As always, the last week of the month is reserved for High Noon: After Dark with Emily Jashinsky. On the docket this month were some pieces and topics from writers such as Robert Pondiscio in Commentary and Richard Hanania, including the reasons why the current cross-ideological backlash has a long way to go in terms of dislodging or deterring the woke revolution, and what we can expect from the feminization of both the halls of power and the public discourse. Jashinsky and Stepman also discussed the current bleakness of the American school system, which can’t pass on anything of uncritical substance because the society itself finds itself in the grips of a paralysis of meaning.
High Noon is an intellectual download featuring conversations that make possible a free society. The podcast features interesting thinkers from all parts of the political spectrum to discuss the most controversial subjects of the day in a way that hopes to advance our common American future. Hosted by Inez Stepman of Independent Women’s Forum.
TRANSCRIPT
Inez Stepman:
Welcome to High Noon, where we discuss controversial subjects with interesting people. And as always, at the last week of every month, we have Emily Jashinsky back on the program to do a docket of issues. Emily is the culture editor over at The Federalist. She is often on Rising on Book TV these days, on CSPAN doing interviews there. She also works for YAF, training up the next generation of conservative, intrepid reporters to go out and find the stories that the corporate media will not cover. And she is an all-around culture, pop culture wiz and general commentator, whose voice is very valuable, even though she is a baby, baby millennial, and she doesn’t know anything because she’s too young.
Emily Jashinsky:
Inez, don’t forget that I’m a senior fellow here at IWF.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, and she is a senior fellow. Emily and I have worked together in so many iterations that I’ve literally forgotten all the ways in which we’re connected. But yes, Emily is a senior fellow here with Independent Women’s Forum, which is a sponsor of our podcast and is my employer, so we are very grateful to have Emily here with us, and we have a docket of issues as we always do. But this time I want to start with a piece from a previous podcast guest, Robert Pondiscio, over at Commentary. In fact, it is the cover story of Commentary this month. And it’s a piece about education, but it’s a piece about so much more than that. It’s called the “Unbearable Bleakness of American Schooling: How Contemporary Education Fetishes the Bad and the Broken in American Life.”
And it goes into, of course, the parent rebellions we’ve been seeing, Emily, but it delves into something much deeper than that, which is we seem as a society at a loss to be able to pass on anything that is positive or can be grabbed onto to our children through the education system, in part because we’ve lost the ability to be uncritically patriotic, which is the purpose, actually as Pondiscio points out, is the original purpose of American public schooling as a whole is to train people how to live, not just in a Republic, but in this American Republic, and to understand about our constitutional system and the underlying principles of this country and of the Declaration of Independence.
Now that we’ve abandoned that goal, it seems that we don’t have anything uncritical to pass on to our kids, and Pondiscio points out that, even though he grew up in an unstable world — he’s quite a bit older — he grew up in an unstable world as well, but he never had this sense that everything was falling apart or that he didn’t have anything to grab onto or to be proud of. He thinks that’s a large part of what we’re seeing as an increasing mental health crisis among people who are younger. I don’t know which part of that you want to dig into, but I know that you’ve thought a lot about why young people, let’s say, from your baby millennial age and then especially younger than you into Gen Z, why they seem so much more fragile in a real way.
I’m tempted sometimes to think of them as fake fragile, so frustrating to have a conversation with somebody who says that your words are violence and seemingly has so little, at least physically, to confront, but I do believe a lot of that fragility is genuine, and Robert believes it too. And it’s part of what he wrote about in this piece. What do you think about where this is going in terms of how mentally fragile we are going to be, and how are we going to be able to rebuild any uncritical basis to grab onto that we could actually teach in a public education system?
Emily Jashinsky:
Well, I think the essay and your supplement to it and your thoughts on it hit on a really critical point, which is that, at a certain point, you can’t blame children for being brought up in a world that is utterly failing them. They are children. It is our country’s job and our communities’ jobs to shape them and teach them and mold them. And of course, parents have been failing at that in increasing numbers for a while. And you can’t just expect to outsource that to public schools, and everything is going to be all right, because clearly that’s not the case. It makes me think of all of the young people who rioted in 2020. And when I saw that happening, it’s like, yeah, there’s some opportunism here. In fact, a lot of it; people are going to get free Gucci by busting into Rodeo Drive or City Center here in Washington, D.C.
But at the same time, they have been told by every institution through the duration of their lives that every institution is systemically racist. That every interaction, if you read Kendi or DiAngelo or your teachers assign it, or if your teachers have their curriculum based on Kendi and DiAngelo and the thinkers that preceded them, of which there were many of and were equally radical, you’re told that every interaction with a white person includes racism. You’re told that all of the people around you, the people who run our societies are irredeemably racist and aren’t trying to overcome their natural racist prejudices. And that applies to pretty much every form of bigotry which you can substitute this in. And so there’s a very real, there’s a very real sense of injustice.
And the only other thing I’ll say, because I think you just explained very well that, there’s almost a national conservative element to this, which is if we are to have public schools — and the essay hits on this really well — the point of the public schools is to train good citizens, and good citizens, we have decided, should have basic mathematical skills, basic reading comprehension skills, they should be able to write, they should be literate. They should be literate in history to a certain extent, et cetera, et cetera. But shouldn’t an essential part of that be of a good citizen, be someone who is going to serve the nation well, and to build the nation into a better community? And you can’t do that if you think the nation is irredeemable. And so without that, you have a problem.
And the last thing that I’ll say is I’ve given a few talks to young people in the last month or so, and generally work with college students a good deal. And the one time I see them all nodding, and I’m not even just talking about conservative student groups, it’s when I’ve found that I mention two words that make up the phrase “moral clarity.” And I started dropping that when I just realized it describes what they all tell me their problems are, or all of their questions seem to…. Nobody has ever told them that things are real and fake, that things are right and wrong. And I think as abstract as the fight over sex and gender sounds to a lot of people, it had really real, concrete consequences because people now think that we live in this totally — like children who were raised with that teaching — it’s a very postmodern world where it feels like nothing’s real because things that are real, they were told were fake.
It’s the foundation of sand versus the foundation of stone, and basically, their realities are constructed on the postmodern foundation of sand instead of stone, and so they don’t trust any of it. They don’t understand any of it. And again, I think this is a consequence of allowing postmodernism to seep into every aspect of education. And we underestimated the extent to which these identity battles, where you’re expanding the definition of racism, sexism, and gender and sex are going to really, really, really start having not abstract but real consequences.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. When you said that about moral clarity, it really struck me that that used to be America’s strong suit. To the point where we were mocked by Europeans, for example, for being too black and white, too simplistically moral in our thinking. But I also think it’s more of a disaster for us than elsewhere. I think it’s one of the reasons that I think our decline will be explosive versus European decline, which you can say has been slow and decrepit and in some ways stable. I think this is part of the reality that America is quite different, that we don’t have a lot of the older kinds of stones, I guess in your analogy to fall back on. This isn’t an ethnic, it’s not an ethnostate, even in its core it’s on ethnostate the way that France or Germany is in its core, even though both of those societies accept immigrants, there’s still this people aspect to it; Israel is the same way.
There’s a peoplehood aspect to it, and there’s this idea that they all share some form of common, not just civilization, but ancestry, which is by the way why France can have five different regimes and it’s still identifiably France. If the U.S. has a regime change, it’s not clear to me that it’s identifiably the U.S. because we had this incredibly strong both civic religion and this cultural character that went along with a lot of moral clarity that was very American. Something I’ve always loved about this country. But I think you’re right. I think that is gone, largely, especially for people who were born in the last 20 years, or raised in the last 20 years. And so my first reaction when I read this piece from Robert, other than to say that I think it’s really important and everyone should read it was actually so…. Palo Alto was at the time — when I was growing up there — was a formally labeled CUC suicide cluster.
There were an inordinate number of suicides in this very wealthy, very privileged, very academically successful and financially successful enclave. A super zip, it’s a Charles Murray super zip. And yet there was this incredibly high suicide rate among young people. And beyond the suicide, this was the root of my contempt for a certain kind of therapeutic language, certain therapeutic culture, because everybody had a therapist. All my friends, almost all of them, they all had therapists, all their parents had therapists. Everybody was constantly worried about their mental health and trying to practice “self-care,” all that stuff was very much a part of the culture. And yet they have this very high suicide rate, and the way they’ve always explained it — and there’s been some pieces in The Atlantic about it and so on — I try to figure out why it is that this very successful, privileged, very liberal community, essentially, doesn’t offer any, seemingly, any reasons to live to a substantial number or very high number, relatively speaking, of its young members. And the answers have predictably been things like, well, the academic pressure is extremely high, which is true. It is very high and there are real pressures there. And for a while, I kind of accepted that explanation, and what they’ve done is put into place a bunch of feel-good speeches. Like it’s okay if you don’t get into Harvard, life isn’t over, which I think have had basically no impact on suicide rate. But the more I think about it, the more I think that’s not a really good explanation.
And when I read this piece, I realized the whole country is Palo Alto now, in the sense that there’s not a high level of religious observance in the way that there was in the past. I believe we just slipped under 50% for the first time, under 50% of Americans saying they have no doubt about the existence of God. Also very little church community there; it’s a forbidden subject. I can’t remember anyone ever bringing up church or religion or very, very few people — to the extent that, when I first got to college, it was the first time I’d seen Catholics putting the ash on their forehead for Ash Wednesday. And I thought it was like a pledge for a sorority because I couldn’t figure out why everybody had ash on their heads.
Emily Jashinsky:
You were so close.
Inez Stepman:
Well, in a sense, I guess it is, anyway, but yeah, I had never encountered it because religion is notably absent, people have small families. There’s a high rate of divorce, which is actually one of the interesting things because, when I was reading Coming Apart by Charles Murray, I was like, actually the place I grew up with is a super zip, but there is a really high level of divorce there. Again, most of my friends had divorced parents. There’s not a lot to grab onto in terms of meaning, and so that academic competition, that getting on the road to becoming a member of what is now a global elite, that’s the only thing that anyone can agree on that has any merit and meaning. And I think that’s why people are so stressed out about it. There’s nothing to fall back on. Any discussion about being proud of your moral character, for example, that’s a complicated subject because where does morality derive from, and do you judge people who have lower moral character? And where does that come from anyway? All these postmodern issues that you bring up. These were very much the environment of Palo Alto. And in the end, the only thing kids had to grab onto was this rat race to the elite, and when people failed at that or didn’t succeed to the level that they expected, I think that’s why they reacted that way. There really wasn’t much else in that environment to grab onto, to have a meaningful life. And that’s really what I thought about when I read this piece, because I was like, what he’s describing is the environment I grew up in, except now it’s not limited to a super zip with hyper-liberal politics. It really has spread to most of the country, even though I know there are pockets here or there that are still in resistance mode against this, but it is that Houellebecq-ian critique of the modern West, saying essentially there’s no core here and either we’re going to lose hope and fade out and not be able to give even a reason to continue living to our kids, or a stronger more virile society will supplant us. That was the Houellebecq-ian point. I don’t know if it’s quite that stark or dire, but it certainly doesn’t seem good.
Emily Jashinsky:
I think it is that stark and it is that dire because we’re really — I think that is the best way to describe it. We are all Palo Alto now because there’s something…. We forget that our entire country is basically wealthier than the entire — like an individual in America on average is significantly wealthier than the average global citizen as they say. But even individual states are wealthier than Great Britain. Like almost all of them, I think except for Mississippi, and maybe even that’s changed now.
And so we just live, even the middle class, even the working class, lives with a level of material comfort that every previous generation would describe as wealth; even the leisure time that we have, it’s wealthy and that’s where it’s wealthy relative to all of society and imagine living in Palo Alto without the bank account of somebody who lives in Palo Alto. Imagine, it’s bleak, but I think there’s something really interesting about the level of material comfort and the level of emotional satisfaction and just life satisfaction in general. And that’s where … I think you want to touch on this in another part of the conversation and maybe this is segue, I’m not the host, you’re the host. So it’s your rules and that —
Inez Stepman:
You are co-host on these.
Emily Jashinsky:
But was going to say — well, you had this point before we started recording about the Caldwell thesis about liberalism, and Elizabeth Bruenig wrote a piece recently too, about how children aren’t welcome in liberalism, or it was phrased something to that extent. And she’s basically saying, well, if the American project is based on this enlightenment concept of individual freedom, is community possible? Is family possible? Are we just now reaping the rotten fruit that lasted for a long time and was great and ripe for a couple of 100 years, but inevitably rotted when it comes to liberalism, that the enlightenment concept of liberalism is what enabled postmodernism to blossom, basically. And I still have to think through that more, because I think you can have one without the other, even if it’s true that one did lead to the other.
I think they’re not mutually entangled necessarily, but I think that’s what you’re getting at, ultimately, is the American project — is this baked into it? Is postmodernism the inevitable outcome of a project based on a country that is based on the enlightenment and was the torchbearer of enlightenment ideas about government and social organization. And I think the answer is yes, but I don’t know if that means that we can recover because it’s like the cheesiest Reagan quote ever, but it’s the one that actually is very real and always seemed abstract to me, but the one about freedom never being more than a generation from extinction.
I think it’s interesting because, to me, it’s the younger millennials and the older zoomers, the older Gen Z. Those are the ones that are really in the gender’s non-binary, blah, blah, blah camp. Maybe it’s just all of millennials. And then the zoomers under that are listening to heterodox podcasts and are desperately looking for something to cling to because it hit them so acutely that they’re aware of what they, that they need something better. And they’re the ones, they’re reading Jordan Peterson and they’re doing all of that stuff because, again, they’re acutely aware of it. But if freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction, we are in some trouble.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. We’ve got two generations down. I don’t know what I think about — I’ve always resisted this conclusion that where we are is an inevitable consequence of the enlightenment, in part because I never saw America as a purely-enlightenment project. I’m not at all in the camp and I think it’s actually quite historically dishonest of certain postliberal-right folks to try to strip Locke out of the founding. The more honest among them, people like Adrian Vermeule are quite upfront about the fact that they just want to reject the American system. I don’t think you can strip the enlightenment or Locke out of it, out of this project, but it’s equally true that it wasn’t the only influence. And I think this is where we get into trouble, right? When we have this — and it really arose post ’60s, this pure and more extreme version of liberalism than certainly would ever occur to the founders of this country, who thought that it was perfectly legitimate to have Lockean liberalism coexist with state laws, for example, banning homosexuality. And I’m just giving that extreme example because I want to make it clear, they believed the states could absolutely regulate morality. They absolutely, at that time, they believe the states could have established religions that only changed later on when there was more competition as to which religion would be established. But even long beyond that, America always had a role for the church. It just had a different role for it. And a more, I think a wiser role for it. Honestly, when I look at the influence of, for example, in Roman Catholic countries, in Europe, the influence of the church, it’s not what the folks here, I think who imagine that would be better usually is.
I think Jefferson was right: when the church really intertwines itself with the state, it becomes just as corrupt as anything else in politics. What I see in these countries is more that than the latter. And I don’t think you need an established church to have a public morality, but the idea that America is this wrong…. Yeah. America is this project that is pure liberalism with no limitations. And I think one of the consistent errors the right has made since the 1960s has been to assume that the vessel of liberalism has no content, that it’s only the neutral rules of the road. This is the famous David French thing about the blessings of Liberty and Drag Queen Story Hour, that the rules of the road are enough to hold together a society. I think it was always clear to our founders that wasn’t the case.
Emily Jashinsky:
I agree with that completely.
Inez Stepman:
And that you needed a normative set of principles in America, became something close to a civic religion, which for a long time was intertwined with Protestantism. But that you needed a normative set of commitments, that Robert in this piece is basically saying we don’t have any more in common — and worse than not in common, a large part of the country doesn’t have them at all. I don’t think that would’ve been a problem foreign to our founders, and I don’t think that it’s impossible to have a liberal state with normative commitments as on the part of the population. Now how to maintain those over time? Yes, it’s a difficult question, but I don’t buy this idea that it’s the inevitable evolution of liberalism, in part because it really didn’t happen until the 1960s.
We had all kinds of disagreements as a country about what those principles should be. Some of them, and including erupting into civil war, but the specific postmodern liberalism really can be dated to the ’60s in this country in terms of it having any influence whatsoever. I don’t think it’s inevitable, I think it is very odd that America has lost its moral clarity because, for a country that didn’t have an established church and for a country that never had the intertwinement between religion and the public altar, as some European countries still do, Americans sure managed to hold a lot of moral clarity all the way.
And then into the ’60s and ’70s, even though there was this growing movement, and the movement that I’m talking about, it still remained a minority until it essentially took over the institutions in this country. I don’t know. I think it’s a little hard to explain under the postmodern or the postliberal-right analysis, why it is that America made John Wayne movies in the 1950s into the 60s and even into the 70s. It’s really hard to explain why that’s the case and why that strong sense of morality that is way stronger, that moral clarity way stronger than what exists in most European countries, where they do have an established church in some of these countries.
Emily Jashinsky:
Well, you can say that critical race theory…. You can pass state laws, you could even pass a federal law — I don’t care, in this case — saying that critical race theory or basically banning what counts as, not banning it, but limiting the way that some of these actual racist ideologies are taught by just establishing that we can’t promote racism. We can teach it and say, this is what it looks like, and this is why it’s bad. And we absolutely should do that, by the way; you can do that without bringing back sodomy laws, you can, there’s an attainable balance here. I agree with that entirely. Although I also think it’s very interesting, not to get too, I don’t know, crazy — I’m on my obsessive tech fixation these days — but I do wonder if you can have the free-market system that we have in this country and in the West more broadly without also unleashing the industrial revolution and whatever the future version of the industrial revolution might look like.
I do wonder if that was inextricably tied to our system of government. And I think all of that has basically just created anti-humanism. I think postmodernism is anti-human. I think that’s why it makes people unhappy because it conditions us to live against our nature and what makes people satisfied just biologically, evolutionarily as human beings. And that’s not to say I don’t love that I have a laundry machine, a washing machine, and a dishwasher. I think that’s great. But I do think we have the cumulative effect of all of it has been to push us into an anti-human space. And I think postmodernism springs from that well, and maybe those are connected, but to fix it, you don’t have to swing full neo-monarchist or full strongman, nor do you have to swing full David French Drag Queen Story Hour.
We know what the roadmap looks like. There is a happy middle, but I do think the technological problems are foundational. And we can’t really get back to that. That’s my concern is can we get back to that, where we share enough values to reconfigure the laws and rebalance the law in society? Can we get back to a point where we share enough values to actually do that, where we believe that men are men and women are women, and where we believe that racism is X not Y, I don’t know if we can get back to that point, but I do think reconfiguring our relationship with tech would be the first place to start.
Inez Stepman:
I don’t tend to think we can go back. That’s one of the things that has changed in my thinking. I used to be much more conservative, like capital-C conservative, than I am now. In part, because I still have this restorationist hope that we’re going to reestablish certain things. And now I tend to think that the way out is through and that it’s going to look like something that we can’t predict right now, but it has crossed my mind that maybe wokeness is, you alluded to this in the beginning or answer, but that wokeness is our next great awakening, our great moment of moral clarity. In fact, the only people who seem to have any moral clarity are the people who are participating in this cultural revolution.
But one of the things that’s really both seemingly unique, at least historically, and really, really irritating is that this great awakening seems to be prosecuted by a feminist bureaucracy that has this very therapeutic self-care language to it. And here, I’m thinking about, for example, what’s happening to our neighbors in the north, in Canada, where the Ottawa police put out a tweet right before they started to violently move the protestors there out that said, well, we’ve given you a chance to be reasonable, and now we’re coming in and we’re going to be using batons for our own safety, of course, because you are unreasonable.
I’m paraphrasing, but that was the tone of this tweet, which was the ultimate application of state force. There is nothing cute or self-care-y about applying the batons to people’s heads. But it came in this clothing of well, we’re doing this for own safety because you’re unreasonable. I’m going to count to three. And by the time I count to three, you better get out of here. It had that whole feel to it. Richard Hanania, sorry. I knew I was going to mess that up. That’s why we’re laughing. Because I said it off air in the beginning. It was like, I’m definitely going to mess it up, Richard Hanania.
Emily Jashinsky:
I thought you wrote this down phonetically.
Inez Stepman:
I did. And I still messed up. Anyways, he wrote this piece on women’s tears in public discourse in which he brings up a very interesting scenario where he says some of these campus confrontations, right, where you have somebody yelling in somebody else’s face for 20 minutes about how they’re participating in racism. Usually, it’s a dean of some kind or an administrator being yelled at by a crowd or even one-on-one. And he says something really interesting, which I thought was quite true. If you’re a man yelling in another man’s face in that way, there’s only one of two outcomes, either you’re going to have to stop rather quickly or it’s going to get turned physically violent.
There’s just an inability of two men to yell at each other in that way and have it not escalate physically after a certain number of minutes. You might get away with it for a minute or two, but there’s a natural escalation of force that happens or somebody backs up and goes away. Whereas, in the female context, you continue to berate and yell, and he points out several other things about the nature of our feminized public square. To me, what I thought about when I was reading through this is it’s almost like the Title IX context or, or the #MeToo era framework that popped up in a way to try to deal with the results, the inevitable results of male nature, human nature, female nature, and the sexual revolution.
And we’ve discussed this before, where we now have a legal, busybody network to try to determine what has happened. And almost always ambiguous and gray situations in which much is left unsaid by necessity. And it seems like it’s trying to cram this back into this legalistic framework. I almost think about how we’ve made feminine traits really not admirable in society. They’re certainly not celebrated in our media or our movies or anything like that. But they’re popping up in these inappropriate contexts. Where it’s okay to unleash a very feminine rage or —
Emily Jashinsky:
Toxic femininity.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. It is, it is toxic femininity, but it’s something that seems to me in the same way as the sexual dynamics that were tried to be, or were attempted to get pushed out, because they were deemed sexist, pop back up in the college hookup context and like West Elm Caleb and all of that. And the response to that was okay, well, we need to create a[n] even more strict framework that makes it no fun for anybody. It’s almost like that, where these feminine traits are suppressed in most contexts; we definitely ask women to behave like men or encourage them to behave like men from a young age. We celebrate women who can fight and kick men in the face and be very aggressive. But then these toxic feminine traits kind of pick up or pop up in unexpected places. And that’s what I was thinking about when I read this, but I don’t know. What did you think about this piece? Because it seemed to me like the core of this idea is really, really interesting, but then parts of this seem to go a little bit further than I would take it.
Emily Jashinsky:
I didn’t like it, but I don’t know. I still don’t entirely know why — probably, obviously, because I’m a woman and I am easily offended. No, I think what he’s talking about, I think might maybe a better way to describe it — and he does talk about this — but it’s an incursion of femininity into a traditionally masculine space and it’s a space that really needs masculine virtues in order to function properly, but not to get into a chicken-or-egg type of situation, but the reason that women are in…. Here is another thing. This was one of my early red pills was like, we have only existed within one generation of having this level of men and women together in the workforce. And this was something that became clear in MeToo.
We went from our parents’ generation being the pioneers of women taking the exact same jobs of men at that level in so many different professions and spending their nine-to-fives, the majority of their weeks in close quarters with this equal standing, equal footing, that is a huge explosion of sexual power dynamics that I don’t know has ever happened on that scale in a country of like ours that was as technologically advanced as ours. The huge explosion of sexual dynamics. I think that…. What he’s talking about, I feel like, is downstream of that. And the idea that women should be in the workplace bossing men around is kind of immasculine, it’s like women aping men. I think ultimately that was my problem with the piece, is that I do agree, and I think this has been particularly — and you would know about this, Inez — I think this has been particularly egregious in education. I talk about this all the time, but when I worked for Christina Hoff Sommers, I was helping with the research for her second edition of War Against Boys, and there are a lot of really specific ways that, in order to lift girls in school and to lift their academic performance, we suppressed men’s academic performance, even just by shortening recess times and changing the way that kids were allowed to play and changing math problems to word problems and all of those things. I do think that that’s happened. And I think that it is an outgrowth of the feminist movement, but I think ultimately it comes to women trying to replicate or behave like men.
And I think that means they’ve brought feminine traits that have…. I’ve just also seen a lot of guys yell at each other at protests and stuff. It’s because they’re the type of men who protest things, but I’ve seen men yell at each other without breaking into fights. Some of it, I just thought was like a little specific and off, but I also think at the end of the day, it’s really women trying to be men that has brought some feminine traits or normalized feminine traits, and even created a reverence for feminine traits in traditionally masculine spaces.
Inez Stepman:
It’s certainly true that, as women — and Christina Hoff Sommers obviously has done amazing research on this — but as we become a more female-dominated society, the positions of prestige, wealth, and power are increasingly going to go to women because women gravitate towards some of more of these service industries. The credentialing treadmill and the fact that you now have to go through that gauntlet of getting a college degree before you can really join the halls of power, you have to be credentialed in that way, which means you had to sit, as you pointed out, you have to sit quietly and be a good academic student for 12 years and then get into a good school and then do it for another four years and then potentially even more education.
There are biases to — or advantages to — being a woman in a service economy that are obviously the opposite of, for example, we have a manufacturing-dominated economy that requires a lot of heavy labor or even if we have, some of the elite jobs that are still dominated by men are more things like programming, where you have to be totally locked in a cubicle over 12 to 14 hours a day. But on the whole, we are moving towards lot more jobs and a lot more positions of power that will be more attractive to women than to men, and there’ll be more women than men who have the credentials for those jobs. It makes sense in a certain level that, yes, our society will become more feminized as more people in power are female, but women have always had an enormous amount of, especially, for example, purchasing power.
This is the most basic of advertising maxims, is that women are doing the purchasing and it’s also a matter of what those women want. Because it seems to me that, one of the best examples of this, I think, is the change in Victoria’s Secret advertising recently, where they dropped the smoking-hot Victoria’s Secret fashion show models. It was always just basically a parade of the hottest women in the world. They dropped the Angels program, and now they have Megan Rapinoe and they have women who have accomplished this or that. And instead of that, they put them in lingerie and they put them in these ads or they’re completely trying to change their image.
Emily Jashinsky:
The valorization of the A cup by Inez Stepman, coming this Christmas.
Inez Stepman:
That’ll be an interesting one for me to write anyway.
Emily Jashinsky:
Don’t write that book.
Inez Stepman:
No, but it strikes me that they are trying to go for a customer…. Because it was always women spending money at Victoria’s Secret. It’s not the case that the majority of purchases of Victoria’s Secret were ever made by men. Most of them were made by women, but women still wanted to please men. And so the entire advertising strategy of Victoria’s Secret was essentially to attract men and thereby to attract female customers because they wanted, they saw that these incredibly beautiful women are desirable and they wanted to be more like them in order to attract men. Right. It was ultimately what men want, but through the fact that women wanted to be that.
Emily Jashinsky:
And that’s why I think we are more androgynizing our society than femininizing it. And I completely agree we feminized it in particular ways, but I also feel like we’re just trying to neutral both genders — sexes, as I should say — in ways that are, and you see this in fashion. Absolutely. In fact, you see this in the way that we treat the Civil Rights Act. You see this in the way we treat Title IX and interpret Title IX, I feel like it’s more androgynizing and that goes into the safetyism, as there’s less sex happening with younger people.
There’s less risk-taking in general and masculinity and femininity at their edges. They are the version of each that is toxic, which of course exists, from mean girls to super bad, that obviously exists. And the version of it at those edges, people aren’t even flirting with it anymore. And I think it’s more of a part of androgynizing, and that’s anti-human I think, and it goes along with the postmodernism and that river that flows to de Beauvoir and then flows to everything surrounding JK Rowling and the opinion page of the New York Times. Maybe that’s ultimately what irritated me about this. Because I feel like it’s more a push of androgyny than femininity.
Inez Stepman:
I suppose that’s true, but I also do think that it’s androgyny maybe in outward appearance, but there’s always…. Again, nature will reassert itself. There is this very weird, for example, I associate with the girl boss culture, I associate quite provocatively dressing for men with that culture. Am I wrong to do that? I think really this is a generational thing because the girl bosses are more millennial-style. Let’s say women between the ages of 26 or seven and into their 30s. But I associate that culture with actually wearing suits, but wearing suits with plunging blouses, and there is like a provocative element, like look at me, I’m a woman, don’t forget that I’m a woman, but coupling it with a very aggressive masculine demeanor.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah.
Inez Stepman:
I think there is something, and even the more androgynous looks. Think about Billie Eilish now coming out of her imposed shell of androgynous dressing.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yes.
Inez Stepman:
I don’t know, when I see a lot of the androgynous dressing around New York, it’s always to highlight, actually, in a contradictory or seemingly contradictory way, always to highlight the sexuality of the women wearing it. I don’t think you can breed that out of women. I think it’s just a different form, now that it’s not socially acceptable, say, to want to be the girl in the Victoria’s Secret poster, because directly appealing to men in that way — and I don’t mean just by parading in your lingerie, but I mean, in the larger sense, directly appealing to what men like is not acceptable, it’s not considered acceptable.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah. Nobody wants to be Alicia Silverstone and clueless. But the interesting thing about Billie Eilish is she justified her androgyny by saying it helped her anxiety. She was experiencing this very common zoomer sense of just anxiety from existential concerns that you couldn’t put your finger on. She had all of these body dysmorphia issues. And she said that the androgyny for her was a way to treat it. And I thought that was just super, super interesting. I don’t disagree with you that the girl boss fad, you want to take the masculine and make it feminine. I think that’s completely, I agree with you, but it’s also downstream of the broader let’s androgynize by having women be providers, they should be the breadwinners. They should be prepared to live without a man and et cetera, et cetera, which again, okay, I get, but is it the organizing block or the building block, an appropriate building block for society? But I still see the girl boss thing as a symptom of the broader androgyny.
Inez Stepman:
Well, it’s interesting. I’m not sure…. here I’m actually going to bring up something about technology, as opposed to, I tend to be the person who chases down the intellectual origins of ideas and beliefs in the power of ideas, sweeping culture. And you tend to be in the camp of that we are working our way through a technological revolution that we can’t quite keep up with, that our biology and our brains are not quite equipped to deal with it.
But here, it seems to me there’s a quite simple explanation, which is that no generation of girls, including mine, actually, I don’t know, you can answer this for yourself. I don’t know, you were probably right on the cusp, but no generation of girls had to go through puberty, taking pictures of themselves and putting them in public every day. And puberty is awkward. And even for the vast majority of girls and probably the vast majority of boys, it comes along with a deep insecurity, your body is changing. You probably are changing weight, your skin gets full of pimples. It’s just miserable and awkward.
Yeah. I can’t imagine going through that and having to post photos of yourself and have them evaluated by your peers in that way. And I wonder how much of that androgyny or the way that, for example, Billie Eilish dressed was just a response to that. She wasn’t one of those rare, she’s a beautiful girl, but she wasn’t one of those rare people who wasn’t beaten by the puberty stick with awkwardness. She covered up because she didn’t match like an Ariana Grande-style perfection, like pop perfection. That seems to me to be the more obvious explanation for some of that. And then as it became more taken over by fashion and worn by older girls and older women, it became more…. I can just tell you, walking around in New York, it’s definitely sexualized.
Emily Jashinsky:
No, yeah.
Inez Stepman:
“Androgynous,” but it’s also deeply sexualized. In a way that, it’s like intentionally supposed, it’s actually supposed to be, oh, look, I’m so sexy that I can wear literally —
Emily Jashinsky:
Yes.
Inez Stepman:
It’s this t-shirt and I can show my whole midriff and I can sling, now micro minis are back. I can wear a micro mini, but then I’ll wear a punk-like jacket over it. It reminds me, actually, a lot of the early 2000s, which is obviously derived from, but in any case, there’s no doubt that the 22-year-old girls in New York walking around with this aesthetic, it’s sexualized. It’s not completely androgynous.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yes. Although I think it has also given permission to the Billie Eilish’s that are coping in different ways to cover their body in a more safe way or a way that feels safer to them. But yeah, and I think this is sort of chicken-or-egg-y because I would still argue that the mirror, when the mirror came out, there was a concern that even when the watch came out, there was a concern that people were obsessed with it. When photography came out, what feels like ages ago, that’s actually a very, very new thing and I’m not going to go so far as a call photography anti-human because I think as an art that’s operating within this context, it can be so profound, but it’s very new to the human species. And even though it feels really old, and even though some of those pictures look really old, even if they’re from the ’90s on a disposable camera, I do think some of this is actually still post-tech revolution going back to the printing press.
And some of it is just still very new to the human race and very confusing. And what I see is the social media revolution of the last 15 years accelerated and the younger millennials like myself, and I think older millennials to an extent, but especially younger millennials and Gen Z, they are experiencing the downstream consequences of that and reacting in some interesting ways that make me think you’re completely right that the only way to solve it is to go through it, because that brings people out and say like, whoa, we are living without this. We actually really need it. We’re living without these common understandings of God and purpose and sex and race and et cetera, et cetera. We actually really need to share a foundation as a society.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. As we come to the close of this episode, I want to bring up one more article, and I think it’s relevant to this conversation to bring it full circle, right? There’s been a certain amount of hope in the last, let’s say, several months. We had this big victory in Virginia, not because of the politics involved in that, but because a bunch of parents were so opposed to what was being taught — and then ultimately not taught when the schools were closed — in the schools that a lot of center-left folks went and voted for a Republican. It seems like there is a large wave against this stuff. Now, whether Republicans — and something we’ve talked about in the past that I want to just bracket for this conversation is whether Republicans will actually pass any policies worthwhile out of that.
But in the deeper sense, there is this piece that has been going around from Substack and it’s written by N.S. Lyons and it’s called “No, the Revolution isn’t Over.” None of the fundamental drivers of wokeness have relented. And I think he has a really depressing, but a really good set of points. One is that wokeness is filling the role of religion and it’s difficult to convert people from their religion. Another is that, more important to what we’ve been talking about, the postmodern void of meaning still hasn’t been filled. There’s no answer. And here, I think this is where a lot of the folks like David French go wrong is he thinks that we can fill it with this very neutral rules-of-the-road kind of liberalism. And that just doesn’t fulfill the needs of human beings to actually fuel that moral clarity about anything.
Emily Jashinsky:
Pocket constitutions. The answer is pocket constitutions.
Inez Stepman:
American civil religion. And then he points out that the atomization that has led to all of this, that Robert talked about in his piece, the feeling alone and atomized and disconnected, that hasn’t abated. And so I think he basically predicts that this is going to be, yes, there will be a backlash, but it won’t actually succeed in derailing the train that is wokeness from continuing in this country and that, one, of course, that’s really depressing to think that this backlash might not come up with much, even though it is definitely happening. So I’m not saying it’s not happening and it is encouraging, but he closes it by saying with long marches take a long time. And what do you think the fate of this backlash is?
Do you think that we are going to be able to go through, as you say, and come up with some new sources of meaning, are we going to be able to synthesize the technological revolution in a more human and sane way? Are we going to be able to come up as a species — we are very adaptable — are we going to be able to come up with answers that we can give the next generation? Even if we, for example, we win the political battle and we control what is being taught in the classrooms, and it’s something much more reasonable. Well, what is that thing? What’s that story that we’re going to be able to tell to our children about who we are, what we believe, when we don’t seem to be able…. Even a lot of people on the right, I don’t think truly can uncritically articulate anything on that base level that’s certain.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah. The person who’s good at it is Jordan Peterson, and he’s not really necessarily on the right. And I think we’ve seen that, actually, some of the most effective communicators against the creeping wokeness, but I think even more like nihilism, or you could even call it hedonism or whatever form it takes, the cultural, the monopolistic cultural ideology to the extent that we can define it, the people who are best at questioning it aren’t necessarily on the right. And that’s why I actually…. I see it all as the same kind of thing. I see what happened in Loudoun County as the same. And that’s good news as the same thing as why Jordan Peterson suddenly was a bestselling international author with a book that gives almost reactionary, but very solid and morally clear advice.
I see it all as part of the same thing that it’s exactly why people are just suddenly freaking out when these postmodern, explicitly postmodern, ideas about education are being implemented in policy. These are actually being implemented, not just being talked about and tinted around the edges, but they have like fully taken over our educational institutions. I think it’s all part of the same thing. And so the question is does it just stop at maybe at a David French point or does it actually keep going to where it’s not just a new civic religion, but where we actually have, we’re comfortable in sharing Judeo Christian, Western concept of freedom and community and country. That is a good question because you’re very right that it can’t just stop at one. But I do think that this is all part of the same thing.
Inez Stepman:
Well, you’re always the more optimistic person, I’m always the more pessimistic. Let me give you my pessimistic rejoinder before we wrap here. And that is that Jordan Peterson does not seem to me to be a particularly happier, stable person who seems to have answered these things for himself.
Emily Jashinsky:
He’s working on it though.
Inez Stepman:
He’s working on it really hard, and that’s not a knock on Jordan Peterson. I think he’s very smart and very interesting and very determined to push his way through the morass of postmodernity. I just don’t think he’s truly done it, I don’t think. And I think that’s the problem that faces us. And that’s, to loop this all full circle again, that’s the Houellebecq-ian real problem: it’s how to restore meaning in a society that’s lost its ability to uncritically accept things, even things that may be false, but things that gave meaning to people’s lives and to the bonds that people forged with each other.
And I don’t know that Jordan Peterson has actually succeeded in doing that. I think he’s trying it. To his great credit, he’s actually grappling with that problem every single day in attempting to synthesize enlightenment rationality with a certain type of faith, but I’m not 100% sure of the success of that project or whether that type of blend can ultimately play the same role that religion did for thousands of years in human society. But we’ll go ahead and wrap it up there. Because Emily has a Bible study to get there. Because she’s the —
Emily Jashinsky:
I hope both you and Jordan Peterson find God.
Inez Stepman:
I hope America finds God. Anyway, we’re going to let Emily work on that project for us for a while in a more effective way than podcasting. Emily Jashinsky, thank you so much for coming on High Noon. We have these After Dark episodes every month, so you will hear Emily back again next month. Thanks for coming back on, Emily.
Emily Jashinsky:
I’ll be back next month. About to turn 29.
Inez Stepman:
Wait until you hit 30 and I can make fun of you for being old.
Emily Jashinsky:
Coming up.
Inez Stepman:
Thank you to our listeners. High Noon with Inez is a production of the Independent Women’s Forum. As always, you can hit and send comments or questions to [email protected]. Please help us out by hitting the subscribe button and leaving us a comment or review on Apple Podcast, Acast, Google Play, YouTube, or iwf.org. Be brave, and we’ll see you next time on High Noon.