RedFem Hannah

Women in greater and greater numbers are choosing not to have children. We discuss the reasons why, both material and ideological, and how the internet, particularly apps like TikTok, have removed the mystery of different lifestyles and bashed down the once private walls of the nuclear family. Online, the Red Pill 'no eggs' rhetoric attempting to shame women into attaching themselves to a man, is failing because it's like playing on a social chess board from 1953. We think through the contradictions of people like Jordan Peterson encouraging femininity, housewifery, and for women to be stay-at-home mothers, whilst also criticising the 'devouring mother', when those are exactly the conditions that set it up. Also, the contradiction of giving only carrots and never metaphorical sticks to boys and then wondering why young men don't feel the need to accomplish anything or graduate into full adulthood, like getting a job and moving out of the parental home, in order to bag a wife or serious girlfriend.

This episode also includes wider discussion of men in crisis, how romance culture today is dead, dating apps as a form of ruthless shopping, how relationships now start with a sexual encounter, and women coming off birth control in large numbers. We contest Louise Perry's comments about the welfare state reducing the birth rate, instead putting forward an analysis of how the unrestrained market has ripped through everyone's lives, ensuring very few young people are financially secure enough to have a baby. Plus, globalisation meaning the nation state is less relevant, the Victorian culture in UK schools, Michael Hudson's book 'Super Imperialism', and confusion around the 4B movement in South Korea, where many online seem to think 4B caused the birth rate to drop, when in fact it was the effects of neoliberal economics, which the 'Sampo' generation of the early 2010s came to represent, well before 4B. 

The release of the Cass Review last week on the treatment of 'trans' children in the NHS has caused huge waves and responses that indicate where we're heading. We discuss its moral inditement of the PMC, their rapidly devalued sunk cost, and the media classes witch-hunting of women who acted to protect children before Cass. This episode includes comment on Novara Media's apology to JK Rowling for falsely accusing her of being a 'holocaust denier', the Left's political vacuum where safeguarding doesn't exist, how ex-Stonewall CEO Ruth Hunt was branded a 'transphobe' back in 2010, and how it's the liberal PMC who are being revealed as the homophobic moral monsters of the modern West. We also think about how we arrived here, covering how women on the liberal-Left are incredibly submissive and male-approval seeking, how lesbians are considered expendable, and that lesbians on the Left often inadvertently reflect liberal-left women's 'low value' status (in heterosexual terms) back to them, making them uncomfortable with female homosexuality and our presence politically.

We also talk about how Nancy Kelley, former Stonewall CEO, was the asexual chummy figure cleverly placed to hide a thousand perversions, detransitioners who have 'human dysphoria', why referrals to Gender Identity Clinics are drying up in part because Gen-Z is less approval seeking from institutions than Millennials are. Plus, the not uncommon self-isolation of lesbians due to the hostile environment they face, that transforms the closet into something not just metaphoric, and how the smiling homophobia of Left-liberals, who used the tools of power available to them to do violence to gay children is far, far worse than the average street homophobe.

We discuss the political and moral quandaries around euthanasia, otherwise known as medical assistance in dying. How what was effectively a liberal 'harm reduction' policy of assisted dying for the terminally ill, later the elderly and frail, has now expanded its application towards those living with a physical disability or mental health issue. This episode includes commentary on Canada's notorious MAID policy, the excellent Japanese film Plan 75 that explores state-sponsored euthanasia for the elderly, and how the profit-motive determining that only those who are productive have value is the opposite of universal human dignity. We also cover the fact that over two thirds of those euthanised are women, that suffering is part of the human condition (we are all suffering some of the time, in some way, and suffering is not without meaning), and why we cannot accept a society that determines human worth according to economic productivity or ability to rely on private capital. 

The abandonment, smearing, and legal harassment of Hilary Crowder by her ex-husband, rightwing commentator and supposed Trad Christian Steven Crowder, is causing a crisis in sexual politics amongst the rightwing. Why? Because Hilary Crowder is the epitome of a Trad woman, a virgin-until-marriage, deeply religious, stay-at-home mother, and yet she's been left high and dry by a man who seems more concerned with Youtube and his interest in transsexual men. If Hilary Crowder can be treated this badly, then it demonstrates the Tradwife lifestyle is an unreliable route for the everywoman. The rightwing is tearing itself apart online, with conservatives like Ben Shapiro and Lauren Southern supporting Hilary's bid for child support, whilst Tim Pool and Pearl Davis argue she should get a job (thus contradicting their claims women should stay at home to look after their children). The 'lawfare' by Steven Crowder is not only directed at his ex-wife, but former employee Jared, who Steven nicknamed 'gay Jared' and forced to dress up in women's clothes regularly.

We discuss that bonfire and the abusers playbook currently being deployed by Crowder (drive your spouse crazy, then threaten to use the legal system to make her mental health records public in a bid to embarrass and control her), sadistic narcissism, and what happens to everyone when we can't tolerate distress (a collapse in containment and loss of the ability to mentalise). Plus, Kanye West's inability to do 'lawfare' against billionaire ex-wife Kim Kardashian, and so resorting to humiliating her lookalike in Bianca Censori by parading her around naked, dead-eyed narcissistic rage, and how Ben Shapiro is basically a Betty Freidanite.

Love affair or sexual abuse? That is the question at the heart of 'Tell Them You Love Me' (available on Sky, NOW, and Apple TV), a documentary on woke Philosophy Professor Anna Stubblefield, who was convicted of sexually abusing a student, after gaining access to him (Derrick) through the debunked method of 'facilitated communication'. We discuss the woke race and disability politics surrounding the case and put forward that the attempt the claim disabled people have no limitations due to their disability plays a role in removing provisions and protections for those people. The idea of the resilient individual who thrives through greater agency under neoliberalism is just one way that neoliberal ideology has deformed the New Left since the 1970s (another is reducing structural issues of race and disability to mere identity politics). The wish to have moral superiority and experience a 'moral high' through enacting ones politics in ones own lifestyle is more to do with a fantasy of grandiosity and performative identity game-playing than creating meaningful political change in the wider world. Peter Boghossian is not wrong when he describes the scale of the intellectual fraud going on in woke academic departments in the United States, theories that in the Anna Stubblefield case when practiced led to a crime. Proving true that, indeed, ideas  have consequences.

The episode also covers the panic around black single mothers in the USA, the grift of identity politics as a form of poaching and proximity, the satanic panic, the myth around multiple personality disorder, and the difficulty of accepting apathy in others about subjects we feel passionately about. Plus, the ideologically-sponsored delusion of believing your own romantic love story is unique (which ultimately turns people into objects), the feminine grandiose fantasy of being the only one who understands a particular other person (usually a man), projecting your own internal world onto others as a sign of a lack of empathy, and how those heavily involved in ideologically production today, such as in Big Tech, are incredibly cautious about subjecting their own children to it.

We steelman the argument for 'girl boss feminism' as a way for some women to achieve financial independence and freedom from men and the family under capitalism. Much of the logic of 'lean in' feminism, as epitomised by former Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg, is about accruing enough capital as a woman to afford privately the things socialism would otherwise provide for women nationally i.e childcare, laundry services, food provision that's an alternative to mothers cooking, etc. We think through why rich, successful women are so often hated by both the Left and the Right, including within feminism, concluding it's because access to capital presents a possible freedom from dependence on men and the family. However, that material reality is often trumped by ideological commitments (to exactly men and the family) that are deeply engrained and cultural.

We also discuss the TikTok documented trend of 'stay at home masc' lesbians, partly in regard to how lesbians defy gender roles, the archetype of the British middle-class mummy, the often sordid underbelly of middle-class life due to repression and need for respectability, the risks of being a Tradwife, an example of which is the obvious hatred of Stephen Crowder for his ex-wife and children. Plus, Dolly Parton's lesbianism on the DL, the importance of having written agreements if one partner in a marriage isn't going to work, and the importance of not just money from professional advancement, but how the ensuing self-esteem and self-respect also distances women from dependence on the family / men.