Episode 58 - Feminism (feat. Carol Hay)

Transcript

David: 0:06

Hi, I'm David Peña-Guzmán.

Ellie: 0:16

And I'm Ellie Anderson. Welcome to Overthink,

David: 0:22

the podcast where two friends

Ellie: 0:25

who are also professors

David: 0:26

put philosophy dialogue with the everyday.

Ellie: 0:28

Because big ideas are within everyone's reach.

David: 0:30

Ellie, I'm really worried that we find ourselves in the middle of an orchestrated backlash against feminism that is being carried out in very different quarters of social life. I think it's there culturally in the rise of all these creepy men's groups that bond over their hatred of women. Think about the, uh, MRM, the men's rights movement or the incels or the PUPs. Lots of acronyms today.

Ellie: 1:00

What's PUP?

David: 1:01

PUP is the pick up artists.

Ellie: 1:04

Oh god.

David: 1:05

Um, who like have this idea that they have to crack the code of how to manipulate women into sleeping with them because women are just puppets that fall for very easy tactics. And so culturally, I see it in the rise of the sense that men are in need of defending themselves from feminism.

Ellie: 1:24

We're scary. Coming to get you.

David: 1:28

I, I know, Ellie. I, I'm afraid.

Ellie: 1:32

me or for you?

David: 1:33

I'm, I'm afraid for me. I'm a men's rights defender.

Ellie: 1:36

Oh, whoa.

David: 1:37

Yes. Even beyond those creepy men's groups, that backlash is also there in, uh, the conservative takeover of the Supreme Court, which culminated in a terrifying decision, which is Dobbs. And it's also there in the media, which seems intent on exploiting any story that seems to complicate the claims of the #MeToo movement. And by the way, this is how I read the Amber Heard Johnny Depp trial, um, which was just really difficult to even listen to or watch.

Ellie: 2:08

Don't even get me started on how much of a shitshow that was. Like, I, it was so bad that I actively avoided much coverage of it for that very reason. Like, I know that this is on my area of research but I was just like, I can't deal with this right now. Maybe I'll revisit it at some point.

David: 2:21

No. I, I definitely understand that I, myself didn't, I actively didn't follow it because anytime I started seeing videos going on online about it, most of 'em were mocking Amber Heard and putting her under a microscope, but not really doing the same to Johnny Depp.

Ellie: 2:42

Not, yeah, not at all. Not, not that, like, not that there's any, any completely perfect party here, but still, yeah, there was just no comparison in the coverage between the two.

David: 2:51

No, no. And it just like, seemed like misogyny pouring out of every TikTok video, out of every Instagram story out of every Facebook post. And it all had this effect on me where I just tuned out. I was like, there's I, I can't begin to articulate how many problems I see. And it angers me that people in my social circle, in my family and friends, just like very broadly, don't see how shitty all of this is.

Ellie: 3:19

There was also just this ubiquity of content online that was like hating on Amber Heard. Like anytime I went to YouTube, it recommended a video to me about that, even though I'd never expressed interest in watching videos like that. And on our very own YouTube channel, I have a video on Sartre's "Existentialism as a Humanism" and somebody commented the following. Don't worry, I pulled it up already for this episode because I knew I wanted to mention it. This is about me, talking about philosophy on, online. "How does Amber find time to produce philosophy content during her trial with Depp? Good luck, turd."

David: 3:55

Oh, my god. Are you kidding?

Ellie: 3:56

Yeah, yeah. Some somebody was like, oh, another, another blonde woman. Like, yeah. Let me just make a shitty comment about Amber Heard on a philosophy YouTube channel. "Good luck, turd" is the best.

David: 4:08

Also, like does, let me make it about me cuz we've established that men's rights are under attack. Does that mean that I'm Johnny Depp?

Ellie: 4:16

No, no, no. Cuz you're not the video. It's, it's just, it's just.

David: 4:19

Okay.

Ellie: 4:20

But I mean, that's one of the reasons that our YouTube philosophy channel is like way more milquetoast mainstream than the podcast, because that's the kind of comment that I'm getting on a video about existentialism.

David: 4:31

Yeah, well, and you've mentioned to me that you've gotten really creepy, borderline, scary comments on YouTube before. Um, and I think YouTube in particular, kind of breeds those.

Ellie: 4:43

Oh, yeah. I mean, our, our YouTube viewership is 84% male, according to the statistics. And that is not at, at all the case for our podcast statistics. I think YouTube tends to attract more, more men than women, Yeah. Or men than other genders, for sure. But I wanna go back to how you open this, which is by talking about Dobbs and the Heard Depp trial as part of a backlash against Me Too. And I definitely think that's true of the Heard Depp trial. There's, like I said, a lot of complexity that I haven't really taken the time to unpack with that trial, but I think it's pretty obvious by now that it was like, "Oh, look, here's this imperfect woman. Let's all pounce on her because we feel threatened by Me Too." I don't think that's the case with Dobbs though, because the Supreme Court started to get packed with conservatives before the Me Too movement happened and having gone to Catholic school now what, like almost 20 years ago, when I was in high school, there was always talk of wanting to eventually overturn Roe v Wade from that kind of Catholic perspective. And so I, I think I see the Dobbs decision as part of a much longer programmatic and extremely nefarious desire to return to a pre feminist movement that is not necessarily a response to Me Too.

David: 6:02

I can see that. And maybe I see them as more connected than you do because the world that these nefarious actors want to go back to is a world in which women do not have abortions. And in which they do not dare accuse a man of sexual assault, let alone bring that to, to court in a, in a public way that might humiliate the man. And you see the connection between those two, actually in the Johnny Depp Amber Heard trial, because most of those videos online that we've been talking about mocking Amber Heard were funded by the Daily Wire, which is a conservative news website.

Ellie: 6:42

It's like Ben Shapiro's thing, right.

David: 6:44

It's Ben Shapiro's burning trashcan of a news website and the Daily Wire has also at the same time been pushing for the overthrow of Roe v Wade. So for me, this moment of backlash does makes sense as I said, as, as an orchestrated whole that is moving us back to that world where women are men's possession for the reproduction of their seed.

Ellie: 7:08

Yeah, I think I'm not ready to generalize and say we're in a moment of backlash though. And maybe this is just because I don't wanna cede ground to this. I just think that there are too many different forces that are competing at this particular moment in time and too many forces still pushing for feminist gains that I think the backlash is getting a lot of attention right now, but I also think that we don't wanna be too focused on this moment as a moment of backlash, you know, in a, in a general sense. I think it's more complex than that.

David: 7:40

So I do disagree with you on this point because a moment of backlash is never one in which all forces point in the same direction, right there is a lash and then there's a backlash against it. Um, and it, it doesn't need to be universal or absolute in order for it to register as such. And it might be different from previous cultural or political backlashes against women, such as the one that Susan Faludi describes in her book

Backlash: 8:06

The Undecided War Against American Women, which is about the setbacks suffered by feminism during the Reagan years in the 1980s. And it, and in that book, Faludi focuses a lot on the media in particular, probably because she herself was a journalist. So that was her area of expertise. But basically, she says that in the 1980s, there was a sudden explosion of negative stereotypes in the media about women who sought to quote unquote, "have it all." They wanted to have a family. They wanted to have also a career. And these stereotypes had one function. They were meant to shove women back into the cult of domesticity from which they had already began to liberate themselves in the 1960s and the 1970s. And so according to Faludi in the 1980s, there is this, this moment of regression, even though, of course there were still forces of feminism pushing forward the cause of women's liberation. So there is a moment of cultural regress, even though there are still people pushing the feminist movement forward. So I think we are today in a moment of backlash, it's just a backlash of a different order.

Ellie: 9:18

And how different?

David: 9:20

Well, I read an interesting article in the Journal of Men's Studies, which by the way, is a legitimate journal.

Ellie: 9:27

Of course.

David: 9:28

I know when I, I hadn't heard of it. And when I read it, I was like, is this the Journal of the Men's Rights Movement? Like Journal of Men's Studies?

Ellie: 9:35

Uh, no, no, I'm pretty sure I've used pieces from that, that journal in my research.

David: 9:40

Yes, definitely not a creepy, uh, journal, very legitimate journal that studies questions of masculinity and men's role in a contemporary society. Anyways, and, and this article that I read argues that the recent attacks on the feminist movement are no longer framed openly as injunctions for women to return to a purely domestic life, although that might still exist, that's still definitely part of the appeal of, of conservatism, but rather as a fear that the women's liberation movement has gone too far, that the feminists have gone so far that the tables have now actually turned. And it's the feminists who are suddenly victimizing men. And this is where the authors of that article say that this new backlash is what lies behind a lot of the conservative reactions to the Me Too movement, including things like #NotAllMen and #HimToo. I don't know if you remember that hashtag which went viral around the time of the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court hearing involving Christine Blasey Ford.

Ellie: 10:48

Yeah, another shitshow of a legal procedure. But I, it's really wild how much pieces like this article give the lie to our narrative of a forward march of historical progress, you know, as a sort of unified thing. And I love reading feminist theory from previous periods because it's shocking how much is still relevant today. Many of the same problems that feminists have diagnosed since the very beginning are still ones that exist today. And many of the stereotypes that people had around feminism way back in the day are still there today. Like this isn't even that early of an example, but Beauvoir's The Second Sex begins by saying "Today, it seems like everything on the subject of feminism has already been spoken." And she talks about stereotypes of sort of like militant lesbians who are anti-men, et cetera, you know, even before like the major, uh, radical lesbianism movement happened, uh, decades after she wrote The Second Sex. So I, I do think that there's so much that we can learn from the history about not only the complex forces that are at work here, but also the ways that a lot of the main aims of feminism have not been addressed, although, you know, many have to. So I wanna give credit where credits due, but I think if we're talking about a backlash to feminism, then we also have to talk about what people are lashing out against, or back to.

David: 12:11

Yeah, you're right that we have to get clear about what feminism is, because to be honest, when I first started, uh, my journey into feminist theory, I really thought feminism was gonna be about man hating, angry lesbians. And I was extremely disappointed to find out that that was not the case. And so,

Ellie: 12:27

You're like the one man who went into the feminist theory classes requesting that.

David: 12:32

You know, I was actually my university's first male freshman declared women's studies major. I just,

Ellie: 12:38

Okay.

David: 12:38

I, I didn't know that this was not, um, like a field where guys went into.

Ellie: 12:44

I knew that already. And I love that about you actually.

David: 12:48

And, uh, anyway, so yeah, I really wanted my man hating angry lesbian cohort, and I did not get it. So, if feminism is not that, Ellie, as the inhouse expert on feminist theory, can you tell us what feminism is?

Ellie: 13:05

The dreaded, "what is" question. Um, a question that philosophers both love and hate. I think a pretty well agreed upon definition is that feminism is a movement that both diagnoses the oppression of women and works for the overcoming of that gender based oppression. So, it's about gender based oppression. It's usually about women as a gender who is exploited, although that's not always the case. So bell hooks, for instance, defines feminism as a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. Her view involves sexism more generally, but most feminists do talk about gender based oppression of women. And so Manon Garcia and Amia Srinavasan, both contemporary feminist philosophers have recently argued, following a long tradition of feminism, that feminism addresses the subordination of women as women and seeks to overcome this subordination.

David: 13:57

And here, I wanna ask another "what is" question, because as you know, it's been extremely controversial and debated, and that is the, what do we mean by women? What is women in this context?

Ellie: 14:10

Yeah, this is such an important question. I think, I, it's actually not all feminists think this. Some actually think that we shouldn't even bother trying to define women cuz it gets us into too many. kind of questions in the weeds and prevents political action from taking place. So, focusing too much on who counts as a woman can cause us to lose sight of the necessity of overthrowing gender based oppression. I think it is an important question. Some feminists of course, and ugh, most non-feminists are what are known as essentialists. People who think that there is some essence to being a woman, whether that's through your anatomy, right, your body parts, your biology, um, your chemistry. There was this book The Female Brain that came out a couple of decades ago. Or whether we could locate that essence somewhere else besides in one's body. But I think most feminists today are not essentialist. And I really like the way that our guest for today's episode, Carol Hay treats this question. She talks about woman as being a concept of family resemblance. And the idea of family resemblance is one that comes from the philosopher. Ludwig Wittgenstein who famously says we don't need to answer "what is" questions by offering a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for something. One of the examples that Wittgenstein uses is that of a game. He says, "If you were to try to come up with a perfect definition for what counts as a game, you would fail because there are so many different kinds of things that are games, and it's useless, therefore, to obsess over creating the perfect definition of what a game is." We generally recognize a game when we see it and games kind of hang together, according to this sense of family resemblance that we have. And Carol Hay says that this is a useful way to think about the category of woman. I'll also say here that despite the rise of some kind of weird TikTok trends around the divine feminine, many feminists are not invested in the continuation of their gender permanently. A lot, actually wanna abolish gender moving beyond the gender binary that is still prevalent in so much of our society, but they think that we can't skip straight to that. We can't be ignorant of the realities of gender based oppression today. And denying that there are such thing as women would likely lead to that. And so Hay says in her book that feminism actually wants to make itself obsolete, right. But I think it's important to recognize that it's definitely not obsolete for now.

David: 16:37

Yeah. I mean, I've seen, uh, some posters for instance, in, um, campus offices that say things like I'll be a post feminist when we're in a post patriarchy. And, uh, the idea is that even though, of course, the goal of feminism is to achieve a society where there is an absence of gendered oppression and gendered exploitation, such that feminism is no longer needed. In this particular context, we're not there yet. And I think something like the category of woman could be read in, in that way. Even if there might be a lot of feminists who say, you know, I'm not particularly committed to these gendered labels, given the fact that our society is structured in such a way that power is asymmetrically distributed according to these labels, it's very hard to just assume that they're not there simply because I don't believe that they track anything essential or metaphysical or transcendental.

Ellie: 17:31

Yeah. The gender wage gap targets women as women.

David: 17:34

Yeah, that's exactly right.

Ellie: 17:37

Today we are talking about feminism.

David: 17:40

In the wake of the Me Too movement, American women have sustained major losses in their rights.

Ellie: 17:45

Are we in the midst of a backlash against feminism? And what does this mean for the future of the movement?

David: 17:50

And what concepts from feminist theory might help us make sense of this backlash? To help us think about these issues we have with us, Carol Hay, who is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Dr. Hay is an expert on feminist theory, liberal social and political philosophy, oppression studies, content ethics, and the philosophy of sex and love. And she is the author of the book, Think Like a Feminist: The Philosophy Behind the Revolution.

Ellie: 18:24

And because this book is so helpful for providing a comprehensive introduction that enables us to think about the really complicated moment we find ourselves in, today we're jumping. Into our interview because we don't wanna waste any time.

David: 18:38

Hi, Carol. Welcome to Overthink.

Ellie: 18:41

We're so happy to have you,

Carol: 18:43

Thank you so much for having me. I'm really, really excited to talk to you.

Ellie: 18:47

Uh, me too, because I totally nerded out about loving your book. And so I can't wait to talk about it. It's like, not just me saying this because you're our guest. It's like, I mean, obviously we have you on as a guest because we think your book is great, but like I, yeah, I loved your book.

David: 19:02

Yes. And, and Ellie was, uh, nerding out about this only recently. I was nerding out about it back in the day when we began chatting with you about having you on the podcast. And so we've both been major fans of your work, how accessible it is, how rigorous it is, how illuminating it is. At different points in time converging on this moment. So let's just jump directly into your work on feminist theory, because in your book, you invoke feminist philosopher, Marilyn Frye's theory of the bird cage to explain gender based oppression. So tell us about this metaphor and why you think it's so useful for feminism.

Carol: 19:40

Absolutely. So, I use this metaphor in a chapter where I talk about a number of different metaphors for understanding oppression, because I think oppression is kind of one of the central theoretical concepts that feminists use to explain the social problems that we're interested in dissecting. And Frye's metaphor is really useful for understanding what feminist call is systematicity of oppression. And what that means basically is just that, um, you're not gonna understand how any kinda oppression works, whether that's sexist, oppression, or racist oppression, or any, any other forms of oppression is you're only looking at individual cases, right? So the harms and injustices that we're talking about here are harms and injustices that only make sense from a kinda big picture point of view. So I'll come back to sort of like running through the philosophy of it, but lemme give you the metaphor because it's incredibly powerful. And Frye is just, Frye's one of the, sort of the huge names in, in the feminist philosophical canon. She's incredible. Okay. So based on what happens, Frye says, pretend that you're looking at a bird, right? You're looking at this bird and it is just clearly failing to thrive. Its feathers are all dirty and it's scruffy and it's under fed and it's just, it's just not living a very good bird life. And you're trying to explain the nature of what's going on with this bird. And if your face ran up in the bird, looking at it really, really closely, and you can't for the life of you see why this bird isn't doing what it needs to do to take care of itself. Right. Is sitting there. There's a pile of seed not that far away. It's a bird. Why could you just fly and go and get the seed? It seems like it's starving, right? and then you step back just a bit, right? You just have to like take one step and you realize, oh, there's, there's a wire in between the bird and the pile of seed. That explains why the bird's not popping straight forward to get those seeds, because there's a wire in its way. But like, like it's not like an electrified wire. It's not razor wire. It's just a wire. But a wire by itself, can you block the bird's but just a small path, right? So you think, okay, well, why doesn't the bird just fly around the wire? You step back a little more. You see not one wire, but two wires and the wires are connected. You step back a little further and you see a third wire and a fourth wire, and then suddenly step back far enough, you realize the bird is completely surrounded by wires. And each one of these wires by themselves wouldn't really be capable of affecting the bird's life prospects in any interesting way, but collectively together, they basically completely determine what's possible for that bird. And so that's why the bird is failing to thrive because it's stuck in a bird cage, right. It's trapped. So this metaphor Frye says is a really good way of understanding the systematicity of oppression, right? So the thought is that the harms and injustices that feminists are talking about can't be understood in isolation from each other. We have to sort of see how they're connected to each other in various ways. One of the things I also do in the book Like a Feminist is talk a lot about the misconceptions of feminism and one misconception of feminism is that a bit of feminists, they focus on these things that just aren't that big a deal. They freak out about chivalry or they, you know, they can't take a joke. Right? You say, you make mountains out of mole hills. But I think that misconception relies on a failure to understand the systematicity that we want to pay attention to here. So the reason, you know, feminists might get mad about the lack of pants with functional pockets isn't because we think, oh, this is a huge deal, right. But it's because we think it's one, among many things that prevent women from living good lives. Right. And so I just use a trivial example, but of course there are a lot of other much less trivial examples. Things like the wage gap, things like rape culture. And one of the things that really can do in the book is just point out all of the different forms and injustices. Throw out as many as possible that women experience, and of course, any individual woman isn't gonna experience every single one of these harms and injustices. But it's, you know, there are all these landmines that are laid out for women to navigate and sorry, I just throw another metaphor in there but yeah, but so the fun here is that, right. We have to sort of understand how oppression is systemic and institutional, right? It has not just to do with the individual interactions that people have with each other. But also with just sort of larger social institutions, right? We have to look at, you know, the way, uh, like the law treats women. We have to look at the way that the academy treats women or the professions treat women. And you have to look at all these sort of informal social norms as well. Just in sort of like rules and behavior that no one's sort of written down and no one's passed laws about, but just the expectations that we have of women and girls and how that affects them. Right. So each one of these things together can't by itself, explain what's going on in a woman's life, right. But collectively they can explain why women often find themselves constrained, trapped, or basically just sort of not able to live as fully flourishing lives as most can.

Ellie: 23:53

Yeah. And I think that bird cage metaphor that you're using from Frye is not only really interesting for thinking about the structural barriers that prevent women from their self-actualization by showing the. Hidden ways that society prevents them from, you know, from this prevents them from getting the food. I liked the, I liked the scruffy feathers example too. May, maybe in this case, it's like overly groomed feathers

Carol: 24:18

Right. Exactly.

Ellie: 24:20

I'm thinking also about how something like the bird cage metaphor can extend to internalized forms of oppression as well, because you write in a really fascinating way about internalized oppression and the way that women are taught from an early age to take pleasure in their own objectification. And so you might think, for instance, about teenagers gazing at themselves in the mirror and obsessively taking selfies or wearing sexy clothing to attract men. You also kind of call yourself out on this in the book, which is something I totally resonate with as well. I do this in the classroom too, of being like, "Hey, just because we're critiquing, this doesn't mean that we're suddenly kind of outside of it too." And so that, that leads you to talking about how important it is to refrain from judging individual women for such behavior. And so when we're thinking about internalized oppression and the behaviors that women perform that are easily explainable by sexism, and yet we also want to refrain from judging those women and placing the responsibility on them for such behavior, how does this work? Like how do we navigate those two in your mind?

Carol: 25:26

Yeah, no, it's, it's a really tricky needle to thread because I think as you point out, right on the one hand, we see how participation in these social practices entrenches them, right. We see how we're sort of co-opted into doing the work of the patriarchy for it, right. And so as a feminist, we wanna be really critical of that. But at the same time, we wanna just sort of recognize that, people are just doing what they need to do to, you know, to make it tomorrow. I think, I wouldn't wanna say that we should refrain from judging people, but I, I think I would wanna say that any judgment needs to be sort of taken in, in a kind of bigger context. And again, so that was another kind of misconception of feminism that I was addressing, what, in those passages where I talk about the importance of not judging individual women. Cause I think there is this misconception of feminists as being these really kind of judgemental bitches. Can I swear on this podcast?

David: 26:08

Absolutely.

Carol: 26:09

Okay, good. Just checking sh, should have asked that before

Ellie: 26:15

Yeah, well, and in fact, I actually did a TikTok video recently that was like a short version of a review that I did of Manon Garcia's book We Are Not Born Submissive and I was talking about women's submission to their own oppression. And I got these comments of people accusing me of being a SWERF.

David: 26:30

Wait, what is that?

Ellie: 26:32

So it's, uh, it's sex worker exclusionary radical feminist, basically the idea of a TERF, of a trans exclusionary radical feminist, they have co-opted those last three letters and made the new term SWERF, which means basically that you're a feminist who does not consider sex workers as part of the feminist movement in the same way that TERFs don't consider trans women as women, let alone part of the feminist movement. I guess these people on TikTok were assuming that because I was calling out women's submission, I must think that sex workers couldn't be feminist, which is just like so far from the case. It's so much more complicated than this, right? I'm not judging sex workers. I'm talking about patriarchy.

Carol: 27:11

Yeah, no, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. so another metaphor that I talk about in the book, especially in that, that chapter on oppression is just, I think it's the best way to wrap your head around, the philosophy itself is through these metaphors. Then the metaphor can kind of structure your understanding of the philosophy.

Ellie: 27:24

Mm-hmm

Carol: 27:24

If the philosophical concept that we're trying to understand is internalized oppression or internalized objectification, another metaphor that's really useful for this comes from Foucault, actually.

Ellie: 27:34

We talk about him all the time on this podcast.

Carol: 27:36

Perfect, perfect. Okay, so your listeners are familiar. That's great. Foucault talks about the pantopicon, right. Which is this model prison designed by Jeremy Bentham, one of the founders of utilitarianism. And so Bentham basically had this idea and apparently, actually a couple of these prisons were actually built. So, but it's basically a prison design. Where you have a central guard tower, and then you have hundreds of individual cells that surround the guard tower in a circle. And what this means is that a single guard can potentially be looking at any individual one of the prisoners at any given time. So like they didn't have like two-way glass back when Bentham was, was imagining this, but, you know, right, technology's gotten even better on this, right. And so the thought is that any individual prisoner doesn't know whether he or she is being watched. And honestly, the odds are pretty low if there's only one guard, but if the disciplinary practices of the prison are such that if you get caught doing something you shouldn't be doing by that guard, if the discipline is really, really swift and severe and public, so everyone sees it happening, then what's gonna happen is that all of the prisoners in that prison are gonna start taking on the work of surveilling themselves. So you get this idea of self surveillance and so Foucault used this metaphor to sort of understand how power works in modern society in general. The thought is that people start to see themselves as perpetually under surveillance, possibly being watched. And again, Foucault is writing this in the seventies right before, you know, cell phones and GPS tracking and like cameras on every corner, right. So, this is real oppression, right? So, but even without that Foucault said that we were, we live in a world where people take on the work of disciplining and punishing themselves doing the work of keeping themselves in line. And so feminists have taken Foucault's idea of the panopticon and applied it in particular to the ways that women take on this work of disciplining and punishing themselves. Foucault says this work produces what he calls "docile bodies," and we get feminist philosophers like Sandra Bartky or Susan Bordo, who talk about how women's bodies are expected to be even more docile than men's. There's a lot of interesting work by sociologists about how, teachers notice when girls misbehave more often than boys. So we have this stereotype like, oh, girls are just quiet and, and meek and they don't actually misbehave, but no, it actually just turns out that a girl who is starting to misbehave is noticed much more by her teachers. And so it's corrected much more by teachers, by parents. And of course, once you add race in here, it gets a hell of a lot more complicated and the picture gets even more ugly, right?

David: 29:48

Well, and I, I mean, what I really like about this metaphor of the panopticon, something that it adds to the metaphor of the cage. Is the notion of punishment, right? Which is not a literal punishment dished out by the state or by a state actor. It's a social punishment in the case of gender, where even if we can talk about internalized oppression as women, sometimes choosing, uh, certain behaviors, as Ellie mentioned that can very easily be read as supporting a condition of submission. The other side of the equation is that there is a very high price to pay for not living up to standards of femininity, standards of beauty, social expectations. And the example that you just gave is so illuminating that it's so deeply ingrained, that it begins at an early age, even in places like school, uh, where. A girl who is too loud or moves around too much is suddenly the object of a disciplinarian tactic that produces a gendered docile body. So I, I, I think it adds something very meaningful to the metaphor of the cage, where the bird is primarily trapped in all these invisible wires.

Carol: 30:57

Yep. That's exactly right. And I would completely agree. And I would add to that in addition to all of those sticks of punishments, potential punishments, right, whether we're talking social ostracism or actual punishments, right. There are also a lot of carrots, there are a lot of cookies for women who, choose to go along with this stuff, at least in the short term. Right. And that's another thing I discuss in the book is how, um, in some ways this is a collective action problem. Right. So, and I get this from a, an analytic feminist name Anne Cudd. So Anne talks about how, um, the reason that sexist oppression is so difficult to fight is that there are actually really good reasons for women to go along with it. It's not like women, aren't dumb, we're not stupid and we're not crazy, right. There are reasons for women to conform to norms of femininity. There are reasons for women to go with the flow it's and the reasons could be economic. if you live in a society with a wage gap and you know, where, where chances are, you're gonna be making, you know, 80 cents on the dollars to a man, You need to support yourself. You need to support your, uh, your children, right. There are economic reasons to play the part of femininity Right. There are, uh, you know, the reasons of, even just sort of social protection, right? So Susan Brownmiller who's like this classic 1970s, like, uh, second waver. She has this idea, which she calls it a male protection racket, So this is sort of early feminist theorizing about what, what we now call rape culture. And, Brownmiller talks about how we have basically there's a, there's a protection racket where the legitimate fear of experiencing sexual violence or rape puts us in a culture where women actually depend on other men to protect them from the violence of other men. And then this is just a classic protection racket, right. Just as when the mob comes in and, you know, like protects, you, you, you pay protection to the mob, from themselves or

Ellie: 32:34

Yeah. Yeah.

Carol: 32:35

You know, when, yeah, or like when you're on vacation, right. Some little group of kids comes to you and they're like, "Hey, like you give us some money and we'll protect your rental car for you." And like, you're protecting the car from yourselves, right. But here you go, here's some money, right. So that's a protection racket, right. And Brownmiller says that, functionally, women live in a live in a similar sort of, sort of circumstance, where, uh, women need the protection of men from other men. So that's another reason why women have, again, have to go along with the what's expected of them, right. Even just the fact that like it's exhausting to be mad at the world all the time. It's exhausting to, you know, be this sort of, you know, like to be like noticing every single instance of sexist oppression and to be sort of like constantly rejecting it and constantly forming your identity opposition to that, right. So it's, it's emotionally exhausting.

Ellie: 33:15

It's easier and more fun to just buy that mascara you saw on TikTok.

Carol: 33:19

Yeah, exactly. It's fun, right?

Ellie: 33:20

Not that I've experienced that firsthand.

Carol: 33:23

No, and that's just it. I think capitalism is really good at making money off of all of this as well, right? So it's like, there's the social acceptance of feeling like you're doing femininity well. So if you're a woman who, who can for at least a short period, cuz again, let's be real like feminine beauty standards are incredibly ageist and racist and all these things, right? So it's, there are many women who actually can't approximate these, these ideals, but for a woman who can there's actual social power in being able to do that, right. If you are young and beautiful, that is social power and feminists are seen as sort of enemies of that, right? So they're seen as enemies of glamor. So again, so there are, there are all these reasons that women have to act as a patriarchal society says that they should, but that when you do that, then you're not bucking the system. You're not changing the, the bird cage. So you're improving your individual conditions in your bird cage, but the bird cage is still gonna be there and it's gonna get worse for you and other women. You know, a collective action problem, right, is one where, you know, you can't have a strike if people are willing to cross the picket line. You need like, you know, you need solidarity in order to sort of fight these bigger social problems. But the problem with solidarity in a feminist context is that women don't have very many things in common with, with other women across race lines, across class lines, across geographic lines, across ethnic lines, across religious lines. Most other oppressed groups have a kind of solidarity based in a kind of shared experience. So you get racial solidarity based in a shared racial experience or you get class solidarity based in a shared class experience, right. You know, the proletariat can band together to fight the bourgeoisie precisely because there's a similarity in their experiences. Women don't have that. And so it makes resistance a lot more difficult and a lot more complicated, right. And it makes going along with the status quo a lot more rational or, or at least a lot more reasonable. It makes it make more sense for an individual.

David: 35:08

I mean, I'm now thinking about all these different categories along race and class, and, uh, whether there is a shared experience, but in connection to gender specifically, one of the things that I really like about your book is that it gives us all these concepts for thinking, not just about feminist theory, but for interpreting the world that we have in front of us for learning to spot these contradictions for maybe learning how to zoom in on those wires, that otherwise would be invisible to perception. To learn to identify those social dynamics that are rooted in something like the panopticon where we are observing ourselves rather than being observed by other people. And so I now wanna get your take on the present moment, on the world as we have it at this moment.

Ellie: 35:52

Because this, the timing of this episode is not random, folks. Like this has been a, this has been a summer of a lot going on.

David: 35:59

It's been a summer of wires, a summer of policing.

Ellie: 36:03

That's a much better, better way of putting it. David.

David: 36:05

Yeah. So let me just put it in like a concise form and in the form of an actual question, cuz so far I've just rambled. Given what you have said so far about gender based oppression and about internalization and about these metaphors. How do you see the status of feminism today? And I'm here thinking, especially in light of something like the Johnny Depp Amber Heard trial, that Ellie and I talked about a few minutes ago. So what's, what's your take of where feminism is at today?

Carol: 36:36

I have to say, I think I'm a lot less optimistic than I was a year ago. You know, like the Me Too movement happened and Amber Heard was one of the sort of early voices of that movement. And I think it was this moment of collective optimism amongst feminists that I think I hadn't seen in quite some time. It's actually the context in which I signed the book contract for this book.

Ellie: 36:53

Yeah.

Carol: 36:54

And, um, things have taken a turn. I have to confess. I didn't, I, I intentionally didn't let myself get sucked down too many rabbit holes because it was just so dark. So I think what I'm gonna say here is pretty sort of, intentionally vague because I just couldn't let myself get sucked into the internet cesspit of what was happening to Amber Heard. I guess I, I will say this, I think feminists are very used to backlash, right. And I think that we're very used to understanding social progress is a two steps forward, one step back kind of thing. In some ways I still do hold onto a little bit of optimism. I do see the progress that feminists have made and the concrete results that that has made for women's lives in this country and across the world. Women have more freedoms, more liberties than ever before historically. And that's still true, but we are, we're starting to see some back, backsliding. And I think that when, when you look at something like the Heard and Depp trial, what you see is it's hard to not see it as a sort of vengeance. All the people who were maybe made to feel uncomfortable by the Me Too movement, right, by the thought that, you know, women could now accuse men of something and have that actually count for something. It feels like the way the public reacted to the Heard Depp trial was in some ways colored by this sense that too many people thought that the Me Too movement had gone too far.

Ellie: 38:03

Totally.

Carol: 38:05

I dunno. It makes me scared for what this precedent is going to do for women who now want to launch accusations of domestic violence or these sorts of things, right. Because from the very little I've read, basically, um, a lot of this really was sort of like a textbook domestic abuse case where, you know, you know, you have an older, more powerful perpetrator and a young, younger, vulnerable woman. Again, so she's not what, you know, what we sometimes call a perfect victim, right. She had character flaws as well cuz like, you know, we're all human and I think that the internet did a lot with those character flaws and with those, you know, those missteps.

Ellie: 38:34

Oh yeah..

Carol: 38:34

I think there is this sort of concerning them among, like for example, many feminist lawyers that I know, that this, this actually sets a very dangerous precedent for women's ability to make the claim that they have experienced this, this kind of abuse or injustice.

Ellie: 38:48

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Carol: 38:48

Right. Because what we had was an incredibly powerful man taking on an admittedly also very powerful woman, right? She's white, she's incredibly wealthy, but he clearly had deeper pockets and he had deeper resources and he had a jury trial. He had a jury that wasn't sequestered. And so basically he had a jury that had access to all of the internet cesspit that was going during the trial. And so of course that's gonna affect their judgements. So legal experts are sort of concerned about, you know, what this means for domestic violence cases going forward. Because again, I think a lot of women don't report their abuse because they, they think with good reason that they won't receive a fair trial. And th, this I think is all the evidence they need, right. That, that, that's actually true.

David: 39:28

And, and I think this goes well beyond not having a fair trial. And it goes back to that earlier discussion that we had about penalization, because what's very clear from Heard trial is that her career is over. It's not just that the trial went south. I cannot see anywhere where she can go, where she's not gonna be constantly persecuted by other social agents for being that woman who dared. Um, and I think that really that, as you said, that sets a, a really scary, genuinely terrifying precedent.

Carol: 39:58

Yeah, absolutely. And it's true that her, her career is over, but you know, like she's always gonna have food on the table, right? This is, this is a woman who started off with an incredible amount of privilege. So my concern as an intersectional feminist is always to go, what does this mean for women who have a hell of a lot less privilege than Amber. So who aren't just worried about, you know, whether or not they get to live the career of their dreams, but like whether or not they get to keep custody of their children or whether they're able to put food on their table or whether they're able to escape someone who very likely might kill them. I think that these, these flashy cases that involve a lot of privilege, um, in some ways they're easy cases because, you know, it's just one issue of domestic violence, right. Whereas in the messier real world, you know, domestic violence is often also mixed up with racism, with systemic racism, with classism and with these other forms of oppression that make, the situation even worse for the victims.

Ellie: 40:46

Yeah. And thinking about that messy or real world, obviously I'm also thinking about the Dobbs decision that happened this summer and wondering how that figures into the discussion for you. You mentioned earlier feeling like, you know, feminists are, we're obviously used to backlash and there's kind of a two steps forward, one step back mentality. But I feel like with Dobbs, it's two steps forward, two steps back, or maybe even three steps back. And so I'm wondering how, or whether Dobbs changes the landscape of feminist theory and practice now and what you might think that we can anticipate in the near future.

Carol: 41:25

Yes, and I don't think we're talking two, two steps back. I think we're talking 10 or a hundred steps back. This is huge. Think that, I think we're all still reeling from the prospect of what this is gonna mean for the rights that we had, we had taken for granted, we, we sort of thought that, women's basic right to bodily autonomy was, was one we could count on, right. I didn't even really talk much about reproductive justice in the book, for example. Because when you're writing a book like this, you like, you have to sort of like make judgment calls about like what seems timely. And again, because I was writing it kind of in a Me Too context, right. A chapter on sexual violence really made, seemed like it made sense, right. But a chapter on reproductive justice just didn't make the cut because I was guilty, I think like many other feminists, of feeling like, okay, this one's safe.

Ellie: 42:02

Oh, I can totally relate to that. Yeah. There's not a lot of contemporary feminist theory on the, the ethics of abortion, cuz I think we had this impression like, oh, that was taken care of by people, you know, 30 to 50 years ago.

Carol: 42:13

That's right. I think that in some ways the feminist, at least the academic feminist discussions of abortion had, had the luxury of moving to sort of the talk, you know, so we got to a space where we're not just talking about bodily autonomy. We're talking about reproductive justice and understanding the connection between like access to abortion, but also understanding that in a history of forced sterilization, right. And, and the racial elements of that. So I think feminist discussions had really sort of moved to a much, a much different place. And now we're realizing, you know, we have to go back to the basic arguments about, you know, women having control over their bodies, a philosophical concept that I didn't discuss in the book. I know maybe this will be for one down the road is one known as androcentrism, right? So, androcentrism, the idea that what it is to be human is fundamentally male. So we see this even just in the basic example of like, you know, who does the word mankind refer to? Refers to all humans, regardless of their sex or gender. But womankind only ever means women. So Beauvoir has this line where she says, I'm gonna bastardize the translation, cuz I always do. she says something about how man is always the positive and the neutral women is only ever the negative.

Ellie: 43:14

I'm a Beauvoir scholar. That sounded good.

Carol: 43:17

Thanks. It was off the top of my head too. Thank you. Um, but she's, she's, she's pointing or androcentrism here, right? The idea that you know, what it is to be human is to be male. You, you could see it even popping up in a case like Dobbs where I think that the legal system was not set up with the assumption that what it is to be human is to be the kind of being whose body is used in this way for the creation of the next generation of human beings, right. And so that means, I think in some ways that the legal system from the beginning was never set up to really be able to, to handle the case of abortion or the, the issue of abortion. And this is why, when you look at the legal arguments for abortion, they're actually kind of weird. Like it's one of those things I sometimes in my, in my intro ethics classes where we talk about here are the, the moral arguments that have to do with abortion. And we compare them to what the legal arguments were. I'm not a legal philosopher, but basically Planned Parenthood v Casey, Roe v Wade, they all depended on the idea of privacy. So, privacy was the central right. That, that was appealed to in giving women the right to abortion. And when you think about that philosophically, that's weird. That's not actually what, you know, what, what gives women the right to control their bodies? It's like, it's not a privacy right. It's something, and it's not a property right either. It's not that women own their bodies and therefore we can kick the fetuses off our lawn, right. But, right. But like the fun here is that like the legal system really doesn't, doesn't have the proper tools to think through this. Because from the beginning, the legal, the legal system never really fundamentally conceptualized human beings as ending up in this situation, we shouldn't be surprised when we had end up with these weird legal arguments. Again, I like to joke that, um, the difference between being a philosopher and a lawyer is that if you're a philosopher and that you realize that your, that your argument is using controversial or problematic premises, you can start over. Now you can shape the etch sketch, go back and just come up with a new argument from new foundations, right. And we see that. We see these sort of like paradigm shifts in philosophy, and it's really fun to see that happening, right. That doesn't happen in law. In law, you're always, you're always bound by precedent. And that means that precedents, never really think that the precedents were one where women weren't really people. Right? So of course, now we get this point where, um, women and people with uteruses were not like, from the beginning, weren't considered to be fully human. And so of course, now we have a legal system that doesn't quite know what to do with this situation.

David: 45:26

And this really changes I think what we think feminist organizing and the feminist struggle will have to look like moving forward. And it reminds me of a point that you make in your book about what you call girl power feminism. And it, it, it seems like in light of the Depp and Heard trial and especially in the wake of Dobbs, that kind of feminism just seems so clearly out of place. And so I, I want you to talk to us a little bit more about what you mean by girl power feminism, why you find it problematic and maybe give us a couple of examples to concretize it.

Carol: 46:05

So, yeah, so I spent a lot of time in the, the early part of the book talking a lot of about misconceptions of feminism, because I think. As someone who's been teaching this stuff for more than 20 years, you see a lot of the same misconceptions. And one, I was seeing an awful lot was this idea that, and this is actually, this is a misconception of, uh, feminism held by people who themselves considered themselves to be feminist. So this wasn't a kind of, or at least in some cases, right. And it was basically the thought was, it was just these, you know, "you go girl" finalities, right. It's a feminism that's focused on individual success. So Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In was girl power feminism, right. And you have like corporate women's leadership events are

Ellie: 46:43

Girlboss.

Carol: 46:43

girl power feminism, right. You know? Yeah. Like anytime capitalism gets involved in feminism, it's probably girl power feminism. Cause marketing execs had figured out, right, that this language of empowerment and inclusivity could be mobilized to make women buy more shit we don't need. And so like suddenly you're a feminist, if you get body wash and you have a slightly more diverse conception of beauty, but it's still, you know, it's not really that diverse and it's, you know, still focusing far too much on objectification, right. So girl power feminism basically takes this idea that, you know, we tell little girls that they can do anything. But we don't actually want a world in which women are insisting on doing what they want, because that's just a pain in the ass. I dunno if you remember that statue on Wall Street that they put up, um, actually right at the head of the Me Too movement, it was, you know, so there's the bull on wall street,

David: 47:26

Yes, with the bull, yes. Uh, and a young girl.

Carol: 47:29

Yes, yeah. Her name was Fearless Girl and right she's

Ellie: 47:32

Yep, yep.

Carol: 47:32

Yeah. She's this fearless little white girl with these cute little pigtails. She's got her hands on her hips and she's like staring down the bull and like everyone freaked out. We loved it. I loved it. We all loved it. Um, right, because it's like, but yeah, Fearless Girl is great. Right? Cause we love feisty little girls, right. We don't like feisty women. They're strident, obnoxious, bitches, right. So feisty girls are one thing because they actually don't have any power.

Ellie: 47:53

Yep, yep.

Carol: 47:54

So we live in a world that likes to tell girls that they can do anything, but we don't live in a world where we actually want women to do that. And so that, that's girl power feminism in a nutshell, right. This idea that, um, the goal of feminism is to let women do whatever they want, just make their own choices, right? Sometimes you, I think there was a Sex in The City episode about this, right? Where, um, the thought was feminism is just about defending women's right to do whatever they want. And that is not what feminism is about, right. Feminism is about the bird cage, is about pointing out these, these big social structures, right. And so if what a woman chooses to do is to actively oppress other women, that's not feminist, right. If what a woman chooses to do is to actively participate in a social structure that has the result of oppressing other women. You know, again, like we don't wanna say that's necessarily feminist, right? So this, I think Ellie goes to your earlier characterization of me not wanting to judge women. I do wanna judge women. I just, I think. I wanna also be, I wanna be willing to judge myself. I think we should all hold ourselves, we should all be willing to be under scrutiny. And we should be judging people in, in against the larger context of actually looking at the choices and the option sets that women have and these sorts of things, right. But girl power feminism lets us avoid all of this, right. It allows us to avoid sort of self reflection, asking ourselves, like, what am I doing to go along with a patriarchal status quo? We don't have to do that under girl power. But, but I think it's a very popular conception of feminism precisely because it doesn't actually pose a threat to the status quo.

Ellie: 49:15

Yeah, that was one of the most powerful parts of your book for me. Was that your analysis of the Wall Street girl. Oh, so, so good. Anyway.

Carol: 49:22

Thank you. Yeah, no, it's, it's rough stuff. So again, like back to the point about there being backlashes, right? So girl power feminism kind of like popped up, like the Spice Girls were suddenly a thing and you know, like the celebrities were calling themselves feminists. And in some ways as a feminist, I'm like, yay, good. Like suddenly we're not just, you know, like, you know, a dirty word, but at the same time, the version of feminism that got so much uptake was for the most part, a pretty watered down and non-threatening version of feminism. So I think that given that the kind of feminism that I want to encourage us to take on is a much more radical form of feminism, or that really does look at the power structures that affect people's lives, not just rich white women's lives. Right, girl power feminism is very good at making that world better for rich white women.

David: 50:05

Well, and is there a more clear symbolic representation of that than the fact that it's in the middle of Wall Street?

Ellie: 50:10

Yeah.

Carol: 50:10

Exactly.

David: 50:11

It was welcomed by Wall Street. And in fact, it was interpreted by some people as a symbol of women's struggle to climb the corporate ladder and become those bosses that have a lot of people working under them.

Ellie: 50:25

Exactly, exactly. Obviously I'm a, I'm a fangirl. Hopefully not in the girl. No fanwoman. say I'm a fanwoman of your work, Carol. Um, we're so grateful for you coming on and sharing your wisdom with us today. This has been a really fascinating interview and we recommend to our listeners, if you haven't checked out Think Like a Feminist yet, please do so.

David: 50:47

Buy it. Read it. Give it to your friends. Make them read it.

Carol: 50:51

Book club it. Track me down and I'll Zoom into your book club.

Ellie: 50:55

Oh, it, it would make a really good book club book. Thanks for being on.

Carol: 50:59

Thank you so much for having me.

David: 51:02

Thank you.

Carol: 51:07

Thanks a lot. Bye.

David: 51:20

Ciao. If you're enjoying Overthink, please consider supporting the podcast by joining our Patreon. We are an independent, self-supporting podcast. And as a subscriber, you can help us cover our key production costs, gain access to our exclusive digital library of bonus content and more.

Ellie: 51:35

When Carol was talking about girl power feminism, I was reminded of my now regrettable involvement in a classic girl power feminist organization, which is called The Wing.

David: 51:46

The wing, w-i-n-g?

Ellie: 51:48

Yeah. I don't know if listeners remember this or have heard of it, but it was like basically an exclusive club for ambitious, smart women. It was like a girlboss greenhouse.

David: 52:02

What?

Ellie: 52:02

And yeah, and they had like super millennial gorgeous interiors with color coded bookshelves and really beautiful decor and really tasty food at the cafe. And I was like a scrappy visiting assistant professors slash adjunct, really wanting to make it, not knowing how to make it and having to consider leaving academia because I didn't have a tenure track job. And so I was like, you know what? I should join The Wing because there are a lot of people with major connections there.

David: 52:34

I need to network.

Ellie: 52:36

I don't, no, that's exactly what happened. I was like, I need to network. And so they had some program that was like a scholarship program for people who are actually doing feminist work and, or activist organizing work, um, in related areas.

David: 52:50

They're like, we'll pay some actual feminists so that we can have some cred to this self-described feminist organization.

Ellie: 52:57

It was like this exclusive club that you had to pay I don't know, probably like a couple thousand years to join. It was a coworking space. I sh, I should say that I don't think it marketed itself as a club. It marketed itself as a coworking space.

David: 53:06

Okay. So it's like a feminist WeWork.

Ellie: 53:09

Exactly, exactly. My point is that even I went through a phase of kind of unreflectively wanting to be in this girlboss club as like a young, thin, privileged white girl. But who's also, hopefully not reproducing the worst of what that, that kind of identity means because I have commitments to intersectional feminism. Anyway, I felt called out by this.

David: 53:36

This all now suddenly feels like a, like a, like a forced confession on your part, like a really awkward extrication of your sins.

Ellie: 53:44

I feel like I've wanted to talk about this experience because I, it happened right before the pandemic. And then during the pandemic, The Wing went under because of the white girl Lean In feminism that was touted by its founder. It came out that their employees of color, despite a forward face of diversity were actually really exploited behind the scenes. There was tons of racism in the organization. Um, they were underpaid, like women of color were underpaid, um, who worked for them, et cetera. So anyway, The Wing is like this symbol of girlpower feminism that now has been taken down.

David: 54:17

I mean, I do see girl power feminism all over the place. I see it in the, in media. I see it in movies. I see it in the radio. I see it also among a certain young demographic of millennial women, less so, uh, gen Z, although I'm sure it's also still there in some segments of that generation.

Ellie: 54:37

Probably some segments, yeah. But it's less of a thing now.

David: 54:39

Yeah, some segments, but I think it, there was this moment where around the early two thousands, maybe mid two thousands, where the idea was that feminist liberation looks like getting a high powered job and wearing a pencil skirt and being like, "Yes, girl, you better work."

Ellie: 54:55

Yeah, yeah.

David: 54:57

And what I'm walking away from this interview with is a sense of heaviness about

Ellie: 55:05

Totally.

David: 55:05

the future if we expect girl power bosses to save us and to save the feminist, uh, yeah, girl bosses, to save us because I, I do think, especially in the face of structural attacks on women's rights and liberties, like with the Dobbs decision, that kind of quote unquote, "feminist organizing" is futile. You know, I'm, I'm not, I'm not really sure how you respond to something like Dobbs or to, uh, the cultural changes that we've seen with the Dobb Heard trial, which has

Ellie: 55:36

Depp Heard trial, not Dobb

David: 55:39

Oh my God.

Ellie: 55:39

Heard trial.

David: 55:40

Uh, the, the Depp Heard trial, which has been just a shitshow. And so it just left me feeling heavy, I guess I have to say.

Ellie: 55:46

Yeah, no, I feel that too, because I think I can tell you what The Wing would've done in the wake of Dobbs if it still existed. It would have had an event where there would be a lot of handwringing over the contemporary status of the feminist movement. And there probably would've been some form of donation drive where the women who belong to The Wing, most of whom, like I said, are very wealthy, would be able to donate and then feel better about themselves. But places like The Wing, which I think are emblematic of girl power feminism are ultimately private spaces that encourage a few women to get a leg up without changing the structures at work, right? The Wing was literally renting out exclusive spaces and making them available to a certain class of women. And that's never gonna actually help the society at large, right. It, it's physical space as, as like a real estate space as almost like a real estate organization is I, I think the perfect expression of the privatization of public problems that girl power feminism, without realizing it, ends up reproducing. And you mentioned David, just feeling down, right, in this current climate, say more about that.

David: 57:00

It's hard because I'm in the moment. I mean, we're going through it. And so we don't have enough distance, I think, to really, um, parse our emotions or tease them out and identify and name them as well as maybe I would want to, but I'm here reminded of Carol's comments about exhaustion in the context of a feminist movement. The fact that as a feminist, there are so many wires that you begin seeing and you begin feeling that it's impossible to be on edge at all times, right. And if you do, you also start playing into that stereotype of the angry feminist who flies off into a rage because your pants don't have pockets, right. And so at some point, the question of self care kicks in, but I don't have the horizon of self-care at the moment. Um, right now I have to confess that I am feeling pessimistic and I want as, as a lot of people say, let this moment radicalize you rather than tear you down. But if I'm being truly honest, I think the Dobbs decision put me in a dark place, more so than in a, in a place filled with radical potential and possibility. And, and it's a sad thing to, to acknowledge, but it's true that that's how I've been feeling.

Ellie: 58:13

Yeah, I feel that too. And I'm also really struck by Carol's comments about the collective action problem that feminism faces. I think we have a long, upward facing battle. To undertake with regard to that collective action problem. Sorry to leave you all in a bummer note, but may, may this catalyze rather than bring us down, because I think what she said had a lot of really, really amazing and rich insights.

David: 58:38

And definitely read her book. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Ellie: 58:52

You can find us at overthinkpodcast.com, where you can email us with questions, feedback, or even request for life advice. You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_pod. We wanna thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, as well as our production assistant Sunny Jeong-Eimer. Samuel PK Smith for the original music and Trevor Ames for our logo. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.