective subject. And as I've said, it doesn't mean you always get things right. It's simply that you have a capacity for reason that at a certain point we've recognized, yes, okay, emotions are useful. If you want to get a synopsis of this, you can go on YouTube and there's a lecture I give called Emotion versus Reason, where I kind of explain the interplay of the two. So I'm not saying like be automatons, da-da-da. But I think that at a certain point when we said we should put our emotions aside and speak to each other rationally, as the birth of science was extremely powerful. Because it was like no matter where you are in the world, no matter who you are, no matter what culture you come from, I'm gonna say if you do this, this, and this, you're probably gonna get this outcome. I Did this, this, and this, I got this outcome. You fellow human can also do this and get the same outcome. And if you don't, we're gonna talk about it and try to figure out why. And in so doing, we will advance human knowledge. That was so powerful. And to associate this kind of thinking with rationalism, with whiteness, with men is so belittling to non-white people, to women. It's like, oh, don't even get me started. Where it's like, oh no, well, we need to make this more feminine by bringing emotion in. I just want to kick them in the face. Like it's sorry, perhaps I shouldn't be too emotional about it. The most insulting thing possible. And I've how many times I've heard that before? Or like, you know, as an indigenous person, like, why don't you bring more spirituality into it? You know, you're capable of holding two things in your head, you know, like that spirituality is wonderful, but at the end of the day, I want chemo. Like, and that's like literally how a lot of people do it too. Are like, okay, we're gonna go to a shaking tent or whatever, but also we'll get our chemo because we're rational. Anyways, and we're capable of reflection and judgment and so on. Putting that and associating all of that with like whiteness, men, masculinity, and so on, I think is so destructive and so, in a roundabout way, very racist and very sexist. So there are all sorts of attributes that are associated with women that can be good. There are all sorts of attributes associated with men that can be good and can be bad. And a human can live out any of these without being a man or a woman. And we are socialized to fall on either side, and it works for us for various reasons. Like there are certain things about feminine socialization that are quite useful and productive, it's true. And there are certain things about masculine socialization that can be very not useful, very unproductive, obviously. But as human beings, I think we have to recognize that it's not like promoting men or promoting women is going to be a solution to social problems. It is through our own reason judgment about the causes of these problems, argument and debate, and hopefully putting aside emotion in that process or bringing in emotion where it is useful to do so, you know, through our own judgments, that we will find solutions. And I think kind of bringing gender into this brings in a layer of essentialism that is ultimately not useful and as I said, can be quite racist and sexist and so on in the end.

SPEAKER_00

Here's something I found quite spicy in Helen's. Well, that's the whole article is spicy, but I mean particularly spicy for me, is she says women can sue their bosses for running a workplace that feels like a fraternity house, but men can't sue when their workplace feels like a Montessori kindergarten. Now, at the moment, the number of male primary school teachers in the UK is very, very small. And every time I see a PDF person who is male be arrested and prosecuted in the news, there are quite a lot of gender critical feminists who come out and say men shouldn't be allowed around small children, which I get extremely angry about and frustrated with because there are also PDF people who are women who also get in the news and don't seem to get that argument. For example, that's just me. If we are to help, like you said, equalize this society whereby we don't essentialise men and women, what needs to change them? Because for me, this makes my job more difficult if I'm constantly championing men to go into caring professions, but they're either receiving a barrier whereby they're not allowed to, or a cultural barrier whereby they'll feel stigma from even trying to go there in the first place.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, so this is a huge, huge problem. And again, like I mean although I am fundamentally against essentialism, there are obvious biological differences between men and women that are gonna play out of course in society and that society tries to deal with in various ways and has always done. And probably repressing sexuality is a big part of that. Like even like during the Enlightenment, you know, the ideal subject was, you know, they thought, you know, men need to get married because otherwise they're not gonna be good subjects. They need to be tamed. Like they this is how they thought of men. So there's like, you know, probably almost certainly a higher sex drive, which we are not really able to talk about instead of like, no, women love sex, they want sex much more than men do. I don't think so, because like otherwise, why do they stubbornly refuse to do it all the time? It's just not as good. I'm sorry. So there are like certain basic things that are different between men and women. But like there's a line from The African Queen where one of the characters says, a man imbibes a drop too much sometimes. It's only human nature. And the other character says, Human nature, Mr. Alnut, is what we are put on this earth to rise above. Like whatever it is that might be the underlying kind of biological push, not every man is a rapist by any means. We are socialized, we have to figure out a way to live together to overcome whatever our drives might be, which is a very, very hard thing to figure out actually, because there are almost pretty much no humans that aren't born in society. You know, you can talk about like feral children and this sort of thing, but that's like a very rare sort of thing. So it's very difficult to figure out even what that would be unsocialized. But, anyways, the the trouble is that when you kind of see men as on the whole predators, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because what happens is you keep good men away from children. So if you are like, no, no, I uh go, oh gosh, only people who want to be close to children are are these weird individuals. I want nothing to do with them. So then the people who do have something to do with them are the ones who have no qualms with this because they themselves are predators. And that's what I write about in the piece that I wrote for Compact, and I've forgotten the title of it, about men needing other men. So what we wound up doing is we've actually exacerbated the problem because you know, human nature is what we are on this earth to rise above. And to be a good person, you require to rise above whatever it might be that is your human nature, requires a huge amount of socialization and input throughout your whole life, with from lots and lots of different people, through like playground squabbles and falling and doing the wrong thing, and but also through lots and lots of adults throughout your life. And what we have done is by sexualizing children and constructing them as tempting, too tempting for adults to be around, except in highly structured, very much vetted ways, we actually make it more difficult to be socialized and to grow into an adult role organically. So I write in that piece, it's almost like to be a good man, a boy needs a superman for a father, not because it actually takes such a man to be a father, but because we have removed every other man from a boy's life. So that the father now has to be the neighbor, the coach, the priest, all of these different things, you have to be all these things as a father. And nobody can do that. We've problematized all these relationships, and nobody wants to be around young boys lest they be considered weird and suspect. And then it becomes, as a man, you have no idea what it means to be a man. And you see all this like looks maxing and Andrew Tates and so on, where they're like, I don't know how to be a man, but if I approximate the look of one, then I will truly be a man. Or if I like live up to all these really stupid stereotypes, then I will truly be a man. As opposed to like, and I've talked about my husband a couple of times, and you can tell that I very much love this man.

SPEAKER_00

But I am You can tell by the accent and the impressions.

unknown

I know.

SPEAKER_01

I know, and it's unfair because you can't really do an impression of me. But the one thing that I have really noticed about him, so he is like a village boy, like he grew up in a little village in the middle of nowhere in Greece, and I dragged him kicking and screaming out of Greece for a short period of time for 10 years while we lived in Swansea. Well, I was associate professor at Swansea. So he's super traditional, very, very traditional.

SPEAKER_00

Very passionate men, the Greeks are very passionate, very passionate men.

SPEAKER_01

But he's not. He's actually not passionate at all. He's super level, very, very level. That's what I like about him. But the thing that I have noticed is that intergenerational relationships are way, way, way more common. And intergenerational mixing is way more common. Like I have never seen, I worked at beach bars and so on when I was younger, working in in clubs and that sort of thing. And I never saw a young person get drunk. Never, not once. I saw older men get drunk, like maybe 60s and 70s, but that's it. And I have actually seen it play out several times where young people will start coming out to the clubs around 15, 16. And they will be sitting next to a table of people in their 30s and 40s. And if they start to get a little rowdy, the people at that table will turn to them and say, Stop, slow down, stop it. And they will tell them. But when I was a teenager, I did not mix with anyone over the age of 21. Never. That was crazy. So when alcohol was kept completely away from us, so when you hit 19, it was like, go, go, go, go. Like it was crazy. Like, I'm surprised I survived, especially like we'd start drinking at 15 in a forest with a bottle of vodka and nothing else. That's crazy. Here, like they will give my children small amounts of wine that my um father-in-law makes. Like it is very much a part of the culture, and you learn to drink slowly. I have never seen my husband drunk, never, not once. He's never been drunk. I have, but because I was not socialized around this stuff. So I witnessed this kind of intergenerational mixing. And the one thing that I noticed as well is that so we now we live in this village, and he knows everybody, and he knows people of all different generations. And one day there was a parade, and I wrote about this in the piece, and we're leaving the parade, and you know, everybody's going to cafes and all that stuff, and he's waving at everybody. He's like, hey, and he's waving at all these people of all different ages. And I'm like, How do you know like a 15-year-old boy? I thought that was weird. And I said it in that way, because our relationships between men and boys are so poisoned that I even said it as like a jibe. I was like, Oh, how do you know so many young boys? And he didn't get it. Like he did not even register.

SPEAKER_00

He was like, he wouldn't, he wouldn't though.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, he's like, because he plays soccer. He's always played soccer professionally, and now he's old, so just plays, you know, for fun. But he's like, you know, I'm the oldest on the team, they're the youngest on the team. That's how I know them. And he knows people from different things because he like works in the village or in the little town. And I remembered, oh, that's right, because when we were 19 and 20, the older players on his team would take us up for coffee. We would go to their house and have dinner with them and their little families. And when we lived in Swansea and he was playing soccer there, there was one boy that he used to always invite over to our house to like help take our shed down, paint our fence, put furniture together. And we would always, as payment, have dinner with him as a family. He'd always sit with us and and and our family and eat with us. And he never mentioned why. Like, why always this boy? And then one day I asked, like, oh, why are you always inviting this boy around? And he was like, Oh, I just noticed that he doesn't have a dad and he seemed lost. And that was it. Like, he didn't say anything. He didn't he didn't say anything about it, he didn't talk to him, but he was showing him, like, without even thinking about it, he was showing him this is how to be responsible, this is how to be a man, this is how to take care of a family and showing him something aspirational, like, look at our lovely little family having dinner together. And I was like, that is what the older players used to do on his team because I remember going over to their house, having dinner with their family, and thinking, I want this one day. This is what I want. And so he just naturally does that and doesn't think at all about it. And I was like, you would need like 15 different vetting people to do that for somebody, and the only person that's gonna do that, and like I see this like it's crazy, like all the time. Like it's on my balcony, and he was walking back from training, and there was like little children that were playing, and one boy came out and because he's like looking up to him, oh you know, because he was a professional footballer, and my husband put his arm around him while they were walking together and was talking, and I was like, Oh man, like you'd never do that. And I just remember the little boy looking up to him with like so much admiration, and he will also tell people off, like we'll even be driving, and he'll see misbehaving young boys, and he will pull over and yell at them. Like, it's crazy.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, that's the part you gotta be careful though, because I know I won't be able to like this. Is the thing in the UK, no one gets checks anymore. It's like the breaking down of the social contract. Like, I see it in my gym, like the boys, I've had to check them a couple times, and I'm like, you're not getting checks somewhere else. If I'm having to check you, and I'm not a big guy. I mean, there was if there were four of them and they're all six foot three, they probably could take me. But because I've got the authority as a 30-year-old man, I can do that. But like I remember I was on the train and some woman was just watching a video extremely loudly, and I could hear it through my noise cans and headphones. I was like, where the hell is that coming from? And I turned it down, and she was an African one. I said, Auntie, please, can you put headphones in for all of our sakes? But no one said anything. No one. It's just this implicit like leave it to someone else.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, but also you almost can't now because adult authority is destroyed. Like I even talked about this once, and somebody was like, Oh, you want a participation trophy just for being an adult kind of thing. But this is the thing, like, you did participate as an adult. Like all cultures have rights of passage through which you move from a lower status to a higher status as you grow older, as you become an adult, that is a higher status. Now people are like, How dare you think that is a higher status? In fact, children are the future, children are the da-da-da. Becoming an adult is like a demotion and status. So, no, I'm not gonna listen to an adult. Who do you think you are to tell me what to do? And I think this is unfortunately traveling and gonna be utterly destroyed because like even my kids they don't play outside on their own, this sort of thing. So there are fewer and fewer opportunities to kind of mix with adults of different generations now. So this is gonna gradually break down even here where I am. And it's not good for us because we don't know what it is to grow up. There's a problem, a crisis as you become an adult because I don't know what that is. And I felt that too myself, like being like 16 to 18, I was like, How am I supposed to be in the world? What does it mean to be a woman? I didn't know. And so I would like search for rule books. I would read self-help things, and I'd be like, just give me some rules to live by. And these were not really the organic ones that grow out of the relationships that you have with lots and lots of different people through which you try, fail, and make a fool of yourself and get told off and so on, and gradually learn to be a better person. And even the idea that you would like, you know, it's all bound up in like bullying and like the sense that you should feel bad because you did something bad, and therefore the next time do something different. This is how human beings socialize each other. But no, it's all contained, it's all institutionalized, it's all in these kinds of rule books now. And people do not feel that they're growing up. Like if you think about it, like people go, Oh, I'm adulting. It feels like you are living something that isn't real. No one's got a house. That's why.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, that's no one can afford a house.

SPEAKER_01

But also you're not shifting into taking responsibility for other people. That is because no one's having kids.

SPEAKER_00

You've not got kids around you. Like, you know, I've got five nephews, I've gotten used to that now. I was one of four kids, so like we were always out because my mum was like, Well, get out, just like play, like go find some mates and go play. Like, I ain't got time for this. But like, that's the problem. People having less kids, so then everyone is focusing on the one or two kids max, then they're not having the autonomy, and it's just a vicious cycle. Like you said, um, people are saying like children are the future. Well, I would agree with that, except if they're young boys, and then they're actually demons who need to be like shown how to live properly and talk to and not to be predators.

SPEAKER_01

But even like our parenting norms and so on, they're like shifting toward like quote unquote child-centeredness, as though like all of the goodness, and it's a very kind of like Rousseauian idea of like the goodness.

SPEAKER_00

Unless they're boys.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, but that's interesting too, because the literature does talk about like angels and demons, where like children are angels, and you know, there's this idea that children are born naturally good and society gradually damages them, and parents in particular damage and oppress their true selves and all this nonsense, but also that they are also potentially demonic. Like through their unsocialized nature, they can be risks to society. So there's always this kind of give and take where it's like children's natural goodness is destroyed by the parent and must be kind of like honed to your or by society. Yeah, that's your goal is to kind of like hone the natural goodness.

SPEAKER_00

And then we have adolescence and the cycle continues.

SPEAKER_01

Exactly. And then it's like the deep fear of the child, the deep fear of the feral potential of the child, the animal nature of the child. That these are kind of tensions in society. But generally, we're like, oh no, your role as a parent isn't to assert your authority, it's to like have endless fricking conversations where gradually you show them as though it has come from the child themselves what the right thing to do is, as opposed to just like very quick assertion of authority, clear the air, moving on, which is what authoritative parenting, according to Baumrine, has always been. Now we have this kind of very permissive idea. And it doesn't help. It doesn't help because there's unclear boundaries, unclear authority, parents feel that they have no authority, adults feel they have no authority, we don't feel we can talk to each other, we don't give people examples, we stay away from children because we're afraid of being contaminated by their presence because we've sexualized them to such a degree that adult-child relationships, except very, very carefully institutionalized and monitored ones, are seen as potentially sexual and damaging. And that's the situation that we get into now.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. And the phrase child-free is now quite popular, which I disagree with the term massively, because it implies that children are some sort of virus that you should be free of.

SPEAKER_01

Well, yeah, because people are taking for granted the uh intensive parenting as the correct and natural way to parent. And so why would you want to do that? Like it's another job and you can't but fail at it. So why bother?

SPEAKER_00

I also think it's massively insulting to people who are involuntarily childless, which I point out to those who use that phrase a lot of the time, but they don't want to talk about that. What was I you can say? Yeah, I use this joke sometimes when I've spoken to men who are in this space who are trying to give a positive message to lads, and I say that I feel like the current conversation is this line in The Simpsons where Homer's trying to apply to be a prison guard to look after Bart when he's in juvie, and they say, Why do you want to be a prison guard, Homer? And he says, Well, I believe the children are the future unless we stop them now. And that is how I think people are treating boys at the moment. Just to wrap up, Ashley, because this has been an amazing podcast and we covered loads of different things. It's a similar question I asked you on the first podcast we did. What has this part of your academic journey taught you about yourself?

SPEAKER_01

Gosh, I don't think about these kinds of questions very much. And I think that I am better for it. So um I honestly don't know. I have been thinking about whether or not I want to write another book because writing for me is like ripping out a small piece of your soul. I don't find it easy at all. So I just wrote a piece called Jeffrey Epstein's Necrophilia and Ours.

SPEAKER_00

Oh like reading that. God.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. It's actually, I think, probably one of the best things I've ever written. And it's it's based on Eric Fr Eric Frum's idea of necrophilia, which is like a societal preference for what is dead over what is living, because what is dead can be manipulated. So the robotic, machinery, the automaton. So I'd recommend you go and read it because it's it's not literally the actual sex with dead people. That's not what it is. That's not what he means. Although he does he does bring that in in very interesting ways. Anyways, but yeah, I said to my sister, like, that was the most difficult piece I've ever written. Like it took me two weeks, like 12 hours a day, me with my head in my hands. And she was like, Oh, really? Why? Writing is not easy for me. I don't know if it is for other people, but yeah, it's difficult to write a good piece. I literally feel like I rip out a tiny piece in my soul every single time. And I need to like recover for a couple days afterward. So writing a piece, like I said to my husband, Oh, I I might write another book. I really want this to be like a popular book, not academic like the other ones, like a big one, penguin kind of thing. And uh he just looks at me and he was like, Why would you put me through that? And he was like, No, I'm not afraid of like the two years. I am afraid two years are gonna be great. It's the last six months when you actually write the book that I'm afraid of.

SPEAKER_00

Why would you do this to me? Why?

SPEAKER_01

Why would you do this to me? Like he sees that I'm like perfectly happy until I have to write something.

SPEAKER_00

We have great life here. Why would you want to write another book?

SPEAKER_01

Exactly. Because he's not academic, he doesn't have a clue what I do. When people ask him what I do, he says, I think she's a teacher. Like he has no idea. Oh yeah, so he has to deal with the trouble of it. But yeah, I guess it's that I do not do things because they make me happy. I suffer for what matters. And I frequently have to make choices between these things. Do I want an easy life or do I want a good life? Do I want a happy life or do I want a meaningful life? And I consistently choose the meaningful one, even though I'm probably gonna die young because of it. But I am very fortunate in that I have something like that when most people don't.

SPEAKER_00

Oh, that is a great way to end it. Ashley, thank you so much for coming back on the Just Checking In Podcast. It's always a Laugh. It's always some unfiltered chat and talking to me.

SPEAKER_01

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00

Well, that's all we've got time for in this episode of the Just Checking In Pod. A big thank you to Ashley for being my special guest and for letting me check back in with her. I'll put links to all of the articles we discussed in the show notes if you want to read them and also subscribe to Compact Magazine. As always, thank you to all the vendors who tuned into this episode. Remember, if you've liked what you've heard, give it a share on social media. Tell your friends or work colleagues about it. If you're feeling generous, write us a review and give us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to support us further, you can go to patreon.com slash ventshelpuk or make a one-off donation to our PayPal. All of those links are on our link tree. That's linktr. We'd hope to check in with you again very soon. And remember, guys, it is always okay to vent.

Contributor

Freddie Cocker

Host