A $5,000 Baby Bonus, Birth Rates, and…the Manosphere?

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Can you pay people to have kids? On one hand, countries that have beefed up social safety nets and pay people to procreate often see short-term success. But long-term results have been remarkably consistent worldwide: It’s very hard to pay people to have children.

My guest, writer Meagan Day, joins me to discuss the recent birth rate data, the growing appeal of opt-out fantasies proffered by both tradwife influencers and the manosphere alike, and what our leaders would be wise to consider—beyond a one-time baby bonus.

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Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and Katie Gatti Tassin, with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is President of Morning Brew content and additional fact checking comes from Scott Wilson.

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Mentioned in the Episode

• “White House Assesses Ways to Persuade Women to Have More Children” (NY Times)

• The Money with Katie Show episode on the birth rate panic

• Claudia Goldin’s work

• Writer Meagan Day’s work

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Transcript

Meagan:

There are reasons to care about the overall global birth rate, and I think there are good reasons that specific countries care about their birth rates for economic reasons. I just think that it’s not a simple problem with one technocratic fix anyway, and so we’re probably better off going into it asking what do we think are the main ingredients in this stew and what do we think about each one of those and can we make society better on this front, on that front, on this front, on that front.

Birth rates do have a correlation with economic health, but also that they are not synonymous and to understand also that there are some sacrifices that we might want to make in order for the existing people and the future people who are constantly being born, in actually quite large numbers, even when birth rates are low, to have good lives.

Katie:

I’m Katie Gatti Tassin. This is The Money with Katie Show. [Bernie Sanders:] I am once again asking…the conversation about birth rates and babies to consider the institutional forces that shape our personal outcomes.

Last year I did an episode about the so-called birth rate crisis after a wave of hand wringing coverage infiltrated all the major bastions of economic news. The central question, the coverage seemed to ask was, can you pay people to have kids?

It seemed to me that much of the conversation took it as a given that a stagnant population was a problem per se, that is, not a sign of a problem—for example, a lack of support for families—but a problem in and of itself. In that episode, I argued that the best immediate investment a modern government could make in family formation would be advancing access to and efficacy of fertility science.

But the question has been revived anew since the New York Times reported that the Trump administration is considering $5,000 baby bonus payments for new mothers, literally paying women to have children and reserving 30% of Fulbright scholarships for married people with children. Since then, he’s floated the idea of doing away with Fulbright altogether. So who knows?

Anyone even remotely familiar with conservative orthodoxy will find both of those suggestions curious. What is reserving scholarship money for a group whose identities meet certain demographic characteristics, if not affirmative action? And paying women to have children was the primary insult lobbed by those who considered welfare bad social policy that supposedly incentivized people to get pregnant for money.

Ironies aside, on its face, I’ll never reject a direct payment that supports parents no matter how poorly designed, but as social policy intended to get people to change their behavior, this is a bad one. No person on the fence about having children or who firmly didn’t want them, whether for financial reasons or otherwise, will be persuaded to have kids for a one-time payment of $5,000, which means the most likely result would be paying people who were already going to have kids $5,000, which is honestly fine by me, but at some point we’re probably going to have to face the fact that it’s really hard to pay people to have more children.

The current thinking goes that if you want more people to have children, you need to create a society that makes it more appealing. Now, usually that involves removing barriers like the costs of healthcare, college, childcare or improving access to affordable housing, so in other words, addressing their material conditions.

But as I discussed in the previous birth rate panic episode Scandinavian countries, those social democratic havens boasting the most robust version of this utopian economic order each have lower birth rates than the United States. In other words, even people in countries with all of these benefits and more still have fewer children than Americans do. Pretty much the entire globe, with the exception of some parts of Africa, are seeing falling birth rates. And other nations that have experimented with similar entitlements saw short-term results, but outcomes across the world have been surprisingly consistent.

Spiritual friend of the show, Nobel Prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin has published work that suggests there might be something about the way a country industrializes how quickly it adopts a modern capitalist economy, and whether said country’s culture has time to adapt to the idea of women as people who work outside the home. That impacts family formation suggesting it’s less about the system you currently have and more about the way transitions between different systems are handled that can affect people’s decision to start families.

There are a few notable cases in Eastern Germany and Bulgaria as socialist economies. The states subsidized childcare. Think: baby bonuses, paid parental leave, and other policies that we typically associate with being very pro-family anthropologists. Kristen Ghodsee argues that this system supported women who wanted to work and have children, and most did both. Critically, most women reported wanting to do both. When those enterprises were privatized with the introduction of capitalism, she told Meagan Day for Jacobin, those resources disappeared. “Officials tried to push women into the home thinking instead of the state paying for these services, women will do it for free because that’s what women are supposed to do.” Sound familiar? Today, Bulgaria is one of the fastest shrinking countries in the world due to out migration in very low birth rates.

Here’s another odd wrinkle. At the global level, it’s generally accepted that as women’s average years of schooling go up, their average number of children will go down. But at the individual level and in the United States specifically, we see a different trend. The group of women in the US with the highest birth rate right now are those with the most education, those with a graduate or other professional degree. So maybe this story is, like many things in the American economy, about income inequality. While it’s not always the case, education can be a pretty good proxy for income. So if you’re a woman earning wages that put you in the top 10% of the income distribution, childcare has actually gotten relatively less expensive for you because while childcare costs have grown, your income by the very nature of being in that top 10% has actually probably grown faster.

Meagan Day has produced particularly interesting work on this subject in the last few weeks, pieces that go beyond the normal unsatisfactory explanations and instead get to the heart of what we make of this broader, often gendered question, what are the material underpinnings and solutions to the resurgence of rigid ideas about gender? Today she joins me to discuss her recent piece, “The Norwegian Route out of Tradwife Hell”, and a two-part interview that she did with the aforementioned anthropologist, Kristen Ghodsee. We’re talking about trad wife content, the manosphere, how policy shapes culture and vice versa, and how—while not directly—the role of wealth in our society might be the beating heart of all of it.

We will get to my conversation with Meagan right after a quick break.

Meagan, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here.

Meagan:

Hi, Katie. Thanks for having me.

Katie:

In your recent piece about Norway’s paternity leave policy, you grounded your argument in the resurgence of traditional gender roles. Why?

Meagan:

Well, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Katie, that something is kind of amiss in our culture.

Katie:

This is news to me.

Meagan:

Yeah, there seems to be a major resurgence of I guess what I would call gender role orthodoxy, really black and white thinking about male and female social roles that I think second wave feminists would be shocked to see them rear their head. Again, this long past the publication of the Feminine Mystique, but here we are.

I think in terms of grounding this article, it’s quite the opposite. It was rather that I was observing this and I was thinking, what is a good way to think about this problem and how to fix this problem? I mean, I think I probably had my fill of tradwife content on a recommendation from you. I believe I clicked on a link to Gwen the Milkmaid who asked, if you’re having relationship troubles, have you tried putting on a pretty dress and making him a home-cooked meal joyfully?

So that was tough, and then I think at some point I saw a manosphere influencer saying that being around female partners will make a man’s heart grow weak and that men should instead spend their time outside of the house making money and “skill stacking”. And I think that was my breaking point. I was like, we have to have a serious conversation about how to address what is occurring. So fellas, is it gay to spend time in your house with your own wife?

This led me to actually just engage in kind of a serious inquiry of trying to figure out if there are any societies that have made really quick progress on backward gender ideas that they’ve been struggling with, which of course naturally led me to Scandinavia because I’m not sure anyone else has ever done that.

So that’s why I grounded it in that Norway has a really great example of this. I actually read about it in a book by Natasha Hakimi Zapata. The book is called Another World is Possible, and it’s just every chapter is something that another society noticed a problem and then actually fixed it in ways that we might learn from in the United States, and this one was about the paternity leave system in Norway, and I thought it was a really good example of how we might go about trying to intervene in this resurgence of gender role orthodoxy in a way that is going to actually work.

I think that what that probably means is that in general people are kind of sick of progressive moral appeals, and so we’re going to have to figure out another way to go about making progress on progressive social policy that isn’t just telling people to do better and be better. Kind of reached the end of the road on that. So that’s where I ended up on researching this Norwegian paternity leave policy.

Katie:

Yeah, I think in America there is an interesting thing that happens where we do tend to think, so culture first, institutions I don’t even want to say second or last, because it’s almost like they don’t even come into our frame of reference. And we’re thinking about how we solve these problems, and in your tradwife piece you emphasize that making equality the “institutional path of least resistance” is the most reasonable approach that we could be taking here. Can you expand on that?

Meagan:

So in Norway, it basically worked like this. Women had entered the workforce on mass in the 1960s and seventies, which was great because it ended this highly unequal system of spousal dependence. So it was a feminist success to have women be able to go work for their own money. They were able to have autonomy from men. Obviously this is something that feminists wanted to happen.

Everywhere this happens though, you end up with a workforce that contains many of the inequities carried over from the previous system, so they realize that they had a motherhood wage penalty, and we also have a motherhood wage penalty. What I mean by that is that if you have a kid, you’re going to be punished for it because we don’t actually have work-life balance and because we also have different ideas about men and women have different responsibilities with regard to child rearing, and we don’t accommodate for that in our social policy or in our workplace culture or anything like that.

So Norway unlike us, was like, this is a problem that we should try to fix. We just let it persist, which is how we’ve arrived at the present moment, we’re sort of collapsing under the weight of all of the contradictions of it, but in Norway they were like, we should fix that. And specifically they had already set up a really generous parental leave policy and it was for men and women, and the idea was that this would help it so that women wouldn’t face so much of a penalty that they wouldn’t miss so much time off of work that their careers would not be interrupted, that they wouldn’t take a hit and so on and so forth. But men weren’t taking it. It was optional for them, and they just were not taking it because they just didn’t believe that this was men’s work. This was the way that Norwegian society was set up was like, men don’t do that, women do that.

And so they weren’t taking it even though it was offered by the state. So they convened something called the committee on men’s role, which sounds a little bit like scary, like social engineering reeducation camps, but actually was just a very good thing. It was a task force to talk about what to do about this problem, and what they came up with was not a public service announcement campaign or commercials to persuade you to be a better father or ads at the bus stop or whatever.

What they came up with was the idea that they should actually pass policy to make it irresistible for men to take paternity leave financially irresistible. So that was when they created the pop-up perm, which is what it’s called. It’s like pop-up permission, the father’s leave. Today it has been expanded to include anybody who is, but at the time it was just presumed that that would be men and women, and so it was like this is the father’s quota or the papa perm and it’s use it or lose it.

You can either take this four plus months at home with your kid or not, but if you don’t take it, you cannot transfer it to your wife, which means that you guys are going to have to pay for daycare during that period because she’s going to probably have to go back to work. Or if you don’t pay for daycare, then you’re going to take a hit from her lost income. So if you would like for the state to supplement your income for these four and a half months, dad has to stay home and crucially, mom cannot be there. She has to actually be at either work or school, whichever one she was doing before in order to be eligible.

The idea being that this would make it financially irresistible for men to be primary caregivers to their children, and it worked. The percentage of dads who took parental leave went from 2.4% in 1992, which is right before the policy was passed to more than 70% in 1997. That’s five years later, and today 90% of Norwegian fathers take their papa perm leave because it’s literally stupid not to. You are just throwing away money for no reason if you don’t take this. And as a result, they have radically changed what it means to be apparent and gendered ideas about being a parent, and this actually helps break the motherhood wage penalty because it means that you have two parents in the house who both know what it means to take care of a child who both think that they’re perfectly capable of it, who understand how difficult it is and understand themselves to be up to the task. So yeah, they, they’ve basically changed this problem overnight.

Katie:

Wow. Well, I think it’s especially fascinating because I think oftentimes we look at policy as something that is shaped by culture, and I think that this is an example of the opposite happening, that the policy is actually shaping the culture. I think oftentimes when I will either talk about this or have this conversation with people, they’ll be like, well, maybe Norwegian men are just naturally more egalitarian, and I think it’s really fascinating to see in that five year span that sometimes when you throw money at a problem, it fixes the problem. We’ve talked a little bit now or made allusions to the fact that it’s working in Norway. Can you tell me a little bit more about what the data in Norway indicates to us? What do we mean when we say that something is working?

Meagan:

So first I want to go back to this question of whether Norwegian men are just inherently more egalitarian. No, I mean that’s not true. I think that a lot of times we utilize American exceptionalism to get out of having a political imagination. We’re like, we are different. We could never do that because they’re them and we’re us.

And as a matter of fact, you’ll recall that Norway is originary society that gave us Viking culture, which was full of macho men and raping and pillaging. So actually no, Norwegian men are not just gentle giants who love to carry a baby and their baby Bjorn on their chest. Though I will say that the baby Bjorn, I do not know the history of it, but I would not be surprised if it was innovated out of Scandinavian innovation.

Katie:

I’d say, well, Bjorn does sound—

Meagan:

Right, yeah, we’ll look into that later. Actually, Henrik Ibsen, who was this famous Norwegian playwright, wrote of his own country in the late 19th century that it was an exclusively masculine society with laws framed by men and with a judicial system that judges feminine from a masculine point of view, that was his assessment of his society. So the idea that they were just coming in in better shape than us because of some innate characteristics. I mean totally. It’s bunk, it’s just not true.

 As for it working. Yeah, I mean there are a couple of different stats that I think are useful to look at. One is that Norway is tied with Finland for a second place after Iceland in the global gender gap index, which is it’s an index that measures a bunch of different things at once. That’s women’s economic participation, educational opportunity, political representation, and health and survival, and so it ranks at the top of the whole world, after Iceland, tied with Finland. In all of those metrics combined, the paternity leave policy is not the thing that is responsible for that solely, but it’s something that grew out of an ethos of trying to tackle the problem of gender inequality through public policy, the purpose of which was to make it possible for people to live out their ideals.

The ideal in particular in this case was dual earner, dual caregiver society. Feminists, because they were unsatisfied with the situation of spousal dependence, decided that women should be working and that men should also be providing childcare to make up for that. That’s the equality that they wanted, and they’ve actually tried to go about addressing that and actually making it possible to have a dual earner, dual caregiver society through policy itself.

Whereas in the United States, we are like, yeah, let’s have a dual earner society. Caregiving, that is completely up to you. We have no opinion on that. Which means obviously we have a dual earner society in which caregiving responsibility is primarily to fall to women. And that’s even in a situation where men wish it were different. There are a lot of men who actually would like to be able to participate more in childcare, but if they were to do that, they would face a wage penalty themselves. They would actually lose income that they need to be bringing in to take care of their families. So of course it’s going to fall to women.

Katie:

You used a phrase earlier, collapsing under the weight of all the contradiction. That is a perfect way to describe the place that we are in now, and I think part of the reason why there is so much animosity toward even the suggestion that there would be something like a $5,000 baby bonus because people are like, oh, that’s cute. My childcare is $4,000 a month, so thanks for that.

But I think there is a cultural expectation that women should do both, that we do kind of think women should work. Now, we are all pretty sold on the dual earner thing, and I think this is something that I write about in Rich Girl Nation as well, which is that there really are financial ramifications if you become financially dependent on another person and we see that borne out in the statistics. This is why women are more likely to end up in poverty following a divorce. This is why when women live longer, they’re more likely to, even if they never get divorced, they’re more likely to bear the consequences of poor long-term financial planning, particularly if they’re not involved in it.

But because there is this lack of acknowledgement institutionally or systemically, that we are really only addressing half of the issue. You get what Kristen called in your interview with her about how women’s real dissatisfaction with poor working conditions, both paid and unpaid, gets redirected from collective action toward individual opt-out fantasies that ultimately undermine their autonomy. Enter stage left: the tradwife fantasy. So I wanted to talk with you about that a little bit and why you think this trend has become so popular with both some of the elites and the taste makers as well as ordinary women for whom you wouldn’t think that these two groups interests would be aligned.

Meagan:

I think that the main thing to underscore here is that when we don’t have a progressive vision circulating, people are looking to opt out and they’re looking instead to a romanticized past. We don’t have a progressive future for them to latch onto and move toward that’s circulating in our discourse. It’s not a live option, and so women are feeling like, look, I entered the workforce. There was no assistance given on the whole caregiving thing. This seems like a raw deal for me. Maybe the trade-off was bad, maybe the past wasn’t so terrible after all. What’s really sad about it is that it all begins from a place of completely legitimate dissatisfaction with the status quo, and we just don’t have political movements or mass organizations that can pump out the idea that there’s a next step, there’s a place that we can get to actually frankly, relatively quickly and easily from here that will give women more work-life balance, more ability to maintain their careers if they give time to their motherhood responsibilities and more time to give to their motherhood responsibilities if they choose to pursue their career.

We just don’t make it possible for women to imagine this. It’s just a fantasy. It’s like you’re scrolling on your phone thinking about how you can’t have it all, and then you see these highly aestheticized images that harken back to a romanticized pass of a single earner, single caregiver society. And because we don’t have a workable dual earner, dual caregiver society, maybe that one was better. I actually was having a conversation with a friend about how the only images that we have left over from that period, from the period of the single earner, single caregiver society are usually highly aestheticized, almost propaganda images from women’s media, so you can’t tell that they also had messy homes, but they also had messy homes. It is actual work to be a homemaker; actually it is intensive work. You’re just swapping one type of work for another, but I think women are imagining an opt-out of grueling work, and so they’re sort of fantasizing about being able to do things that are really meaningful and hang out with their kids and hang out in their houses.

The tradwife content is kind of niche, and I think that even a lot of the people who follow that are kind of skeptical of the extremes, but it’s actually a manifestation of a much more normie trend, which is this whole soft life thing. I think women are just basically, you’re giving me two options. I’m either supposed to hustle and grind and get nowhere and die under capitalism, or I can drink green juice in a hammock and just relax. I want to do the other one. I want to do the second one.

Another side note is that on social media, there’s an increasing segregation of women’s content and men’s content, and if you look at women’s media, a lot of it is actually anti-hustle culture.

Katie:

It’s interesting to think about that in the context of the completely legitimate dissatisfaction with the status quo. I remember there was a trend going around on TikTok sometime last summer where this woman is sitting in her car and she basically poses the question to women. She says, would you rather work a job at a corporation and make $200,000 a year or be a stay at home mom where money is no object effectively? So trying to offer this very bifurcated path of, you can have this or you can have this and what do you want?

And I noticed as I was watching the stitches of that trend and reading the comments that oftentimes what you would see was women being like, oh, the stay at home mom where the money is no object. I had a 200 K career. I was that person and I had a nanny and I had a housekeeper and my employer treated me like shit. I wasn’t happy working that I had the money, but like, oh my goodness, my boss didn’t respect me and this was always going. They didn’t understand when I needed to take off.

What I noticed was that it felt like the trend was this very legitimate critique of capitalism that at the last moment was greening off a cliff and becoming kind of a misguided critique of feminism, and I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait. No, no, no, no, no. We shouldn’t be effectively saying like, yeah, we all should leave the workforce because the workforce sucks. We should say no, the workforce actually just needs to be better for everybody.

The fact that there are many men who would like to take a more intensive caretaking role, I hear from men like that all the time when we cover childcare on the show where they will basically reach out and say, I feel like you are insinuating that I don’t want to be home with my kids, and that could not be further from the truth, but we were put in a very challenging economic position where it didn’t really make sense for me to be as involved because I was the one that had the more demanding job that we needed to pay the bills, and that demanding job was not very understanding about the fact that I had a kid.

What happens then when we indulge the individual tradwife opt-out fantasy, even for those of us whom that actually might be a viable option, maybe you’ve got the prenup, maybe legally you’re set, you’ve got the spousal support in the contract, you know that financially you are not putting yourself at risk and maybe that’s very much what you want to do. The problem will still persist for the people who are in the workforce who must continue to stay in the workforce and earn money. They are still going to be in some ways robbed of that same experience, and so I don’t think it’s in that sense enough to, even if we were to achieve this single earner, single caretaker fantasy, we’re still leaving a pretty gnarly corporate culture for the people who remain in it.

On that note, how are the happiness levels in Norway? How’s the male loneliness epidemic going over there? Where the men are involved in the caretaking and the culture is maybe a little bit more friendly to work-life balance and acknowledging that families exist.

Meagan:

So in 2018, a study showed that Nordic men reported more happiness than their European counterparts, and this is important I think, a weaker correlation between job satisfaction and happiness.

It suggests that they’re finding more joy in family life and at the same time, aggregate studies of happiness in Norway suggest that the whole population is finding broadly more work satisfaction than their counterparts. So presumably women are actually finding more joy in work life and men are finding more joy in family life. That sounds like a great deal to me.

I think what we have here in the United States is that nobody’s really finding an awful lot of joy in either place or actually I think that people do sometimes find great joy in family life, but it’s like take it where you can get it and enjoy the little fleeting moments of happiness when you actually get them.

As far as male loneliness goes, I mean we could also talk a little bit if you like about the rise of manosphere content as a corollary to the rise of the tradwife content because I think that as much as there are pressures that are bearing down on women, there are also pressures that are bearing down on men that are feeding into the rise of gender role orthodoxy on their side as well.

Here in the United States, male self-esteem is still indexed to wealth. Of course, we have profound wealth inequality, so men are looking for alternative sources of self-esteem and they’re looking for something near at hand. One option, and this is like a tried and true like almost ancient option for dealing with men in a disenfranchised, highly unequal society is to make them feel really proud of being men because that’s a natural resource. The men at the very top of the highly stratified class society are hoarding all of the wealth, but we’re also promulgating the idea that being a man is something to feel really proud of, so you don’t have to worry about that so much. It actually is a tactic to prevent social unrest from men who are lower on the class ladder throughout class society history, and that includes pre-capitalist societies in order to be proud of yourself as a man.

We still have a culture where a lot of people, and that includes men and women, think that men have to be good providers. That’s something like 70-something percent of Americans believe that the cornerstone trait of a good man is that he can provide for his family. Meanwhile, that is becoming harder and harder for people to do, especially people who are just below the 50% line in terms of the income that they make. It’s getting harder and harder to take care of yourself, much less a whole family on that income, and so men too are actually looking back at a romanticized past where a man was able to fulfill his responsibilities and be proud of himself as a man going to work and making a sole sole earner income and being a provider for his family.

The reason that these don’t flourish into actual critiques of the system is that we don’t have a political environment that puts forward alternatives for people to imagine. I think I used the term live options before. They’re not live options. We live in a society where you literally cannot even talk about social socialism as anathema. I mean, if you call something socialism, that means that you’re saying that it’s bad, so we can’t actually question capitalism at all, and we can’t even for the record, regardless of what you feel on socialism versus capitalism, can’t move towards social democratic policies because we can’t criticize capitalism.

Katie:

Except for here on the Money With Katie Show where we do that every week with a different guest.

We’ll get right back to it after a quick break.

We’ve kind of gotten the downlow on what’s going on across the Atlantic and the success that they’ve had with bringing everybody kind of into the fold of both the joy of being financially autonomous and also the joy of being a caretaker and figuring out a system that allows everybody to participate in both to some extent in the United States.

You wrote that Gen Z men who we know have swung right pretty hard agreed with the statement, A man who stays home to look after his children is less of a man at more than double the rate of baby boomer aged men. That is pretty shocking to me when you consider what we typically think to be true about how the youth tend to be more progressive than the old in a society that you kind of tend to move in the direction of progress as time goes on, that pullback, I think it speaks to this idea of how and where we teach people to look for esteem in the United States and how if you are a woman that tends to be like you hopefully have a career as we’ve spoken about, there is this cultural pressure or expectation but also that, oh, but you also better be a mom and you better be a really good mom and we don’t really know how you’re going to have the time to do 150% at both.

But I’m curious what you think about how we have kind of created an impossible conundrum both for women and men insofar as where they are taught to look for that societal esteem, and maybe we can get into how the minimization of that search for esteem or kind of the dismissal of it is not necessarily getting us anywhere good. It’s not solving the problem.

Meagan:

People want to be seen and recognized and valued by their communities. That’s actually an elemental—it’s a fundamental human need. It’s not quite as basic as food and water and shelter, but it’s pretty close to the bone in terms of something that people need.

When you make people do stuff with their time all day, that provides no sense of esteem, they will look for alternatives if those alternatives are not even supported by, for example, a capitalist society that’s interested in its own stabilization and they literally have nowhere to look strange perversions in ideology will occur as people look for esteem elsewhere.

I don’t know that this 100% explains why Gen Z men are so reactionary when it comes to gender ideas. Shockingly, not all of them obviously, but a higher proportion than we would like or that we would expect, but I think it has something to do with it. I think that young men are in a situation where your self-esteem first and foremost comes from wealth. The chances that you’re going to be able to make enough wealth to check that one off your list are pretty slim.

The second one is masculinity, but a lot of the healthier, I guess, expressions of masculinity are also not on offer to you due to the way that society is set up, which is to minimize your ability to form deep relationships and form families. People are experiencing a lot of social isolation in a lot of romantic frustration, and even if they are in families, they are working so hard that they don’t have the ability to be at home and be like a dad and feel themselves feeling good being a dad.

So a lot of men are just really frustrated and looking for alternative sources of self-esteem, and the thing that is on offer to them is basically this raw masculinity, the thing that they have that can never be taken away from them. And so we see that actually getting augmented on these social media platforms, and like I said before, there’s a major gender segregation of social media content, and so it’s kind of evolving in an echo chamber. I think on both sides, women’s social media content and men’s social media content are both evolving to augment the alternative sources of self-esteem to the ones that should be available in our society, but aren’t.

Katie:

The dynamics of how these media platforms function are so central to this conversation. I know, I’m sure you’re Gwen the Milkmaid romp probably fucked up your algorithm for a day or two, but I have become really preoccupied with men’s radicalization online. A hundred million other people watched Adolescence on Netflix about this teenage boy who, I mean they mentioned Andrew Tate by name one time he lives in the UK, but you can kind of read between the lines that he’s in his room on his computer a lot, he’s by himself, he’s isolated. There is this kind of growing rift between the boys and the girls at school and the chasm is growing wider because of what’s happening online after school. This girl calls him an incel and his Instagram comments and he kills her, and it’s just alarming on so many levels, and I remember reading some of the on the Vulture reviews of the show and parents of sons basically being like, I couldn’t watch this. I had to turn this off. It was so triggering to me.

I think when we talk about solutions and some of these more pro-social ways to gain esteem, I also think about the chicken or egg of these platforms of are we going to be able to engender healthier means of finding that recognition and that appreciation that all humans crave without regulation of those spaces?

Meagan:

I’m not entirely sure that I have an answer for what we should do about the platforms themselves, but I do think that it’s important to understand that intramale inequality is a profound fixation in our culture right now. I think that it’s always there. It’s always been there as discussed earlier, but right now it seems like the collective psyche is ruminating on this particular question. We have the alpha and beta and sigma and omega male discourse. That whole taxonomy is basically a way to make sense of intra male inequality. You’ve got the whole 80/20 incel discourse. It’s basically the same thing. It’s about male winners and losers.

That’s also the central theme of the UFC, which has emerged as a major flashpoint not only in entertainment culture, but also in political culture with the Trump administration. Again, I just want to emphasize that this is symptomatic of the fact that we have a highly unequal society to begin with. So the way to go about this, we probably should actually take great pains to minimize the freedom of certain platforms to pump out toxic sludge like this, but honestly, we’re going to have to engage in a project of wealth redistribution because when you have a highly unequal society like this, people are going to be fixated on it and it’s going to come out in these really ugly ways.

And for whatever reason among humans, male inequality is something that you have to be mindful of when you’re building a stable society. So there is actually a fair amount of anthropological research, and this is something that Kristen and I talked about that basically shows that polygamous societies across cultures and continents and throughout history are actually quite unstable because usually they’re also highly unequal societies with regard to wealth. So you’ve got men at the top who have all of the wealth and all of the wives, and as a result you have a population of disenfranchised bachelors and those people are going to cause problems because they don’t have anything necessarily to live for, and the young ones can be quite aggressive. So you’re going to have either, whether that’s violent crime or whatever, or just social unrest or even potentially revolution polygamous societies are really unstable.

Historically, capitalism has actually gone hand in hand with socially imposed monogamy as a way to address this problem. Our society has a slightly different thing going on. We have high wealth stratification, highly unequal, and we also have feminism, which is good, which encourages women’s autonomy.

As a result of that, there are a lot of women who are not dating. They don’t want to be tied down. They’re not dating for a while, they’re not finding their partner in their late teens and sticking with him, or maybe they are getting divorced or they’re moving between partners, and for every woman who is currently single, there is also just statistically speaking, a man who is currently single as they always have throughout human history as anthropologists have noted, they are proving to be an unstable population in our society.

Now, I do not say this to demonize or dehumanize these men. I believe that they should have alternative sources of self-esteem available to them so that they don’t get radicalized. I think that they should have access to wealth. I think that they should have access to the ability to pursue romantic prospects, but that we’re not going to undermine women’s autonomy in order to do that.

Katie:

When you spoke with Kristen, she did bring up wealth redistribution as a necessary step toward remedying this radicalization process, but with the anthropology of it all, with the fact that this is a trend, right? When you have men that don’t have status, don’t have esteem, whether that comes in the form of resources, in the form of wealth, in the form of women or wives, these different status markers that it sounds like tend to find community and esteem and meaning in one another, they find one another and then that force becomes disruptive. If that is, I always get sticky around the word, natural.

I think we chalk up a lot of things to nature that I don’t think are truly biologically determined, but if we know that male status culture is still typically derived from your individual ability to compete with others to be better than others, if there were this kind of widespread acknowledgement that wealth was being redistributed, if it would almost feel like cheating if it wouldn’t deliver the same impact because the people on the receiving end of it are not going to derive the same esteem from it that if they feel like they’re working for it. Does that make sense?

Meagan:

It does make sense. I want to start out by saying that I think that, I don’t know if it’s natural necessarily for men to compete with each other, but it sure seems to be a constant throughout human history and across human cultures. So I think we should take it as a given for now. The question is what are the stakes of the competition and what way are men expressing that competitive impulse and how detrimental is that to themselves and to everybody else? So Kristen talked to me because she is a historian of Eastern European socialist countries in the transition to capitalism.

She talked to me a little bit about what happens when you actually don’t have wealth inequality in a society and how this gets expressed among men. So we know that the Soviet countries are not perfect, and we’re not going to argue that they are, but we’re just going to talk about the features of them that are really interesting and compelling to us right now as a thought experiment.

So in Soviet countries, the state guaranteed your housing. There were not a lot of commodities to buy, if any. It was kind of hard to get a car, and if you did, you got the same car as everybody else. It was not possible to compete through flashy wealth accumulation the way that it is here. Furthermore, women had also jobs and they were just as independent as men and counted every bit as citizens, as much as men, and this broke the spousal dependency relationship.

And so competing for women looked very different because women were very independent, so you couldn’t just like lure one in by promising to give her social stability in a highly unstable world because there already was social stability. And so what happened was that men still wanted to compete with each other for women, but in order to do that, they actually had to be really interesting and make women like them. You’re not going to be able to say, hey, the world’s really dangerous out there, but I actually have a really good job, as you can see from my very fancy car, and I can keep you safe from all of the dangers that are lurking outside of your door. That is a dynamic that is specific to capitalism.

It obviously undermines women’s autonomy. It’s also bad for men if you think about it, because men don’t really, first of all, not every man is going to be able, as we’ve talked about, to make it to the top of the income ladder. Second of all, even if you do and you land a great woman, do you really know if she loves you or is she just with you because she wants to feel safe, and this is an unsafe society. These problems were according to the women themselves and Kristen as an anthropologist who spoke to these women and to men. They were more or less solved in the Soviet Union. There were other problems which is subject for another podcast, but these problems were pretty much solved in the Soviet Union in East Germany.

And people, basically, the men would compete with each other by talking about how many books they’d read and what kind of classical music they listened to and how good they were at chess. And this was a detail that I loved what month they got to go to their communal seaside resort because some months were more prestigious than others, and if you got to go in July, you were a very high status male. It probably meant that you were given a privilege in exchange for performing really well at your job. So the stakes were really low, and it was like it’s charming. The competitive impulse among men doesn’t have to be so frightening. The stakes don’t have to be so high.

Katie:

We have been having this kind of, what the fuck is going on with gender in America conversation now, for at least a year? I mean, it has been getting progressively weirder, but I very rarely hear I think people tying it back to wealth and economics in this way, and it’s kind of breaking my brain a little bit to think about the fact that maybe the impulse to compete, maybe the impulse to seek status, okay, maybe that is natural and maybe it doesn’t have to be menacing. The idea that you could structure society in a way that actually results in people exhibiting behavior that you actually want more of, not less of is fascinating.

Meagan:

And that’s what I mean by building alternative institutions that tap into people’s desire. And I would say in particular, at least if anthropology, the entire field is to be believed, men’s desire to compete with each other, there are alternatives that aren’t devastating to everyone else. The competition for wealth and women as expressed through a misogynist mode of the acquisition of females are both very damaging to society. We can imagine people competing for alternative things, and actually one thing that we really need to look at here is the fact that there exists an institution full of largely unpartnered young men that does not have the social chaos energy that you would expect from learning about these anthropological facts.

And that is the military. A little bit, yes, but largely contained, and the reason for that is because there are alternative sources of self-esteem and accomplishment that people can attain. You can work really hard and get rewarded with medals and promotions and things of this nature. We actually do need institutions in our society that reward people for displaying behaviors that we want to see from them, and that includes with stuff like banners and metals. Seriously, it’s not a joke.

We don’t have civil society anymore. It’s been completely hollowed out, so that’s obviously not the solution, but I love the banners and the metals. Let’s figure out another way to do banners and metals. We don’t have anything like that, and jobs themselves are not actually structured in such a way as to make people feel accomplished. Let’s say you’re working at 7/11, there is not really a ladder to climb. There is not really a sense of a job well done. If someone gives you a token of appreciation, it’s going to feel like an insult.

It just feels phony. It doesn’t feel real. But historically working class men have found institutions where they can flourish and feel accomplished. Ideally, jobs would actually serve that function, but barring that, there’s also class struggle. There are also unions. If you look at the history of unions, there are just as many banners and medals and honorifics and a whole social world in which people are competing for honor and respect, but they’re earning that honor and respect through political leadership, through education, through bravery in a type of combat that is actually socially productive.

In the 1930s, young disenfranchised bachelors used to hop on trains and ride out to California to participate in organizing farm workers for a sense of adventure and to feel like they were actually becoming a person that they could be proud of. Right now, manosphere content and misogyny are filling that vacuum.

Katie:

Wow. This is making me think of two things. The first is wanting to circle back briefly to what you said about how ideally work would be giving that to people. What do you think that looks like done well? What do you think it looks like when work is giving that to you? Are there any examples that come to mind for you?

Meagan:

Well, professionals know what it’s like. A lot of the time to be a professional worker means basically to get some of your self-esteem needs met in your job. You go to work and you’re good at something and you’re competent, and others look at you and they say, wow, that was really incredible, and you feel good about yourself when you go home. Most working class people do not actually have the opportunity. They don’t have careers. They have jobs. They don’t get their self-development needs met at work. They get them met elsewhere entirely. And to the extent that corporations, large corporations that employ a lot of people try to solve for this, it’s actually just tends to make the problem worse. It’s so depressing the employee of the month type of hokey crap that a lot of corporations do. I don’t actually know how you structure every single workplace to make people feel like they’re valued, but I know that there probably are solutions for every workplace and that they would be bespoke to every workplace.

Katie:

Something that’s coming to mind for me is just a conversation we had recently on the show about employee ownership and to your point about things being hokey, not the, oh yeah, think like an owner, but no, literally having equity, literally having a good decision-making stake in the work that you’re doing, having a real voice, having real authority.

That is something that I’ve been coming back to. A lot of our workforce participation in the United States as I understand it, is actually not very good compared to Scandinavian countries. I think to stay on the Norway beat, I think they have something like 80% workforce participation, and we have around 60%. My guess is that’s primarily driven by the parental leave policies and the childcare that you’re allowing people who are parents to still participate in the workforce by not addressing the issues of ownership by not addressing these issues of meaning by not thinking and prioritizing how you engage people, such that work does become that for them. You are cutting off your nose to spite your face a little bit, and we are reaping the consequences of that now in the workforce and in the employment participation rates and in people’s interest in having a job basically.

Meagan:

We have so many people who if you can get away with not having a job, you don’t want to because you’re not getting anything there other than a paycheck that you need in order to survive. So if you don’t need that on a given month, people frequently will just quit jobs. They’re fine for a few months and then take a few months off. That’s really common.

We have so many bullshit jobs in our culture as the anarchist theorist, David Graeber, would say, and this is a consequence of the fact that we organize production for profit and not for human need. So the entire economy is organized around which firms are profitable and therefore get to survive and which are not, and therefore have to be phased out of existence.

The only alternative is the public sector where we identify some needs and we say, okay, we’ve got to have that. It’s not profitable per se, but we’ve really got to have it, so we’re just going to tax people and we’re going to pay for it ourselves. This society would be unbearable if we didn’t have that. But of course, the private sector is always trying to figure out ways to cut into the public sector. I mean, arguably this is the whole purpose of DOGE is to break public institutions to create inroads for privatization because it is to the great consternation of capitalists that there continues to be this untapped market of services that they could provide.

But it’s so good that we have the public sector and we know for a fact that the jobs in the public sector are going toward a socially useful end because we democratically decided that we wanted to have that service or good provided or produced in our society. So think about it this way, people would find a lot more meaning in their jobs if they knew that their jobs were necessary for society to hang together.

Even if you’re working a job that’s somewhat tedious or repetitive or what we would call menial labor, if you know for a fact that you’re contributing to your community, then you don’t feel so alienated, you don’t feel so bad about yourself, work doesn’t become such a total dead end as far as providing self-esteem to you.

There was a joint strike between the janitorial and custodial staff of the Los Angeles Unified School District and the teachers, they went on strike together. It was a sympathy strike. It was awesome. This was a couple of years ago, and you could really tell that it wasn’t just the teachers who were taking pride in working for LAUSD, it was the janitorial and custodial staff. I think we would call those jobs somewhat menial, and a lot of us maybe who are professionals or people with careers might assume that it’s not possible to actually derive meaning or self-esteem from cleaning toilets.

Not true. If you are cleaning toilets for the system that teaches the working class children of Los Angeles, and that produces the next generation, that is a radically different way to think about what you do for a living. And I saw that when I went out to this big field where there were tens of thousands of people on strike, and it was a mix of the teachers and the custodial staff, and you could see that everyone felt really proud about showing up to work every day and making the Los Angeles School District run.

So arguably what we want is to expand the public sector and to eliminate the jobs that only exist because they make people rich and actually have no use value for society and replace them with jobs that actually make society better. And then I think you will naturally see people take more pride in their work and have some of more of their self-esteem needs met through work. That is the way that you organize society under these alternative systems. The way that you organize society under capitalism is that jobs exist if they make somebody rich and they don’t exist, if they don’t make somebody rich, unless we can democratically decide to create public sector jobs out of them, which we do on occasion, thank God this would be an unbearable society otherwise, but we want to move more in that direction, like identify problem, make job out of it, person feels good about what they do because they know they’re solving a real problem.

Katie:

There is an unavoidable connection between this and what we were talking about earlier with the role of the media platforms because no matter where you kind of count yourself economically or politically, recognizing that social media has been maybe a net negative force, particularly for young people, I think is kind of a bipartisan or nonpartisan issue, and yet those are the companies in our economy that are worth the most, that have the most power. These problems are very connected.

I want to take us to the birth rate, the original impetus for this conversation right now, it feels like we have a very narrow-minded approach to what success looks like. Even as we’re talking about maybe these social interventions, a baby bonus, there’s been a couple other things floated IVF, right, and that the idea is that we will know it’s working if the birth rate starts going up. Do you think birth rate’s the wrong metric to indicate that something is working?

Meagan:

I think that lots of people who care about society have talked about the birth rate for a long time, but the reason that we’re talking about it so much right now is because it’s part and parcel of the broader trend that we began this conversation by discussing, which is the rise of gender role orthodoxy and the sort of obsession with men, women, children, and everybody being in their proper place in society.

 And the right is making this a fixation politically for reasons other than just caring about the health of the economy. They also are actually just promoting traditional gender roles through this medium as far as whether or not the birth rate is a good indicator of how well things are going. I think that maybe in a world we set with far fewer problems than ours, the birth rate would be a really good indicator of how well things are going, but honestly our world has so many problems that sometimes fixing one of them will lead to a slight depression of the birth rate.

And sometimes leaving one problem unsolved will actually keep the birth rate high. So I don’t think it’s as easy as just saying we’re going in the right direction because the birth rate is high. So for example, access to birth control and access to knowledge, sex education, knowledge about when and how you can get pregnant. These are good things. These are very good things and these are problems that needed to be solved in aggregate. They make our society better and they also depress the birth rate, so their one constituent component of why birth rates are lower in a place like the United States.

Another example, women having alternative sources of self-esteem besides being mothers and wives is a very good thing. It solves a major problem in our society, but it also seems like it contributes to the depression of the birth rate because some portion of those women will decide that they don’t want to have children, and unlike in previous iterations of society where that would have resulted in profound social ostracization and possibly divorce, which would have then resulted in them having no financial prospects, we’re going to be fine if they don’t want to have kids, and since there’s some percentage of them are going to decide that they don’t want to because there’s a lot of different people out there with a lot of different ways that they can imagine their lives going. That might lead to the depression of the birth rate, but that’s a net good thing that that happened.

Then there are things that are bad and they’re also contributing to the birth rate, so like social isolation and a lack of romantic success are often being held a loft as examples of things that are contributing to lower birth rates, and I think they probably are and I think that they’re bad, so we would want to solve those problems on their own terms and presumably once we did solve those problems on their own terms, that would maybe help raise the birth rate somewhat. Teenagers not having accidental pregnancies is good, so we’re going to leave that one alone even though the birth rate—

Katie:

Hopefully we could all be on the same page about that one.

Meagan:

My personal opinion.

But then a really big one in the United States, which is financial insecurity and making people not feel capable of affording kids. That is bad, but of course that should be resolved on its own terms, shouldn’t it? It’s not bad because it suppresses the birth rate. It’s bad because it’s a violation of the core principles of social freedom, so we want to fix that problem of financial insecurity by tackling financial insecurity. We assume that the birth rate would go up somewhat, but even if it didn’t, we would want to solve that on its own for its own sake.

It is such a complex problem that I almost think we’re better off breaking it down into these individual components and imagining birth rates as a reflection of the health or illness of various systems, which we address one by one on their own merits.

Katie:

It feels like we’re circling two things here. Number one is that birth rates actually kind of a poor proxy for how good or how bad things are going in a given country, and that what we have to do and what can get us, I think, to clear answers to your point is trying to be more specific about why we think that’s important.

Meagan:

I think there are reasons to care about the overall global birth rate, and I think there are good reasons that specific countries care about their birth rates for economic reasons. I just think that it’s not a simple problem with one technocratic fix anyway, and so we’re probably better off going into it asking what do we think are the main ingredients in this stew and what do we think about each one of those and can we make society better on this front, on that front, on this front, on that front. It’s also very possible to imagine that society evolves beyond recognition and we have a period of decline and then a stabilization. This is an eons long process, so I don’t think that we can necessarily make decisions now upon which the fate of humanity is actually hinging.

What I think we can do now is understand that birth rates do have a correlation with economic health, but also that they are not synonymous and to understand also that there are some sacrifices that we might want to make in order for the existing people and the future people who are constantly being born in actually quite large numbers, even when birth rates are low to have good lives.

There’s an article in Jacobin called “How to Think About Declining Birth Rates”. I believe that’s the name of it, or alternately “How to Think About Birth Rates”. It’s worth a read because it actually pushes back on the idea that falling birth rates pose an existential or apocalyptic or catastrophic threat to a domestic economy.

Katie:

I would love to hear you steel, man, the economic side of that argument. I think as far as I’m familiar with it, oftentimes it comes down to social security, which I think we are both probably on the same page, that if you are truly concerned about the Social Security trust, you will just take the income cap off and that problem will be solved tomorrow.

I’m not opposed to the idea that there might actually be true economic reasons why this is something that you or I or we should all be concerned with. Sometimes it feels like cover for a deeper ideological projects that I find a little more suspect, especially in light of artificial intelligence and some of the recent conversations about, I know you and Kristen spoke about this, that if AI does to the workforce what they’re saying it’s going to do, we are going to have a lot of people who do not have jobs anymore in the next decade and that one of the ways that you can shrink a workforce and still maintain stability in society and in an economy is to send the women home, and that in some ways we’ve seen this in America before after World War II, and that I think is kind of the period that produced a lot of this beautiful 1950s propagandized imagery of the beautiful housewives and their beautiful homes and all their beautiful appliances and what have you.

To me, those two ideas take some effort full squaring that it is both important for the future of the economy, that we have enough workers and also that we might have too many already based on the direction technology is going in.

Meagan:

This is very interesting. Elites have a contradictory set of interests here. If AI delivers an exogenous shock to the system, it would be really useful for women to leave the workforce to shrink the size of the workforce, to ride out that shock. Of course, in order to convince them to do that, you’re going to have to promote traditional gender ideology and part of traditional and gender ideology is actually having more babies, which you can see that elites actually want for other reasons, for separate reasons, including keeping the number of consumers up, which is actually important for economic dynamism.

Katie:

It just feels like two completely contradictory narratives that often exist side by side without much probing, and I think it, even if we aren’t sure how you square them, it does feel necessary to call out that like, hey, these two things don’t actually fit together very nicely.

Meagan:

It sounds like evil mastermind, like master of the universe stuff, which makes it sound a little bit implausible that elites are even thinking about whether or not to put their energy into getting women out of the workforce or keeping them in or jacking up the birth rate or depressing the birth rate. I think I am not very conspiracy minded, and so when I hear that, I’m kind of like, sure, okay, but actually elites do have to think about these things and they do think about these things, so it’s not really that crazy. If you think about what happened, for example, in the United States during World War II, during World War II, the gender dynamics needed to be turned on their head. Women needed to go into the workforce in large numbers to keep up the domestic production, to aid the war effort, and then after the war they needed to be sent home because otherwise when the men came back from war, the labor force was going to be huge and that was going to create economic problems.

It was going to suppress wages and that would possibly cause social unrest and things of this nature. So yes, this happens. People who are in charge actually do say, let’s bring the women out of the home. Let’s send the women back into the home, and they do say things like, let’s try to make the birth rate higher for economic reasons, and let’s try to make it lower for economic reasons, and sometimes they do actually want to make the birth rate lower for economic reasons in certain scenarios.

In 1991, Bulgaria finance minister who later became the Prime Minister actually told the World Bank unemployment is a burning issue. It’s reaching 10%. One solution could be to encourage women to leave the workforce and return to their families, even if that means a temporary loss of purchasing power in the families, and then they did that, so it’s not that crazy to imagine that there are people who are thinking about what to do with the women and what to do with the children in order to have a particular economic effect.

Katie:

What makes Bulgaria such a fascinating case study is that to your point, they were transitioning from one economic system to the other, capitalism being the economic direction that they were moving in. They said, okay, we’re going to take away all the state programs that had allowed women to work before the childcare, the leave, the things that are so foreign to a modern American’s mind. The fact that this could have existed 40 years ago is just, I think it feels outlandish to me that that was something they were taking away in the 1980s, but the fact that they had that right, they send women home, the thought process feels pretty intuitive to me.

If I’m a politician and I want traditional gender roles, while at the same time I want a workforce that is comprised mainly of men who are being paid well, that seems like a pretty good way to do it. You take the social safety net away, you kind of socially engineer your way into the situation, but the fact that once the women lost the autonomy once they were in their homes and the work felt on them, the fact that birth rates went down defies intuition to me, but also feels like a pretty strong cautionary tale. I think the biggest thing that I’ve learned from this conversation is that if you want different outcomes, you actually have to change the institutions and the systems that are currently producing those outcomes.

The more that we talk about the contradictions and the frenzy of the gender role radicalization, both, if you’re talking about tradwives or you’re talking about girl bosses or you’re talking about the manosphere whatever direction, pick your poison. The reason all of it feels so empty, hollow ,half-baked is because it’s all reacting to a set of circumstances that are just ultimately not sustainable long-term.

It’s an attempt at creating cultural solutions to economic problems, and so we can’t keep talking about these problems as though they are divorced from economics because they’re not. In some ways, the financial independence retire early is also an optout fantasy. It’s just a different kind of optout fantasy. It’s optout fantasy that doesn’t strip you of your autonomy, but it doesn’t scale, and I think it also sometimes leaves you still feeling a little bit alienated and a little bit aware of the fact that the problems that you were reacting to in pursuing fire are still very much there. They may not be there for you, but they’re there for everybody else and you still have to live in the society that those problems have created.

Meagan:

The reason I wanted to write the first article, the one about the Norwegian paternity leave policy to begin with, is because I can see that gender role orthodoxy is flourishing in an environment where people are not satisfied with capitalism but don’t actually have any sense of a live option alternative, and so our hearkening back to a unimagined past or are turning to treasuring their natural resources, for example, with regard to their masculinity. In some cases, like in the case of the manosphere.

My sense is that the anti-woke moment that we are in has an awful lot of things about it that are very bad. I think that we should also just value neutral, understand that this needs to be understood as an opportunity for a pivot away from basically fighting all of our political battles on the uncultural terrain alone because it’s not going to work, because people are really exhausted right now with left wing appeals to social conscience and in a way, while the alternative politics that are being proposed are terrible, it’s also can be understood as a little bit of a gift.

We actually do need to prioritize policy on the left as well because we right now are not proposing alternatives to people that they might find appealing. That is why they’re turning to the tradwife fantasy. That’s why they’re turning to the manosphere stuff is because we haven’t actually made people feel like there is a better alternative right around the corner if we organize for it

With a real politically imaginative policy platform instead of just admonishments for not being, for example, do I want to admonish young men who Andrew Tate content? Sure. Is it going to work? I don’t think so actually. I think that the answer has to be in building alternatives, giving them other stuff to do that makes them feel good about themselves so that they don’t get stuck in this eddy.

Aand the same thing is true for consuming tradwife content. Do I want to admonish women for consuming trad wife content and tell them that actually we went through all of this and we decided that that was a complete violation of women’s freedom and autonomy, and please, let’s not go backward. Yeah, I would like to admonish, but we’re just going to have to provide people with alternatives. We’re going to have to put the policy first and say, we want better childcare. We want better work-life balance. We want shorter work weeks. We want reasonable wages, we want, et cetera. We have to be platform forward on the left and policy forward and not values forward necessarily, though I think that it should be clear what our values are when we communicate our policy or our program.

A lot of the manosphere discourse, for example, is about men being independent and not expressing weakness through dependence, and in some ways steering clear of interrelatedness, which of course includes family life. We don’t like that. Progressives don’t like that. We don’t think that that makes women happy. We don’t think that it makes men happy, so we have two options. We can either explain why we don’t like it and why it’s a contradiction of our feminist values, which frankly in this cultural climate is probably not going to get us very far, or we can say, I see you’re like alpha male independence discourse, and I raise you paternity leave.

Katie:

Meagan, thank you so much for being here and for sitting down with me for almost two hours. This was so much fun.

Meagan:

My pleasure.

Katie:

That is all for this week. We’ll see you next week for our regular Rich Girl Roundup, where we’ll be discussing your feedback, so let us know what you thought about this conversation. Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and me, Katie Gatti Tassim, with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is president of Morning Brew content and additional fact checking comes from Scott Wilson.