SPENCER: Kate, welcome to the Clearer Thinking Podcast.

KATE: Thanks so much for having me, Spencer.

SPENCER: Now, some people claim that with the women's rights revolution and changing social norms around the treatment of women, we've now reached this place of equality. What do you think the biggest flaw in that perspective is?

KATE: Yeah. So, I do think there are lots of ways in which we've made enormous progress in a more egalitarian direction, and I often say to people, I wouldn't be where I am in terms of my ability to be a professor or have the kind of modest, but real platform that I have as a public intellectual if we hadn't made that progress. But I think unfortunately, what we often see is some women have made enormous social progress, and other women are still very vulnerable, and sometimes those same women are still vulnerable to phenomena like sexual assault and sexual harassment. We also have existing pay gaps and those kinds of inequities that are one source of inequality, as is the fact that women are still doing a lot more child-rearing and domestic labor, even when they don't want to be. So, I think those are just some of the ways in which we still have a ways to go.

SPENCER: It seems to me that while there have been huge changes in the way women are treated, and in many ways, women are treated much better today than they were a hundred years ago, by talking about that and focusing on it, it can be dismissive of ways that women are still not treated equally.

KATE: Yeah, I totally agree, and I think that's a good way to frame it. It depends if we're thinking about the bar being set so low as to ask if we have made any improvements in patriarchy. Then sure, but have we really reached a place where people can flourish and be fully themselves, regardless of gender? Then no, I would say there's still a lot of sexual violence, sexual abuse, and other sources of inequality that we really still need to be working on and pushing back against, both as individuals and as broader coalitions of people who are concerned that everyone is treated fairly and has the ability to flourish.

SPENCER: How do you define the phrase patriarchy, and how does that fit in here?

KATE: I think of patriarchy as a very old system in which you have a certain kind of family structure that dominates in society, where men are by default, and not always in actuality, but they go into their adulthood wanting to be or expecting to be the head of a heterosexual household where they will have a wife who does the bulk of domestic and child-rearing labor. That kind of family unit can take place and be dominant across different class divides and across different racial divides. It can certainly be something that is not the constant state of affairs, because we also have a lot of queer couples who complicate the picture. While I wouldn't say we're in a fully patriarchal society, I also don't think we're in a fully egalitarian society. We're somewhere in the middle where we have some men who really still do expect and feel entitled to have a wife who serves a particular role for him, and we have other people who are modeling either more egalitarian social relations or very different kinds of family structures. Male dominance is the through-line, and that also comes out in other institutions beyond the family. We have workplaces, political institutions, and broader civic spaces and discourses where there is a centering of men, and I would say that's also part of what patriarchy tends to be about.

SPENCER: Where do you see patriarchy originating? Do you think it's something that existed for thousands of years? Do you think there's some evolutionary element to it? What do you think it's about fundamentally?

KATE: It's a really common and important question, and it's also somewhat beyond my pay grade as a philosopher, because it's really a historian's question. When I read historians on this, it's such an old system. Patriarchy is about as old as agriculture. Some people think there is a connection there, that when, for example, people started to get a better handle on practices of breeding non-human animals, they started to get kind of weird about fatherhood and the idea that there would be paternal rights, because you couldn't always tell who the father of a new human child is based on appearance. You might want to have a lot of control over women to ensure you know who the father of that child is, so that's one theory. There are many other theories, and I don't really have a horse in the race as to which theory is correct, but what we can say is it's a very old and very entrenched system. Most societies, in historical terms, have been patriarchal, and while we're certainly seeing a breakdown of patriarchal norms across the developing world, and we have done for 50 to 100 years, depending on the particular country, we still see ways in which those patriarchal norms continue to exert an influence even today, even in allegedly post-patriarchal contexts like the United States and Australia, where I'm from. You still see a kind of vestige of those norms having an influence on what people want, on what people expect, and sometimes on what people feel entitled to as men versus women.

SPENCER: Have there been significant exceptions throughout time where there have been cultures that were really not patriarchal?

KATE: Yeah. Not huge exceptions. So there are limited exceptions. One interesting source on this is the philosopher Maria Lugones, who thinks a lot about colonialism as a practice, and has analyzed, along with historians, certain cultures that have quite a different relationship to gender and gender roles, where there are three-spirit kinds of societies, where you have a sense that there's sometimes called a third gender, and often, those societies do have a kind of looser relationship to patriarchal social roles, but at the same time, they're not totally absent. Depending, again, on exactly how you measure it, some historians would be happy to say that really, most, if not all known societies have had patriarchal elements, and the vast majority have been patriarchal, historically. There are very few truly matriarchal social structures, although, again, people argue about whether there are very limited exceptions or really none.

SPENCER: I don't know whether you have an opinion on this, I wonder if it actually originates in literally men being bigger on average than women, and also, I think, somewhat more prone to violence on average, which might relate to testosterone or something like that, and that could sort of be the foundation of patriarchy.

KATE: I mean, it certainly seems possible, and is, I think, not an implausible thing to speculate about. And then, as you know, I suspect you agree based on the way that you asked the question, although correct me if I'm wrong, we have to make an important distinction between what is and what ought to be. The fact that there is this tendency, perhaps somewhat natural to human beings, doesn't mean, of course, that we can't change that, because what ought to be is quite different. We know that it's possible for men not to be violent and to have a much more equitable relationship with people and a much gentler attitude towards others, including other men, women, non-binary folks, and their own kids. I think that is a good value, a good ideal to push for, regardless of whether there are some tendencies that are a part of human nature. I'm neutral on it, but it's not implausible. I think we can do better than that, because what is is not really a guide to what ought to be. If people have the kinds of capacities we have to reason and choose differently, that kind of autonomy of will means we can say, "Hey, I might have this desire or this tendency, but I can resist those impulses and choose to live somewhat differently." So, I think that is an important aspect of it too, that no matter what the story about the origins of patriarchy, we can choose to really divest from that model if we think it is a bad one.

SPENCER: Yeah, I would add to that and say that I think one of the eight forces for moral progress has been rejecting what is in favor of what ought to be, and saying, "How do we actually want things to be when we reason about it, when we use our compassion, et cetera?" I think so many things were not set out in an equal and just way. People have different capabilities. People have different strengths. People who are powerful can exert their power over others, but it doesn't make it right.

KATE: Yeah, exactly. There's a sense in which parents naturally dominate children because we're much bigger and we know more, and we, in some sense, do get to make the rules, but we can choose to exercise that power and that authority in much gentler and more benign ways that support a child's development, rather than being the draconian parent of yesteryear. So yeah, I think that's another example where there might be a kind of tendency or something that is, you know, quote, unquote, more natural in terms of ways for humans to be, but we can choose to live in ways that we think are better and just for everyone.

SPENCER: Yeah, I think a common confusion is, even if something is biological, people think of it as, "Oh, well, that just means it's fixed in stone. But that's completely not true." For example, I think it's not fully proven, but some people believe that men, on average, are biologically more violent than women. It's plausible, even if that were true, we could still work to make men less violent. Or, if you were crazy, you could make women more violent if you wanted, but it doesn't really say anything about what needs to be the case.

KATE: It could be one thing if human nature was absolutely fixed, and you just couldn't change us, without, say, changing our bodies so dramatically that it would be a kind of violence. There is a principle in philosophy called the "ought implies can" principle. So we can't say, "Well, look, it would be great and ideal if human beings flew under their own steam." So yeah, we're just going to say people should fly. We can't fly because we don't have wings. We don't have the apparatus. However, we know that people who tend towards violence, and I do think violence is a predominantly male phenomenon, can restrain themselves, and that many men are humane and sweet and nonviolent and completely averse to violent ways of living. So we know it's possible because it's actual, and so that's where a potential "ought implies can" principle that said, "Well, people are just like this, and we can't change it." That's false, because so many men managed to either resist those kinds of violent impulses or appear not to have them, perhaps because they were socialized somewhat differently. So, yeah, part of my feminism is inspired by a kind of optimism about male capacity. In a way, I hold men to high standards in terms of equitable and nonviolent behavior, because I know this is possible. I see it in my father, my husband, my male friends, my male colleagues, and so this makes me optimistic, in a way that this is not some inevitability, like not being able to fly.

SPENCER: I would also add this idea of sublimation, I think comes from Freud — I'm not the biggest fan of Freud — but I think it's an interesting idea, which is that if you have a tendency, there are ways to use it in socially acceptable ways. I wouldn't say violence is bad inherently. Violence is bad when it's used in harmful ways. If someone is violent on the tennis court, there's nothing wrong with that. I think there are healthy expressions of violence that are not counter to doing good things.

KATE: Yeah. Certainly some people see certain kinds of physical activities as useful catharsis. There are ways to channel impulses in healthier ways. I would also say that we should make a distinction here between violence and aggression. I think being in touch with your own aggression as a human is really useful because there are all kinds of ways in which being aggressive towards, for example, injustice and unfairness is actually a good thing, channeling anger that you have, or even aggressive impulses to defend people who are more vulnerable and who might be treated unfairly. We see that coming out in all sorts of ways that are useful socially, politically, and in interpersonal contexts too, like standing up for the little guy. That is a healthy form of aggression that both men and women exhibit daily and can involve a kind of courage that really has nothing to do with physical intimidation, usually, or certainly doesn't require violent actions. It's really more about using your more rational capacities to make an argument or say something when someone is in a position of vulnerability and needs support, if they're being intimidated by a police officer or something like that. Even just the act of aggressively recording what is happening can be a useful act of defense and does channel the kinds of aggressive impulses we naturally have when we see things that seem unfair and like a form of mistreatment.

SPENCER: Sometimes, when these questions of the ways the world is still unequal to women come up, men react negatively and start listing ways that things are unfair to men. I think when they do this, sometimes they feel that, "Okay, by talking about ways things are unfair to women, it means that we're not allowed to say things are unfair to men, and it undervalues those unfairnesses." I'd be curious to hear your perspective on this, but my perspective is that all forms of unfairness are bad regardless of who it happens to. I do think that the world today is much more unfair to women than to men on average. But I also think there are injustices going both ways. I'm curious to hear your reaction.

KATE: Yeah, I think that's right. It really can be a both-and thing. There's a long debate in feminist philosophy: does patriarchy oppress men or does it merely hurt them? I think everyone agrees that whatever the case, however exactly you want to define oppression, patriarchy is bad for tons of men. The majority of men are not really helped by this rigid model that restricts what men do. It sets them up for certain kinds of disappointment. It sets them up to be less flourishing, morally integrated, socially aware people, some of the time, in ways most of us just want to be good people. There are certain things that are unfair in terms of men being expected to play certain social roles that allow them to feel emotions like anger, but not more feminized emotions like sadness and sympathy. It's sad that men would be restricted in some ways from showing full care for their own kids. More and more men are pushing back against that. We see limitations in terms of equitable domestic relationships with domestic labor, but we do see men playing more of an active role in fathering, and hopefully that reflects the sense that it would be really unfair to keep a man from being fully emotionally present to his own children. The "father knows best" and the idea of a father who just arrives at seven o'clock and barely interacts with his kids before dinner is, in a way, an unfairness to men that hopefully we're seeing undone by more egalitarian norms that encourage men to be fully involved and fully present and have that kind of true intimacy with their kids. That is a really beautiful thing and involves a lot of labor, like reading bedtime stories and being really competent at diapering and bath time and packing the lunchbox. It's both work and something that men shouldn't ever feel prohibited from doing. In fact, I think they're, in many circumstances, obligated to do this work, as many men do.

SPENCER: There are some interesting things in society, such as military service, where, in many studies, women were excluded from it. It's sort of two sides of the coin. On the one hand, women are not allowed to do it. On the other hand, men don't want to do it. In many cases, some men want to do it. Some people sign up. But some men are like, "Of course, I don't want to go to war and kill people and risk my life," etc. How do you think about that as connected to patriarchy?

KATE: Yeah. I am someone who generally worries about people being exploited by being in certain roles. The military, being someone's best option, worries me. I think there are some people, but a pretty small proportion, who are attracted to that kind of lifestyle. I worry about a lot of people who are, for example, poor, and their best option, say, as a young person, is to work their way up by enlisting. I think that, much as I worry about people being exploited for their labor and injured in terrible ways, especially when there are active military operations going on or there's war raging, I do think that it should be open to people of any gender. I just think we should be less militaristic overall. So, it might amuse you to learn I was, at age 10 or older, a pacifist and was the one conscientious objector from the cadet program at my middle school. I don't like militaristic thinking, but if they're going to be there, I think they should be open to people of every gender.

SPENCER: Another thing that I think many men bristle at, and I'm wondering if you see it as connected to patriarchy, is this idea many men have that they need to be the one that provides everything. They feel that it can be a giant weight on their shoulders to be the provider. Of course, many women don't want them to be the provider; they want to contribute, etc. But I think a lot of men feel like they're not a man if they're not providing, or if their wife makes more money than them, that somehow makes them not good enough.

KATE: Yeah, I think that thinking is really understandable, and I have a lot of sympathy for people who feel this sense of obligation to provide, and that is embedded in people's gender roles a lot of the time. At the same time, I think that being released from those ways of thinking can be really freeing. Forty percent of families in America have a female breadwinner, so that really points to the fact that these social roles are breaking down, and that leaves a lot of men in those families feeling bad about themselves. Of course, not all families are heterosexual couples, but the majority are. A lot of men in those configurations are feeling bad about themselves in ways where, in a way, why wouldn't you want your partner to be making a good livelihood? That's a form of security. Why should it have anything to do with the gender you happen to be? It's much more to do with externalities, like what the economy rewards and where you happen to be living and who had good luck in their interview for a particular job. I do think there's a role for both individual and group therapy to release some of those gender roles that really don't help people flourish and be flexible. Sometimes it will make more sense to have a male breadwinner, and sometimes it will make more sense to have a female breadwinner. It really just depends on who has more access to a lucrative career, and sometimes, of course, you will alternate, or both of you will be making approximately the same amount of money at a certain point in time. But why should it be a gendered thing? Those thoughts can be helpful. I often find myself saying to men who are struggling with this, it's okay that you're struggling with it. These are very entrenched and very old ways of thinking. I think we all struggle to relinquish gender roles that are so entrenched. For example, I struggle sometimes, as a mom, to not feel guilty when I have to travel for work, or I don't feel like I've done my job right because I wasn't there to pack the school lunch for the next day, even though I know that my husband is a co-equal parent and is totally on it and capable of doing it, and my daughter is in the best hands. I hope that's a way of developing empathy with people of any gender who are struggling to feel good about themselves, even though we recognize now our partner has it. They're earning more money right now, or they're doing more of the parenting minutia right now, and it's just what makes sense for our family. Recognizing where the bad feeling comes from, and then being able to release it as a product not of your own desires, but as a product of these old patriarchal norms that are not very useful to anyone. Maybe that's a way of thinking about letting it go.

SPENCER: It seems that in the last couple of decades, there have been increasing numbers of young men that feel like they don't know what their life should be about. I don't know whether that's more that the standard model of what it means to be a good man, or a successful man, or whatever is breaking down and is viewed as less of a standard model, or if it's that they feel like they can't live up to the standard model. I'm curious, do you have a sense of that? It does seem like there's something really going on with young men, and this is partly, I think, what explains the rise of people like Jordan Peterson, who has become a really big role model for a lot of young men, and, God forbid, Andrew Tate, who now young men are listening to for some horrible reason.

KATE: Yeah, I do think we're seeing both elements of an old masculinity where a man feels like he should have a girlfriend or wife eventually, and she should look a particular way. She should give him children, he should be the breadwinner, all these kinds of older vestiges of patriarchal roles. We're seeing these new elements of masculinity that are putting real pressure on young men. There's been tons of ink spilled about look maxing, but it is really striking how increasingly young men are buying into beauty standards that were historically the province of women to worry about and bend themselves in odd shapes, both metaphorically and sometimes literally, in order to conform their bodies to an arbitrary beauty standard. For young men, a very chiseled kind of square jawline and certain kinds of big muscles together with a lean body frame are all ways of looking that, historically, a "real man" didn't purchase moisturizer for, much less peptides. It does feel a bit new, and I do worry about these studies showing that young women are still more preoccupied with their image and their bodies, and they're still more conscious of it, but it's really rising for young men exposed to social media. Body dissatisfaction in young women is something like around 60%, depending on which study you look at. It's around 40% now for young men, which is a rapidly narrowing gender gap in terms of who is dissatisfied with their body image.

SPENCER: Forty percent for men, really?

KATE: Yeah, in some studies, especially young men seem more preoccupied with image in ways that I think we're still wrapping our heads around what that means, and also the harms that it can do. In a way, young men may need more of the very standard, commonsensical feminist message that it really doesn't matter what you look like. The more important things are how kind you are, how hard you work, how smart you are, how well you reason, and how good of a community member you are. The kind of very superficial thing of how much you conform to some rather arbitrary standard of good looks should be something I hope we teach both young men and young women not to care about very much.

SPENCER: It seems particularly bizarre to me, because from the data that I've seen, at least as it is today, women actually do care less about good looks than men care about good looks. So it's very baffling to me that men would start fixating on that.

KATE: Yeah, I'm actually noodling on a piece about exactly this, because my theory is that men are not trying to impress women. They might think they are, and they often say they are, but it's actually more about satisfying the male gaze, even for straight men. This, in a way, is not new. Feminist philosophers have often observed that straight men still crave approval from other men, and there's a lot of competition between men, sometimes of a benign kind, like I have no problem with competition of a healthy kind in sports or games or whatever, but sometimes it is really pervasive and a large part of people's lives, trying to be a better person than someone else, having more status, having a "hotter partner," having a better job, having a higher salary, being taller, all of these very superficial things that are actually not about our deep and abiding qualities as human beings. Men compete with each other, and that's not new for these markers of status, but the new element is that a new marker of status for men is how chiseled their jawlines are, how beautiful their faces are relative to the male influencers of the world. That strikes me as a really sad thing, where these young men might feel like they're doing it to be more successful in the dating market, but really, they're doing it to impress other bros who they're feeling insecure around in ways that, again, don't strike me as particularly healthy or good for our possibility of flourishing.

SPENCER: One thing that I observe in that kind of world is that they take data that's real and completely distort the meaning of that data to paint a picture of a certain worldview. I guess they sometimes call it a "red pill" worldview. Where it's like, "Oh, well, here's the real truth about reality," and it's an incredibly grim vision of the way the world is. I think it's a false vision, but it's built on a few actual facts that they pepper in to make it more plausible.

KATE: Yeah, it's really striking. I mean, for example, capitalism is not your friend, and by and large, there is a big risk of being exploited. It is true that men's social role is less clear, although I would say there are very important social roles for men to play in our society, such as being a good human being, a good father, partner, and friend, and whatever other roles you're attracted to playing, like a teacher or a leader of civic effort. We need good humans, and good men can absolutely be part of that. But there is this sense in which you take a few pieces of information; it's harder to compete economically or in dating. People are less likely to actually date and have sexual relationships with each other in an age where many people are more inclined to stay single for longer. You take those little bits and pieces and then build this incredibly grim worldview, rather than rising to the challenge of being a good human who others look to for leadership and support, for solidarity, and community building. I have a really small example of this. I have a six-year-old daughter, and she has even noticed that all her babysitters are young women. That's not because we're discriminating against men in our hiring of great sitters; it's because young men don't apply for this kind of role, which is actually a great social role to learn a little bit about responsibility, earn a bit of money, and participate in family life without being fully responsible for a kid, which young people in their teens and early 20s are often not ready for. Why aren't more boys becoming babysitters? Some will push back and say boys just aren't good at that kind of work with young kids or they're not interested. But when I send her to camp, there are plenty of young men playing the role of camp counselors, and it's the same skill set. It's knowing how to keep a busy, highly active kid happy for a couple of hours while their parents work, and maybe taking them to the park to run around. It's totally doable for any person, especially those who are attracted to these camp counselor roles. Yet, we have these very different social expectations for boys versus girls, young men versus young women, and I don't think this is helping young men feel valued as community members. Why aren't we teaching men to be more caring and also just people who can be relied upon for that kind of basic responsibility? This is how people age morally and socially. So that's my pitch for male babysitters.

SPENCER: Do you think the idea of a male babysitter feels non-masculine to people?

KATE: Yeah.

SPENCER: And therefore they think, "Okay, this doesn't match my identity, or other people will look down on me or value me less if I have this role."

KATE: I think so. And I think that is a large piece of it. I think there are also worries that people would have concerns about men with young children, in terms of there is a pernicious idea that young men would be more likely to be abusive in some terrible way. But this is a rare phenomenon. It is something that, of course, you have to trust the person you leave your kid with. But I just think in general, we are pretty good at recognizing that it is important to build a solid relationship with someone and trust their teachers, their camp counselors, their sitters, and so on. Of course, you don't leave your kid with a perfect stranger. But given that this is all doable and possible, I do think it's more, in a way, a form of selecting out of a particular role, rather than an actual phenomenon where parents wouldn't hire a young man. So I guess, yeah, it does come down to both, in a way, a sort of paranoia that parents would be worried when many parents, me included, would not worry about leaving their kiddo with a responsible and kind-seeming young man. But also, it is just this thought that I suspect, yeah, this is something girls do. This is something young women do, and that kind of care work is incompatible with males, particularly straight male identity, which I think doesn't need to be that way.

SPENCER: Something that comes up in these discussions, taking on jobs like being a babysitter, but also in things like studying STEM fields or math or computer science, is if you survey young people, you will find in those surveys differences in reported interests.

KATE: Yeah, sure.

SPENCER: How do you think about that? Because I think some people will say, "Well, look, people are just interested in different things. Men and women have different interests. That's fine." Other people will say, "No, this is reflective of some kind of cultural phenomenon that's causing people to have different interests. It's not truly reflecting their own values and who they are fundamentally."

KATE: Yeah. Look, it's always going to be massively overlapping bell curves. So it's possible that there is some kind of "natural difference" between men and women, boys and girls, where maybe women are a little bit more drawn to imaginative exercises or language-based tasks, and maybe boys are a tiny bit more drawn to math. But there are always going to be huge exceptions to those rules, which, for all we know, could be purely cultural, because there are such big cultural pressures pushing boys to STEM and girls into more humanities kinds of interests. For example, I don't think we know yet. We will not know until we are in an egalitarian world what people naturally choose. And in a way, it's not that interesting, because there are always going to be girls like me, who are really into math. I was a logic major, a computer science geek. That was my jam. So what would we do with this information if we did find out that that was more unusual for a girl, statistically speaking? I hope we wouldn't want to disadvantage her, especially if she loved those things and was good at them. Similarly, I hope we would really support a boy who was choosing English literature as his major. So, yeah, I think we don't know, and it doesn't really matter. So much energy has been spent wondering about this, and what would we do with that information, even if we got it?

SPENCER: That's a really good point. I think often people feel they have to argue one way or the other because they feel it supports their argument. But actually, if we just take the view that, "Oh, people should be able to pursue the things they want without pressure in the opposite direction preventing them, it doesn't really matter." But I will say, I think it does matter from the point of view of how we interpret the evidence. Because some people want to say, "Well, any difference we see in, let's say, the number of women versus men going into STEM fields tells us how much discrimination or bias, or prejudice or cultural social pressure there is," and whether there's an inherent, quote, inherent difference would actually affect the interpretation of that data.

KATE: Yeah. I think too often we do have ways of telling the difference. If we're hearing tons of anecdotal reports, but also important testimony from women saying, "Yeah, I wanted to be a physicist and I was sexually harassed out of discipline," that should influence what we think, in a way, again, sort of regardless of the exact numbers. Do we have a problem with, say, women in philosophy being treated in really patronizing and pitying ways as if we're just not good at rational thought? Yes. It turns out there are a lot of people within philosophy who want to continue a somewhat male-coded and male-dominated discipline of thinking, but end up being kind of siloed into sub-disciplines of philosophy that are seen as less masculine, like ethics, or just completely pushed out of the discipline because of problems like discrimination, but also sexual harassment, sexual assault, sexual abuse, and a set of experiences that are not conducive to supporting everyone in doing what they would naturally most like to do. Oftentimes, we have independent evidence of that, regardless of what the actual numbers are going into a particular field. Again, there are certain hypotheses about philosophy that don't strike me as very plausible because I'm a philosopher. It's my bread and butter. The idea that men are just more naturally inclined to engage in critical thinking doesn't resonate with my experiences in the classroom. It doesn't resonate with my own personal experiences of how important it is to get good at that kind of work, and how important that kind of work is to other fields where women are actually, if anything, the majority. If you look at which skill sets you need to excel in psychology and English literature and other kinds of professions where women are now the majority.

SPENCER: I think medicine and law.

KATE: Yeah, medicine and law–the two examples I was going for. It would be really surprising if women were just not good at philosophical analysis. It's not distinctive enough to mean that we have many more men who prefer that kind of thing to women. Given that lawyers have a very similar set of analytical abilities and skills. It's very advantageous to the patriarchy to have theories like "women just don't like philosophy." Maybe we should be a little more gender inclusive and see what happens. That doesn't seem like a bad strategy, even if we still don't get exact parity, for whatever reason, we can do better than 30% women and 70% men in tenured and tenure-track positions. That's a really stark disparity, and it would be shocking if that was a reflection of natural preferences. Given that, in probably the most analogous profession of law, you have tons and tons of female lawyers, again now in the majority.

SPENCER: We did some research on gender differences in self-reported personality in the US, where we asked men and women tons of different questions about their personality. We cast a really wide net because we were curious where the biggest differences would lie. One of our fascinating findings is that we did find quite a few differences, on average, between how men and women report themselves, but none of them are that big. We didn't find a single difference that was that big. Yet, there's a perception that many people have that there are really big differences. It's interesting to consider how you square that, because if you ask men and women to report their personality, you'd think, if anything, they would exaggerate relative to the fact. If you were inviting small ones when you asked them to self-report?

KATE: Yeah, that's interesting. Part of it, I think, can be that we do have these very persistent narratives about fundamental differences between boys and girls, men and women that are very entrenched, even when the evidence suggests otherwise. Something similar has emerged about emotional expressivity. I do think that this is a somewhat complex empirical picture, but basically, boys and girls don't show very different emotional levels of expression or types of expression when they're young, and a difference that emerges in adolescence is kind of subtle. Boys show more open anger and girls show more contempt. It's a statistically significant difference, but it's not a huge difference. Those are different concepts; statistically significant just means less likely to have occurred by chance. Something that is a huge difference is another matter entirely. A statistically significant but small difference between the kind of aggression that they evince is very different from the stereotype that boys literally don't cry. I'm certainly willing to accept, and this is why it gets complicated, that boys are sometimes more punished for crying, although maybe girls are also punished, but for somewhat different reasons. There could be a norm without an empirical, descriptive difference in how people behave, but certainly I hear all the time in parenting circles that boys simply don't cry. It's just not true. We look at these huge meta-analyses of empirical data on emotional expressivity in boys and girls, and they're really more similar than they're different. We have to ask, why are we so interested in these differences between boys and girls? What would we do with this information? Sometimes there are legitimate answers. If we found out that boys were literally not crying, that would be grounds for different parenting practices, because arguably, it's really healthy to learn how to cry when you have big, legitimate sad feelings. If the empirical differences are very small or nonexistent, then I think we need to get better at viewing people as people, children as children, and thinking about the fact that often individual differences are way more interesting and important than differences that are arguably due to gender or just due to gendered enculturation.

SPENCER: One thing that we looked at is the question, could it be that although all the individual personality traits show not much difference and there's really heavy overlap in distributions? You can imagine two bell curves, where men and women are really heavily overlapped. Maybe somehow people are combining them all together in some way and kind of have this male archetype and female archetype, and that's why they view it as more different. We actually investigated this empirically by saying, suppose you had all these gender differences at once, and you tried to predict someone's gender, how accurately could you do it? We found it was something like 65 to 70% accurate, which I would argue is still not that accurate; you're wrong a lot. Using the entire personality structure, you're wrong a lot. Then we started thinking, "Could it be a different thing that's going on here? Maybe it has to do with the tails. If you take two bell curves, and there's a little bit of a shift in the means, where you do actually see really big differences is way at the tails." Let's take violence, for example. If you took a hundred men and a hundred women, most of them, you wouldn't ever notice who's more violent. You'd be in a room with them. None of them would be violent. It would be fine. But then if you look at the most violent person in the whole group, there's actually quite a high probability of being a man, right?

KATE: That seems right. That's very intuitive. I mean, just looking at the stats on most forms of terrible violence, especially things that are very domineering, like strangulation, is a really compelling example of this. The vast majority of people who strangle — some people say choke, but that's not really the right terminology, because choking is an obstruction of the windpipe, like food getting caught.

SPENCER: As someone who does mixed martial arts, and I've been both choked and strangled, I can appreciate the difference.

KATE: Yeah, so strangulation is an almost exclusively male phenomenon, and the victims are mixed. It is disproportionately female victims, and it is also children of every gender. But yeah, there are unfortunately plenty of male adult victims too, but the perpetrators are almost exclusively male. I do think there are some forms of violence where it could be culture and it could be aspects of nature, and that nature-nurture question is notoriously very difficult to disentangle and often impossible to do given the world we're actually operating in. But I do think it is important to point out that often the common thread in certain kinds of crimes and certain kinds of unfortunately really antisocial behavior is men. And of course, not all men. Absolutely, it's only a tiny minority of men who do these kinds of things sometimes, but it's almost always men, and that is important to recognize. Men — especially operating under the influence of patriarchy that sends certain messages to men, like you own your wife and children and you can destroy them at will — can lead to terrible phenomena like family annihilation, where a man will kill his wife and children, and then oftentimes himself. Again, it's almost always men who do this. It's a horrific and confronting crime, which is often described as unimaginable, but it's actually a pretty recognizable pattern. It's happening once every five days in the US that a man is doing this. And yeah, sure, thank God the vast majority of men are not doing this, but the fact that it's almost always men means we need to have that difficult conversation in a way that is not impugning individual men who are not doing this, and that recognizes other complexities to it, and recognizes that there are components of this that are related to other social forces, like how available are guns, how is mental illness being treated, and what services are available, but recognizing that for all that, it is fundamentally male violence that is important too.

SPENCER: We did an episode of this podcast on mass murder, if I'm not mistaken. I think familicide, where someone kills their own family, might be the most common for mass murder.

KATE: It is. Yeah. Exactly. I was writing about this yesterday because of the terrible incident in Shreveport, Louisiana, where a man, Shamar Elkins, killed seven of his own children and also an eighth child who was his nephew, the cousin of the kids. It's so horrible, and it's so confronting. But yeah, really, in a way, the most unusual feature of that situation is that he had a lot of kids, and so that's why it hit the headlines, because he killed so many people. But once every five days, on average, you will get these kinds of mass murders. And again, here, roughly 95–96% of the perpetrators are men, according to the estimates I've seen. When women do this, it's nearly always because they are seriously mentally ill and psychotic. When men do this, it doesn't appear to have such a close relationship with psychosis, at least. And yeah, it's the most common form of mass murder. It's also gun violence perpetrated by a family member. Again, overwhelmingly, men are the most common source of gun death for children. We don't really pay enough attention to this form of domestic violence, family violence, and we tend to focus more on the cases where it's a stranger, where it's a school shooting, where it's a random attack at a public place. But I think that, in a way, we need to maybe not altogether redirect that attention, but we can certainly be worried about both. Statistically, the most common form of mass murder is familicide.

SPENCER: Yeah. It seems these cases are incredibly extreme and shocking, and the fact that it's almost entirely men that do this seems to say something about what's going on. It could be as simple as when you have small average differences at the tail, you get extremes. You get really big differences at the extremes, which sounds like an overly simplistic theory, but it actually predicts this, and it also predicts the opposite. It predicts, for example, that the most compassionate people in society will almost entirely be women, which I think is true. It would be interesting for someone to investigate, the people that give away all their possessions and adopt 14 children and that kind of thing.

KATE: Yeah, that's really interesting. What I have been thinking about a lot lately is that I happen to think that the best leaders are very compassionate people who are really able to extend compassion to every vulnerable person and maybe every vulnerable creature. That hypothesis, which is obviously still a hypothesis, takes a long time to fully establish empirically. It does make me interested in something I'm already interested in, which is, how do we get more female leaders in positions where they can be not authoritarian leaders, but really helpful kind leaders to a wide community of people? There's always a question I have of how bad it is that we haven't had a female president? In a way, they're just a figurehead, and it's not my main priority as a feminist, that's for sure. I don't think it's anyone's priority. It sucks that particular women have not been elected when I thought they were the better candidate by a considerable margin by most reasonable standards. But there is this question of, would there be a real benefit of certainly some women being able to access those positions of traditionally male-coded authority in a way that many Americans still find difficult to contemplate? Many Americans still identify a female president as a kind of threatening prospect, and if women are the most compassionate and seemingly have other great leadership capacities, that's a lot of talent and capacity left on the table.

SPENCER: If I'm not mistaken, I think about 10% of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are women.

KATE: Which sounds right. I haven't seen the stats recently, but it sounds right.

SPENCER: I think it's in the ballpark. That's pretty shocking. That is not a small disparity. It demands an explanation. What is actually going on there? Is it that people's idea of what makes a great leader is a very male-coded idea, and they just can't get promoted through the ranks by the people that have the power to promote them? Is it that women are taught not to pursue such positions? Is it that we're dealing with some kind of one of these tail phenomena, like with violence, where you're just picking from these extreme traits? Maybe at that extreme, you do see bigger differences. One example that sometimes people point to would be risk aversion. We studied this; on average, men and women are slightly different in risk aversion. In the US, women are a little less risk averse, men are a little more, and you can actually see this behaviorally. There are some really fun experiments where they literally watch men and women cross the street, and men are more likely to run in front of traffic. It's not a big difference.

KATE: It's a little funny.

SPENCER: It's a little different. But then you go to the tails, and you're like, the super duper risk takers, the people that bet it all on, and maybe people are more likely to end up at the heads of big companies when they're willing to do that. They also probably go bankrupt many more times.

KATE: That's really interesting. And again, it does resonate. However, I was thinking of one of my favorite studies of this question about why women are so underrepresented in these kinds of male-coded leadership positions. It comes from Madeline Heilman at NYU and her team of psychologists. They did this cool study where they alternated a resume and a whole personnel file for two different potential employees named James versus Andrea. It was the same information about the two candidates on average, but upwards of 80%, I think it was 83% of people, if I'm remembering rightly, rated James as more competent than Andrea to lead as this executive vice president of aeronautics, this male-coded business position.

SPENCER: Yeah, wow.

KATE: And then they switched it. They made both James and Andrea the top 5% of performers at their companies. They really couldn't argue now that Andrea was incompetent. Now they said, and this was 86% of people, an even higher percentage, who said James was more personable, more warm, and Andrea was less prosocial than James.

SPENCER: So weird, because that's actually literally the opposite of the stereotype.

KATE: She was seen as a bad woman because she'd excelled. When she was seen as a competent woman, she was seen as kind of a bad person who was not sufficiently communal, is the way they put it. She was either seen as unlikable or as incompetent, take your pick. This shows that upwards of 80% of people, both men and women, and not old people, were people roughly my age, so millennials now in their early 40s. This was research done about a decade ago, if I'm remembering rightly. The results, when they disaggregated by the gender of participants, made no difference. Men and women were equally biased against female leaders. The tail end phenomenon that you mentioned is possible, but it's also possible there's just a ton of preferring him to her from male-coded leadership positions based on literally nothing. You've got the same information on average about these two people. The only difference is one has been labeled James and one has been labeled Andrea, these gendered names. People think, "Well, James seems like a top guy, Andrea seems like either not very smart and able, or she seems like a "bitch.""

SPENCER: That's fascinating research. It reminds me of how some people talked about this predicament for Hillary Clinton, where sometimes people would react negatively to her doing things that they would normally react positively to a politician doing. It's this balance of seeming like a strong leader, people want a leader to be, but not evoking these sort of negative reactions that women sometimes get when they present those traits.

KATE: I'm not saying it's impossible to pull off, but it's really, really difficult, because it's not just that, Oh, a woman has to be twice as good, or more realistically, a little bit better than a male counterpart." She'll actually be punished for certain kinds of extreme competency. For example, being very incisive in a debate and kind of verbally aggressive is both required to win the debate, but it doesn't help the woman necessarily overall, because then she's perceived as less kind, less humane, less pro-social. Women, in order to lead, will have to be perceived as both supremely competent, but somehow their competence, at least for these male-coded roles, will have to be evinced in such a way that she also seems incredibly compassionate, generous, kind, and pro-social, which I think is actually doable. This third study by the team showed that the two ways you can get that perception to kind of stick for a woman is either describe her as a mother, in which case people like her better, which is interesting, or you can explicitly include information that she's a really great team player, and then the prejudice against women as leaders tended to be undone, or even reversed. In some cases, it was possible to get people to slightly prefer Andrea as a leader to James if people were totally sure she was utterly competent and she was utterly kind. But then I think about politicians in the real world, and the smallest perception of her not being perfect morally tends to lead to this very quick sense that she's not actually who she says she is, that she's fraudulent, that she's inauthentic. I know your listeners come from all sorts of political persuasions, but in my circle, someone who was really liked amongst progressives was Elizabeth Warren. It was interesting watching what happened, where she was perceived as very smart, very competent, very well-rounded as a political leader, and she was perceived as very communal because she took selfies with everyone. She really seemed to care about vulnerable Americans across the board, but she did one thing, which is she had a kind of beef on stage with Bernie Sanders. Watching people instantly turn against her, even though he had equally disagreed vehemently with her, was like watching this sense of there's something very fragile about the perception that a woman is good. It feels like that perception can easily wane in a heartbeat. If she does one thing people don't like, or if she shows her teeth a little bit and shows a tiny bit of aggression verbally, people think, "Oh, she is dead to me, she is gone, she's kind of toast." We need to not have women be toast and actually give a little bit more generosity to female leaders. I don't know how to sell that idea. I don't know how to pitch that idea, but I do think that's needed in order to benefit from leaders who are women as well as men in roles where they would excel and have a lot to offer the world.

SPENCER: We did another study where we described a person using different adjectives, and then we said, "Okay, imagine the person's face." After that, we asked, "Who did you imagine, a man or a woman?" What we found is that if we used adjectives like compassionate, kind, etc., they were much more likely to have imagined a woman, even though we didn't tell them who to imagine. If we used adjectives more like strong and tough, they were more likely to imagine a man. This got me thinking that we may have these internal archetypes that we use; many people have a man archetype and a woman archetype. When we're evaluating people, we might hold them up against these archetypes, which means that you can have two people running for the exact same position in politics or at a company, but they're actually being evaluated by different standards because of which archetype is being compared. What do you think about that?

KATE: Yeah, I think that's really sharp. I think that's right. In fact, this team of researchers has posited that women are seen as more "naturally compassionate and kind." There's this expectation that women be like that, but it's also this prescriptive thing and descriptive. If women are seen as deviating from those prescriptive norms, they're heavily punished for not seeming as nice, compassionate, and kind. It's tricky because compassion and kindness are among the most important moral traits for human beings, but I also don't want to see women held to impossible moral standards. We need to have a sense that the archetype for men is a bit off. We really do need to care about men being kind, compassionate humans and raising boys to be kind, compassionate humans. I don't think that's a controversial idea, but it doesn't necessarily get into our mainstream parenting practices as easily as it should, given countervailing norms. We also need to continue to hold women to high moral standards but not be complete perfectionists about it, because we all err. We all have moments where we make a remark that is a little snarky or show our teeth in an aggressive way, which may not be ideal. We could ask, "Has that person recognized that was an imperfect response? Can we hold someone accountable in a way that doesn't just dismiss them totally as a person because they haven't conformed to that archetype of feminine virtue?"

SPENCER: Yeah, it seems like these archetypes, insofar as we really do hold men and women to different standards, can be bad for both men and women. This doesn't just go one way. For example, a man who is feeling really sad and wants to express his feelings may feel scared to do that because he worries he'll be perceived as weak or unmanly. I've even heard men say they worry that their partner won't be sexually attracted to them if they express too much emotion or vulnerability. That's really sad too, right?

KATE: Yeah. I also think this is something that is more anecdotal, and I'd be curious what you think about it, but I think men are often too reluctant to express a lot of emotion, especially around other men. There can be this aspect to male friendships where they both, in a way, you know, we have data showing both men and women are less likely to have close friendships. Both men and women are lonely and more isolated. The friendships men do have with other men aren't necessarily able to both give and receive that emotional labor of, "Hey, I'm holding your feelings. I'm listening to something you're really sad about," in a way where I would have an easy time going to girlfriends of mine and saying, "I just need to talk about this. I just went through this hard thing," or reciprocating that and hearing about their sad feelings about some event or whatever it is. I do think there are also men who rely on their female partners to do a lot of that holding of their emotions and that work, which is fine up to a point. We should all do that to some extent for our partners, but it's also good to spread the load and have other people to talk to about your big feelings and ways in which you feel vulnerable. I think male friendships can have this quality that is not conducive to sharing those more tender emotions and makes it hard for men to avoid this weird dynamic called "man keeping" by psychologists, where a girlfriend or wife can feel like she's doing too much emotional labor because the man really doesn't have other people to vent with, express stress to, or express sadness to.

SPENCER: I think that really is a phenomenon where men may be less likely to share emotional things with each other. I just did my anecdotal experience, maybe more likely to have a bit of a competitive or ribbing kind of relationship, where if you express vulnerability, that could actually be something you get teased about later. Especially younger, with boys and stuff, where that may kind of train people to hide that because, "Okay, it's okay if they tease me a little bit, but I don't want to open up about things that are really important to me."

KATE: Yeah, it just strikes me again. None of us, I think, if we're rational, would choose these kinds of dynamics. And yet they are really understandable to get ensnared in, and to get enmeshed in a sense of, well, I can't talk to my male friends about something that I'm really just genuinely sad about or struggling with, or mental health issues, ways in which you might not be mentally ill, but you might just feel like you're not your best self, and that you are looking to be mentally healthier in various ways. Those big topics are important, I think, to be able to talk to a variety of people with, and there is something about an intra-male dynamic that I find, again, this is something I obviously don't get to experience from the inside. But when I read accounts of men being with other men, it worries me too that there is this moral permissiveness that comes up where groups of men will engage in behaviors that an individual man in that group disapproves of and knows is wrong, like wolf whistling at a woman on the street would be one example. Or just engaging in quote, unquote locker room talk, where it's not respectful and it is misogynistic, and he wouldn't do that on his own ever, like he knows that's just not a good way of being in the world, and yet he's very reluctant to call other men on their behavior. I get that it's hard to call anyone on their behavior. It's hard to say to any other person, "Well, I don't really like the way you're acting," or, "I'm not comfortable with what you just said," or "What do you mean by that?" Or, "That's not funny," but I do think there is a capacity in groups of women and also in mixed-gender groups to be like, "Oh, wait, that's off, that's not kind, or that is racist, or that's misogynistic," in ways that they can be gentle, like it can be a calling in of, "Hey, that's not you, let's just not. Or what is that about? You know better than that," whereas I think groups of men tend to have this permission structure that crops up where you get individual men doing things that they don't themselves endorse as individuals. Do you think that's right?

SPENCER: It's really interesting. Makes me think about the whole Trump, "grab them by the pussy" kind of thing. And the way people viewed that — some people were appalled, and other people were like, "Oh, this is just how men talk to each other, locker room talk." It's like, "Well, what does that really mean? What is that phenomenon?" And I certainly saw lots of this growing up, especially in middle school and high school, where boys would sort of say things that were really inappropriate or demeaning towards women, but they would get social credit for it. I suspect there's something going on around coolness and social status. There's some way of talking about women that people view as high status, even if it makes you an asshole, that they're still kind of looked up to in a status sense.

KATE: Yeah, and we get this focus then on education, which is like, well, you know, actually grabbing a woman by the pussy is wrong. I don't think many people really think it's okay. It's actually, in a way, the game is not sincere assertions of, "Yes, this is okay," or "This is a fact," or "This is what I actually believe." It is an almost jocular, sarcastic approach. It's like a whole different set of norms apply where it's just a joke, and I know that the men involved don't actually endorse this belief. They don't need re-education about what women are actually like or what is appropriate to do and not do. The whole thing is about pushing certain boundaries and edging up to certain norms, at least pushing them and maybe just violating them. I think the thing that's gone wrong there is that violating the norm is a source of status, rather than, "Hey, maybe that particular norm is there for a reason. This is reflective of a norm of how we treat human beings fairly, justly, and kindly that should be in place. You're not cooler for violating or joking about or not calling out. You're actually a person who's just being an asshole, in a sense that is pejorative." If I call a woman an asshole, saying she's being an asshole, that's a pejorative. That's saying, "Hey, don't do that." Whereas if a man calls another man an asshole, I do sometimes get the sense of like, that's almost praise, like, "Hey, what an asshole." Almost like a little bit of a sense of admiration that he's pushing that boundary. I have to ask why rhetorically, in the sense of why let that persist, that sense of permissiveness within intramural groups that doesn't reflect either good norms or norms that are actually endorsed by those individual men when they're being reflective.

SPENCER: There are almost two versions of calling a man an asshole. A man can call a man an asshole, like, "You asshole. I can't believe you did that." It could be like, "Oh, you're such an asshole." It's almost like this joking, it's essentially like saying you have such high status that you can get away with things. I'm sure when Trump made that comment, he wasn't thinking about it. He didn't have some grand scheme he was trying to execute. But if you really break it down, what is he fundamentally saying? He's saying that he's such high status that he can get away with doing these things that normally would be considered appalling, and nobody thinks it's appalling because that's how high his status is, and because women are so attracted to him, It's essentially a status play at the end of the day.

KATE: Yeah, that's right. Have you watched Heated Rivalry?

SPENCER: No.

KATE: Yeah. So it is a show that is very much for the female gaze and for gay men's gaze. I don't know how you identify, but it's a show that I think every woman my age has watched. One thing that's really interesting about the two male characters, one is bisexual, one is gay, Shane and Ilya, is that constantly Ilya is saying these somewhat jocular, rude things to Shane at the beginning of their love affair, which he'll say, "Oh, you're so boring" to Shane all the time, and Shane will respond to Ilya, "Oh, you're such an asshole." It's not totally divorced from elements of problematic or some people would say toxic masculinity, but watching them gradually become more tender to each other is this beautiful thing. It's almost like a fantasy of men approaching each other. When they began this sexual relationship, it was entirely devoid of emotional content, and then they came to love each other. I haven't gotten to the last episode yet, and I think that's going to be the big reveal, but it is this weird and really skillful way of showing men navigate from these problematic exchanges where, "Yeah, why is it okay to call another person you're sleeping with boring?" That's mean. And "Why is it okay to be an asshole and to call someone an asshole, almost like a jocular thing?" But then watching this closeness and tenderness, this real tenderness arises." I think for many women, there is this element of fantasy of, if only men could be a little more like that, a little more tender, not just to us, but actually to each other.

SPENCER: It's really interesting. It reminds me of how many men think that women don't look at pornography, and if you look at the actual data, a fascinating thing emerges: a lot of women use romantic novels and things like that as a certain form of pornography. It's essentially a different genre of pornography, and a commonly recurring theme, as I understand it in romantic novels, is a man who is a bit gruff and a bit of an asshole, but eventually starts showing emotion and genuine love. It seems like it's not just men's view of other men. Putting this archetype in place, it also feels like there's a certain way women want to have a man who's a bit of an asshole but then becomes tender. I don't know fully what to make of that, but this seems like a real thing.

KATE: Yeah, I do think there is this element of fantasy. I'm not hugely into romance novels. I'm not really a romance novel reader, so this is a bit speculative, but I've certainly heard plenty of women talk about it. I have many friends who are really into it. There is this sense, I think, of the fantasy of a man who, in social reality, probably just has red flags. It's probably just someone who is not terribly well-versed in how to treat another person romantically or otherwise. But the fantasy is that you are the special Chosen One who can get through to him and break down the hard exterior, and underneath it, the tender kernel within is a really sweet, emotionally intelligent, available, and loving person.

SPENCER: Red flags are not real, right? The surface shell that you need to get through, and you see this so much. Look at Beauty and the Beast, right?

KATE: Yeah.

SPENCER: Beauty and the Beast looks like an abusive relationship until he opens up. He's actually this sweet guy. It's like, "What is going on here?"

KATE: Yeah, the toxic and hostile exterior is very superficial, and what's within. It's not that you actually have to change him. There's already this kernel of sweetness that has just been prevented from reaching fruition because of misunderstandings, basically. So yeah, I'm not sure how often this is actually a true or actionable storyline, but it is certainly an attractive one. Like many people, if you feel that there are men who feel unavailable in fundamental ways, this idea of there being some kind of core and kernel that is very attuned seems like a very tempting thought that is the fodder of fantasy.

SPENCER: And perhaps also just this fact that you're the one that broke through, and it's all focused on you, that affection. But you could see how confusing this could be in the red pill world? They look at this genre and say, "Oh, well, what women really want is for you to be a complete dick."

KATE: It's a funny thing. I do not know a woman who finds that kind of gruff exterior independently attractive, but certainly I could understand the mistaken impulse. I'm not saying there aren't women who actually want to adhere to more traditional gender roles. I just think there is this whole discourse about, "Well, women don't actually want nice guys." It's like, "Well, actually look around; a lot of happily married heterosexual couples consist of men and women being nice to each other." And, yeah, that's what I've always found interesting in a prospective partner. I think the same is true for many heterosexual women.

SPENCER: It's really interesting. There's this whole narrative around women who don't like nice guys, or the nice guy gets friend zoned, or the jerk doesn't. Again, are you going back to the way the red pill can use some real data to tell a false story? I think one thing that is true for many women is they are attracted to a certain kind of confidence, and someone seeming like they don't believe in themselves at all, or they think they're worthless, can be unattractive. People who are jerks can project confidence that can feel at first attractive. What do you think about that?

KATE: Yeah, I suppose that's true. I do think that for people of any gender, a sense that your partner has a certain degree of self-possession and self-confidence is an attractive trait. I mean, I think men who are heterosexual say that too. They'll say of a prospective female partner that they love the way she carries herself and that she's so confident in her own body or her own sexuality. I think these are relatively common assertions across gendered lines. I do think that there's also a sense of entitlement in the sense of taking a tiny piece of evidence that a certain thing is true and blowing it up into a whole narrative. For example, the idea that a potential female partner for some men wasn't interested turns into the whole idea of being friend zoned. It betrays a sense of entitlement that when a man and a woman who are straight have some kind of rapport or friendship or emotional intimacy, she will then naturally be sexually interested in him too or be interested in a relationship, and that he's almost entitled to her turning her attention from a friendly gaze to a romantic or sexual one. That's just a false sense of entitlement to something that no one is entitled to. Many friendships develop in new ways, and lots of friendships don't. Getting really good with the idea that, for lots of reasons, people have all sorts of desires that aren't reciprocated is potentially really disappointing, but it's a bummer and not an injustice. That is what I think we need to educate young men to be really clear about in order not to go, for example, in extreme cases, the way of the incel, where these are young men who congregate in large communities online to vent endlessly about women rejecting them. Rejection is a common thing that happens to people across gendered lines. It happens to women. Certainly, it's interesting that the person who coined the term incel was a woman, a queer woman who felt lonely, sexually and romantically.

SPENCER: I didn't know that.

KATE: Oh yeah, I believe her name is Alana Connor, and she is a queer Canadian woman who felt sexually lonely.

SPENCER: She was referring to herself.

KATE: Yeah. Involuntary

SPENCER: It breaks the narrative so much.

KATE: It certainly does. Yeah, it was a term that was just kind of co-opted to mean this very different thing, because she didn't feel like she was entitled to sexual attention or admiration or a relationship. She just felt sad about it. And that's legitimate. That's valid for anyone to feel, "Oh, I'm single and I don't want to be" or "I'm celibate and I don't want to be." That's totally reasonable to want to have more in the way of sex or romance in your life. But, yeah, it's really important to be clear that that is this disappointing thing that isn't a cosmic injustice, and it's not you being, in most cases, discriminated against. It's just that sometimes things don't work out with people you're interested in, and you have to get good at dealing with that gracefully, in a way that is roughly adult.

SPENCER: Something I observed a lot growing up is that boys and then eventually men who haven't spent that much time with women can almost treat interactions with them as inherently different, so that there's this idea that instead of just, "Oh, I'm spending time with this person," it's like there's some other element to it, like, "Oh, maybe we're going to go on a date or something." I sort of suspect that that causes a lot of misery, where becoming involved in the relationship by sexualizing it from the get-go, rather than just being, "Well, this is a person. Okay, I might find them attractive, but I'm just going to treat them like a person and develop this as though it's just another person." Then if the person is not sexually interested in them, it's like, "Oh no, I'm rejected. It's a shock," rather than just, "Oh, we could just develop a friendship, or we could just have a human relationship instead."

KATE: That's interesting. Yeah, it's just a funny way of relating to other people, where I would have thought your default is just to be human to human–in a way that, of course, there are always weird gender dynamics, and it's good to be aware of ways in which, "Oh, why are we doing things this way? Why is there an expectation that I won't hold the door for a man who's carrying a heavy package?" That's silly. A kinder thing to do would be to hold the door for him. That's something I've definitely thought of, "Oh, whoops, I should adjust that behavior." But yeah, to have a sense going in that relationships default to having some sexual expectation strikes me as so sad and unhealthy, because knowing a lot of people and having a lot of rich social connections with them requires us to be able to look at people in a way that is not immediately geared towards the kind of almost presumptuous question of, "What can this person do for me?" but also more the question of, "What can I bring to this interaction, just as a person? What do we have to talk about? What do we have in common? What might be a fun activity that we can do together?" Rather than just instantly being geared towards almost sexual conquest. This is the other thing about young men's relationships that does worry me, too, when it comes to changing norms of masculinity. It looks like men are engaging in certain kinds of sexual activity less for the sake of having the sex itself, and less for the sake of eventually developing a relationship, and almost more about, in the case of straight men, having some kind of access to women as a site of social status. One really interesting facet of that is you see that young men, and I think really men across age groups, want their partner to look a particular way and to be "hot" relative to standards of attractiveness, not because they are most attracted to a woman of this type, but because you can only openly date, let alone form a relationship with or marry a woman who adheres to that social standard that confers on you social and sexual capital. That's really sad, because if you look at searches of pornography, many men are attracted to bigger women, to larger women, to fatter women. It's a really common search term, and it does seem to indicate that many men get off on seeing bigger-bodied women, and yet it's such a common thing that they will enjoy that content privately, but would never date a woman who wasn't thin and conventionally attractive. Even if they do find her desirable, she's not suitable dating or marriage material. You also see men seeing sex more as about the conquest and being able to show off the conquest, as well as wanting some kind of trophy girlfriend or trophy wife to show off to other men, as well as people generally. Again, I just don't think those are good ways of relating to romantic partners, and they also mean that a huge proportion of people who aren't conventionally attractive by most measures are not someone you're interested in, so that really tends to winnow your pool of potential people with whom you could be sexually and romantically connecting.

SPENCER: Certainly, when I was growing up, I would see other kids in my high school. They would have sex with a girl and then brag about it and get kudos from other guys for it. There's definitely a social status element to it and a sense of conquest. This reminds me of the relatively recent stuff that happened with Andrew Huberman, where there were articles written about him. I guess I don't know the details of the situation. I don't know what's really true, but the article essentially reported on this idea that he was having relationships with multiple women and maybe not being totally honest with them. Many people criticized him for this, but what I found really fascinating about the response is there were other people who were like, "Well, of course, he's a high-status man." It almost seems like this is a sign of his status. That he's, "What would you expect?" I think buying into this idea of sexual conquest as a status indicator and even something that's cool.

KATE: Yeah. I think that's completely right. I don't know if you saw the Louis Theroux documentary, Inside the Manosphere. It's good. He has this moment with the YouTuber Harrison. I think his name is, but his moniker is HSTikkyTokky, this kind of joking moniker, where he is showing off to Theroux, the documentarian, him having oral sex or getting a blow job from a woman in a bathroom in a club the previous night. Theroux's question is, "Well, did she consent to that? Is she okay with the fact that you videotaped her?" HS says, "Yeah, sure." He's very blithe about it, not very convincingly that he did obtain consent. But how weird that he is a straight man showing off himself getting a blow job from a woman in a club the previous night to, I'm pretty sure, Theroux is straight. Yeah, he is, at least he is in relationships with women. Why would he be interested in showing off this video of him, except as this idea that it's a conquest? You get to show off that you are high status and have more status because a conventionally attractive woman was prepared to go down on you in a club's bathroom. You say it out loud, and it's like, that's kind of bizarre behavior. Sex, for most people, most of the time, is this private thing, and it's typically, as a default, seen as something between two people and not something to broadcast. I'm not saying there are no ways of doing that in a healthy and consensual way, but certainly this didn't seem to be one of them.

SPENCER: Sex isn't always about sex.

KATE: Sex is about social status. And yeah, what a shame for human beings that we turned it into that, rather than two people enjoying themselves consensually, which seems like the healthier way to approach it to me.

SPENCER: You've been very generous with your time. Before we wrap up, I'm wondering, what would you want to say to people that are unconvinced by what we talked about today in terms of gender inequality, and they think, "Well, I really just feel like things are equal now. You know, the laws are the same. Women can choose any life they want."

KATE: Yeah. I would say, "Look inside the home, where women are so much more subject to domestic violence, and sadly, even rape within marriage than their male counterparts in straight relationships." And this isn't a small phenomenon. So one pretty explosive story from CNN that came out in March showed that in a community of about a thousand active participants, men are posting videos that are called "sleep content" or somnophilia, where they're displaying their female partners being drugged and then sometimes sexually violated by these men. Men are doing this, but they're also participating in the viewing of this non-consensual pornography, and that is simply not happening in the other direction. Women are not posting pictures of their drugged male partners in compromised positions and non-consensual sexual activity with them. And so I would say there are just forms of misogyny and degradation that listeners who are skeptical might find shocking and unconvincing, but they're happening, unfortunately. For a more prosaic example of this, women who are working the same number of hours of paid labor outside the home are doing about twice the childcare and domestic labor as male partners when the two have children. And so that's an example which doesn't maybe seem like misogyny and certainly not abuse, but it is sexist that she's expected to do more labor in order to raise the kids and keep the house in decent shape when they're both working an equal number of paid hours. So, yeah, I don't know. I think you look at the stats and you can see that things have a long way to go, even though we really have made egalitarian social progress. Women used to do much more by way of child-rearing and domestic labor. The numbers have improved, but I think they should be equal. If people are contributing equally outside the home, they should contribute equally in the home. I would like a world where no one is vulnerable to sexual violence or exploitation or any of these more extreme phenomena that unfortunately are all too real for people in ways that are disproportionately gendered. So does that make sense as an answer? I think we've improved, but yeah, I want to see more progress. I want to see people, regardless of their gender and regardless of their sexuality, really free to flourish in ways that don't feel guaranteed to me as the way of the future. For someone who's raising a six-year-old daughter and who feels a lot of concern for these new generations of kids who, in certain ways, we're seeing a certain kind of backsliding towards more regressive ways of relating to each other as men and women.

SPENCER: Kate, thanks so much for coming on the Clearer Thinking Podcast.

KATE: Yeah, thanks for having me, Spencer. It was a great conversation.