(00:00:00.321):
When my husband was abusing me,

(00:00:02.382):
often even while he was hitting me,

(00:00:04.503):
his favorite thing to do was to tell me how grateful I should be to have such

(00:00:07.685):
a nice guy.

(00:00:09.166):
He had to beat me, you see, to get me to acknowledge how nice he was.

(00:00:13.048):
When he tired of reminding me of this fact,

(00:00:15.169):
he'd move on to telling me that this was my place,

(00:00:17.611):
the natural order of things, how things were always meant to be.

(00:00:21.613):
So he had to beat me to get me to accept my natural place and my destiny.

(00:00:26.456):
Men are very logical, apparently.

(00:00:29.552):
Hi, I'm Zawn Villines, and this is the Liberating Motherhood podcast.

(00:00:34.015):
Today, I'm going to be talking to Angela Saini about how we come to believe systems

(00:00:38.318):
of inequality are natural and how our social norms obscure the social construction

(00:00:42.800):
of inequality.

(00:00:45.042):
Angela Saini is an award-winning journalist based in New York and Boston and

(00:00:48.604):
an assistant professor of science writing at the Massachusetts Institute

(00:00:51.966):
of Technology.

(00:00:53.647):
Her writing has appeared in the Financial Times,

(00:00:55.969):
National Geographic, Foreign Policy, and The Times Literary Supplement, and Wired.

(00:01:01.216):
An Undark magazine series on race science she co-edited was a finalist for

(00:01:05.257):
a National Magazine Award in 2023.

(00:01:08.558):
Her latest book,

(00:01:09.518):
The Patriarchs,

(00:01:10.519):
How Men Came to Rule,

(00:01:11.559):
was published in spring 2023 and was a finalist for the Orwell Prize

(00:01:16.200):
for Political Writing.

(00:01:18.181):
Her previous two books,

(00:01:19.581):
Superior,

(00:01:20.302):
The Return of Race Science,

(00:01:21.802):
and Inferior,

(00:01:22.802):
How Science Got Women Wrong,

(00:01:24.623):
were bestsellers and sit on university reading lists across the world.

(00:01:28.651):
Together, her books have been translated into 18 languages.

(00:01:32.452):
She is currently working on her fifth book,

(00:01:34.693):
On the Harms of Human Classification, which will be published in January, 2027.

(00:01:40.354):
Before we get started with Angela, I have a couple of quick announcements.

(00:01:43.955):
As always,

(00:01:44.556):
if you like this podcast,

(00:01:46.636):
I'd like to invite you to leave a positive review on your favorite podcast platform

(00:01:50.637):
and to heart react it if you are listening on Substack.

(00:01:53.589):
These reviews and heart reacts may seem silly,

(00:01:55.730):
but they actually heavily influence the success of the podcast

(00:01:59.312):
because everything online is influenced by algorithms and you elevate the visibility

(00:02:05.175):
of everything by giving the algorithm what it wants.

(00:02:08.097):
So if we want more and better feminist work,

(00:02:12.219):
then we have to tell the algorithm to give us that and your reviews do exactly that.

(00:02:17.742):
This work is entirely free and a quick review helps make it worthwhile to continue doing.

(00:02:23.285):
It also ensures that I never have to accept money from advertisers,

(00:02:26.986):
which means no one will ever control this work but me and my listeners and readers.

(00:02:32.667):
Additionally, if you are a super fan, you can become a paid subscriber.

(00:02:37.188):
Paid subscribers get access to a ton more writing on Substack,

(00:02:41.448):
at least eight additional essays a month.

(00:02:44.149):
They also get a bonus podcast, free merch, a support group, and my undying affection.

(00:02:50.660):
You can subscribe at zawn.substack.com slash subscribe.

(00:02:56.725):
Additionally,

(00:02:57.245):
you can find all the books I mentioned on the podcast at

(00:02:59.627):
the Liberating Motherhood bookshop page,

(00:03:01.549):
which also hosts tons of book recommendations and reading lists.

(00:03:05.292):
You can visit the page at bookshop.org slash shop slash Liberating Motherhood.

(00:03:10.496):
And I will put all of the books we discuss here today in the bookshops.

(00:03:13.839):
You can easily find them.

(00:03:16.063):
Angela, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

(00:03:18.524):
Thank you.

(00:03:19.285):
Thanks for having me.

(00:03:20.205):
I was very disturbed by the vignette that you had at the start.

(00:03:25.248):
That was horrible, just awful.

(00:03:27.929):
You know, it really is.

(00:03:29.450):
And it's a recurring theme that I see from readers that it's a very quick leap from,

(00:03:36.613):
you know, you're being abused to I have to abuse you because this is normal.

(00:03:40.375):
And what's wrong with you that you won't accept your place and that I have

(00:03:42.876):
to abuse you into your place?

(00:03:45.952):
And I think it's just it's so sad,

(00:03:48.596):
but I think that your work speaks to a lot of that and how we got to those ideas.

(00:03:54.204):
So I'm just I'm super excited to talk to you.

(00:03:57.228):
Your books have really helped to shape my thinking.

(00:03:59.531):
And I'm just so grateful that you're out there doing this work.

(00:04:02.713):
Thank you.

(00:04:03.113):
I appreciate it.

(00:04:04.594):
I think you're right that we do naturalize a lot of these things.

(00:04:07.795):
And the big theme of all my work,

(00:04:09.796):
I think,

(00:04:10.196):
is to kind of lean away from this idea that anything is rooted in nature,

(00:04:16.959):
in biology,

(00:04:17.699):
that we have to accept the world the way that it is

(00:04:20.401):
because it has always been this way.

(00:04:22.201):
I think that's the idea I'm trying to disrupt.

(00:04:25.363):
Yeah.

(00:04:25.883):
Yeah.

(00:04:26.223):
And it's so important because Well,

(00:04:29.406):
first of all, something being natural doesn't mean that's the way it has to be.

(00:04:32.567):
But, you know,

(00:04:33.347):
we do have a very quick leap from,

(00:04:35.608):
well, it's always been this way to it should always be this way.

(00:04:38.689):
And you show us that neither are the case.

(00:04:42.350):
So I'd like to start by talking a little bit about your 2023 book,

(00:04:46.671):
The Patriarchs,

(00:04:47.751):
How Men Came to Rule,

(00:04:49.332):
because I think it aligns really nicely with our listener vignette and proves

(00:04:53.073):
that her, you know, abusive, terrible husband is just wrong.

(00:04:56.254):
Yeah.

(00:04:58.143):
It seems like just about every system of oppression pretends that it upholds

(00:05:01.787):
the natural order and that things have always been this way.

(00:05:04.210):
That's pretty much never actually true.

(00:05:07.814):
So tell us about the book and tell us how patriarchy

(00:05:11.157):
came to be.

(00:05:13.433):
Well,

(00:05:13.673):
a book came out of this kind of niggling curiosity that I had after my 2017 book,

(00:05:22.780):
Inferior, was published.

(00:05:23.781):
So that book was on the science of sex and gender.

(00:05:27.063):
And one of the chapters in that book was on how men came to have so much power, male domination.

(00:05:34.749):
And in the animal kingdom,

(00:05:36.711):
as biologists have slowly come to realize, male domination is not the rule.

(00:05:40.794):
There are matriarchal species.

(00:05:43.767):
There's a lot more variation in kind of what we might call gender roles or sex roles

(00:05:50):
in other species compared to our own.

(00:05:53.982):
But anthropologists told me repeatedly that Male domination wasn't the rule

(00:05:59.334):
among humans either.

(00:06:00.696):
The further back you go into history, the more variation you see in how we live.

(00:06:06.503):
And so I couldn't help thinking that if we haven't been a patriarchal

(00:06:10.688):
or male-dominated species from the start, then how did it come to be this way?

(00:06:14.893):
How did we end up here?

(00:06:17.076):
And there's surprisingly little literature on that.

(00:06:22.765):
So it's not as though it's a neglected question.

(00:06:24.988):
It's just that very often,

(00:06:27.632):
and this is true even in feminist literature, that very often people...

(00:06:31.297):
Take as given that the oppression of women or gendered oppression was the very first.

(00:06:36.499):
That this is where, you know, it has always been there.

(00:06:39.299):
And women have always been oppressed by men.

(00:06:41.840):
And actually nothing could be further from the truth.

(00:06:43.961):
That's just not the case at all historically.

(00:06:47.342):
So I just wanted to paint that history.

(00:06:49.782):
The last big book on this topic is Gerda Lerner's The Creation of Patriarchy,

(00:06:55.824):
which is about ancient Mesopotamia.

(00:06:57.585):
That was published around Rome.

(00:06:59.065):
40 or so years ago, around the time that I was born.

(00:07:02.108):
So you can imagine that was such a, you know, a lot.

(00:07:05.011):
We have learned so much more since then.

(00:07:06.813):
We have a much more fine-grained appreciation of history.

(00:07:12.218):
We have new scientific evidence as well that helps us paint history.

(00:07:16.222):
These long portraits of human history going back thousands of years.

(00:07:21.003):
So I wanted to explore this question,

(00:07:25.244):
not just through biology,

(00:07:26.504):
because I am a science writer,

(00:07:27.784):
but also, you know, inevitably, it turns out to be a historical question.

(00:07:31.805):
It's not really a biological question,

(00:07:33.965):
because biology cannot explain why the world is the way that it is.

(00:07:40.187):
A lot of this has to do with Decisions that individuals have made,

(00:07:46.185):
this long grift of trying to convince us that patriarchy is somehow

(00:07:51.990):
the way things are supposed to be.

(00:07:55.733):
Yeah,

(00:07:56.113):
so I love that you mentioned that it's not actually a biological question because

(00:08:00.437):
the thing that I find a lot in my discussions with people is that they want to talk

(00:08:05.161):
about biology.

(00:08:06.482):
I had Professor Cordelia Fine on the podcast a couple of months ago

(00:08:10.245):
and Her work disputes,

(00:08:13.091):
you know, a lot of the biological studies, which I think is so important.

(00:08:16.933):
And I love her and I love her work,

(00:08:18.834):
but I also do feel like this constant arguing about biology kind of misses

(00:08:25.817):
the point.

(00:08:27.298):
One of the first books that I read

(00:08:28.478):
on this topic was Sarah Blaffer Herdy's Mother Nature,

(00:08:32.360):
and she's a primatologist and her Argument was essentially,

(00:08:36.105):
well, you know, patriarchy isn't the way in primates, which is, you know, true.

(00:08:40.147):
And like, I appreciate that, but it doesn't necessarily mean anything for us.

(00:08:46.131):
And so I wonder if you would talk a bit more about what you call this long grift

(00:08:51.035):
and why this is really like a historical and sociological question rather than

(00:08:55.578):
about, you know, hormones or genes or the other things we try to make it about.

(00:08:58.960):
Yeah.

(00:08:59.865):
Well, Sarah Hurdy, I have to say, has become a friend of mine over the years.

(00:09:03.070):
I interviewed her when I was writing Inferior and I actually went to stay with her

(00:09:07.456):
on her walnut farm in California.

(00:09:09.740):
Oh my God, I'm super jealous.

(00:09:11.943):
She is the most incredible person.

(00:09:13.585):
And I actually do also recommend.

(00:09:14.887):
And I reviewed it actually for a newspaper,

(00:09:18.829):
Father Time,

(00:09:19.510):
which is her new book looking at fatherhood,

(00:09:21.311):
which is a very neglected area of biological inquiry.

(00:09:27.414):
Because,

(00:09:28.275):
you know,

(00:09:29.235):
for a very long time,

(00:09:30.016):
we just assumed that fathers didn't really matter when, of course, they do.

(00:09:34.858):
So I think,

(00:09:36.880):
you know,

(00:09:37.100):
the point that Herdy has made throughout her very long career looking at this is

(00:09:41.522):
that...

(00:09:43.143):
We make certain assumptions, right?

(00:09:45.364):
When we look at not just our species,

(00:09:47.365):
but others,

(00:09:48.065):
especially when we look at primates,

(00:09:49.406):
we assume that if there is a male-dominated primate,

(00:09:53.767):
then that kind of gives us some insight into who we are deep down,

(00:09:59.930):
that these are our primordial origins,

(00:10:03.191):
that we have always started out this way,

(00:10:04.731):
that males have always been dominant in our species.

(00:10:07.973):
And we don't really have much evidence for that.

(00:10:09.893):
The further back you go, And here I'm talking about thousands of years.

(00:10:14.688):
Actually, you see societies that are far more egalitarian than the ones we live in now.

(00:10:19.270):
So when I was writing The Patriarchs, obviously, I wanted to go as far back as I possibly could.

(00:10:24.731):
So the very first place I visited was Çatalhöyük,

(00:10:27.772):
which is a settlement that was occupied around 9,000 years ago

(00:10:32.254):
in what is modern day Turkey, southern Anatomy.

(00:10:36.895):
And this settlement is one of the oldest human settlements from

(00:10:41.717):
which we have any evidence in the world.

(00:10:43.398):
It's near the Fertile Crescent.

(00:10:45.199):
It's at the very dawn of human agriculture and animal domestication

(00:10:52.781):
and human domestication for that matter kind of settled in.

(00:10:58.143):
Settled homes and houses.

(00:10:59.966):
And when you go there,

(00:11:01.568):
you see it is mind-blowing and it will always be a mystery

(00:11:07.696):
to me why more people don't visit this place.

(00:11:10.119):
So many people visit Pompeii and Herculaneum in Italy.

(00:11:14.203):
Hardly anyone ever goes to Çatalhöyük.

(00:11:17.946):
But what you see there is this kind of honeycomb structure of houses.

(00:11:21.810):
So the way people lived was that everyone's homes, their rooms would be kind of back to back.

(00:11:28.956):
So there's no streets or passages between the houses.

(00:11:33.120):
There would be a roof,

(00:11:34.281):
there'll be a hole in your roof and a ladder and you would go up and down

(00:11:38.284):
through your house that way.

(00:11:39.525):
But there is a hearth.

(00:11:40.893):
There are places where people slept.

(00:11:42.879):
There are beautiful,

(00:11:45.059):
Just astounding,

(00:11:46.760):
vivid frescoes,

(00:11:48.240):
red frescoes on these whitewashed walls, bullhorns embedded in the walls.

(00:11:54.203):
So just a very, very rich culture and thousands of people would have lived here.

(00:11:58.884):
And all the evidence we have,

(00:12:01.325):
and that's not to say that more evidence won't come out later,

(00:12:04.286):
but all the evidence we have since the 1960s tells us that this was a settlement in

(00:12:09.328):
which gender just didn't matter very much.

(00:12:11.929):
It wasn't a dividing line between

(00:12:15.609):
And the reason that archaeologists are able to say that is because we can glean

(00:12:21.916):
a lot from human remains and kind of this...

(00:12:26.477):
Human data that's all around us,

(00:12:28.479):
human remains tell us that the men and women

(00:12:30.900):
in this settlement did pretty much work.

(00:12:33.963):
There was no difference in wear and tear on their bones.

(00:12:37.445):
They ate the same kind of food,

(00:12:39.266):
so it wasn't as though women were eating less,

(00:12:41.948):
which is certainly the case in some modern-day patriarchal societies.

(00:12:49.154):
Even the height difference between the males and females was very small.

(00:12:53.877):
Which again I think is important for people to remember because we think

(00:12:57.180):
of biological sex difference as a hard and fixed thing.

(00:13:01.685):
Actually it varies a huge amount even today between countries.

(00:13:06.349):
So for example in India there have been studies done on matrilineal communities

(00:13:12.035):
and they show that the height difference among women and men

(00:13:15.278):
in matrilineal communities is less than Then the height difference between men

(00:13:19.270):
and women in neighboring patriarchal communities.

(00:13:22.551):
So how we live and how we're treated obviously has an impact then on how we grow

(00:13:28.955):
and how our bodies develop.

(00:13:30.255):
And that is reflected at Çatalhöyük 9,000 years ago.

(00:13:34.257):
So in all these different ways,

(00:13:35.958):
in burial patterns, everything, it shows that possibly age was a...

(00:13:42.982):
That was a factor in,

(00:13:44.885):
you know,

(00:13:45.185):
who had the most respect or if there was some kind of social hierarchy,

(00:13:48.590):
but not gender.

(00:13:50.253):
And again, this is something that lead archaeologist there, Ian Hodder, kept reading.

(00:13:55.798):
You know, insisting to me that they just don't see it.

(00:13:58.979):
So the question for us then is if that is how people living in that part of,

(00:14:03.281):
in that region of the world 9,000 years ago,

(00:14:05.761):
and we can't extrapolate,

(00:14:06.822):
we can't say that that's also how people were living on the other side of

(00:14:11.223):
the continent or in another continent at that time.

(00:14:14.664):
We can certainly say there.

(00:14:16.645):
And now modern day Turkey is a patriarchal country.

(00:14:20.346):
It is quite male dominated.

(00:14:22.107):
There are these social, these gendered patterns in how people live.

(00:14:26.208):
How did things change between then and now?

(00:14:28.948):
What happened between then?

(00:14:30.909):
And when you paint that picture, when you break it apart...

(00:14:34.810):
What you see is not that there was some big moment, one big crash.

(00:14:40.733):
As Friedrich Engels argued, you know, the world historic defeat of women.

(00:14:45.476):
It was gradual and it was slow and it was a grift.

(00:14:54.141):
It entered the psyche and social relations incredibly slowly over thousands of years

(00:14:59.804):
until we get to the modern day.

(00:15:03.406):
So I want to...

(00:15:05.041):
Zoom in on one thing that you talk about a bit in the book,

(00:15:07.723):
and that was the role of marriage broadly,

(00:15:11.406):
but kind of like family structure,

(00:15:13.507):
family formation,

(00:15:14.948):
women leaving their clans and families to move with men and how this affected them.

(00:15:21.252):
And I'm especially interested in that because so much of my work is

(00:15:24.915):
about how marriage and romantic relationships continue to oppress women.

(00:15:30.161):
And now we have more of a choice,

(00:15:33.184):
yet we continue to choose this institution that really most of

(00:15:37.007):
the data shows can be pretty harmful.

(00:15:39.348):
Would you talk a bit about marriage norms and how those have influenced things over time?

(00:15:46.812):
It depends on where you are in the world.

(00:15:48.473):
So one of the arguments I make is that if we get to this point from 9,000 years ago

(00:15:53.895):
to the present, when do we see the first roots of gender depression?

(00:15:57.196):
When do things start to change?

(00:15:59.497):
And as Gerda Lerner argued 40 years ago, it's really around...

(00:16:04.219):
7,000 to 5,000 years ago with the rise of the early state.

(00:16:08.224):
And if you think about what the early state needed from people, just imagine, right?

(00:16:14.271):
This is a world in which anyone can live anywhere.

(00:16:16.974):
People are very mobile and There are no boundaries in how you live other than as you

(00:16:24.254):
or your tribe create them.

(00:16:26.795):
What the elites running the early states needed was for people to stay

(00:16:32.216):
in those states,

(00:16:33.816):
to produce a surplus for those at the top,

(00:16:37.557):
and to be able to protect the boundaries of the state,

(00:16:41.017):
so to defend the state with their lives if necessary.

(00:16:45.580):
Kind of building a military in that sense.

(00:16:48.605):
So you can imagine that for them then a huge pressure fell on the family because

(00:16:55.557):
the family is the unit of Reproduction of population.

(00:17:00.273):
That's how you get more people.

(00:17:02.354):
And this is,

(00:17:03.994):
so between 5,000,

(00:17:05.215):
7,000 years ago,

(00:17:06.295):
very gradually,

(00:17:07.676):
you start to see pressure falling on young women to have as many children

(00:17:11.938):
as possible.

(00:17:13.098):
So far more than you would have otherwise if you were living in

(00:17:15.919):
a hunter-gatherer society, for instance.

(00:17:17.900):
No more spacing out of children, just having child after child after child.

(00:17:21.841):
And pressure falling on young men to defend the state.

(00:17:26.465):
To be available to fight and defend the state, to give up their lives.

(00:17:31.448):
So this is where you get those kind of twin gendered preoccupations that

(00:17:36.030):
a woman's role is as a mother and a man's role is as a kind of public defender of

(00:17:42.513):
the state.

(00:17:43.774):
And the family then becomes,

(00:17:45.735):
you know,

(00:17:45.955):
the loyalty to the family then becomes subsumed to the loyalty to the state.

(00:17:50.897):
And that is...

(00:17:52.778):
The system in which patriarchal marriage then emerges, right?

(00:17:57.141):
That you have this idea that the family is serving the state rather

(00:18:02.864):
than serving each other, the people that you love.

(00:18:07.646):
And this is,

(00:18:08.727):
I think,

(00:18:09.187):
at the root of so much unhappiness and discomfort within the family is

(00:18:13.389):
that we are not there for each other always.

(00:18:16.544):
We're there for these gendered expectations,

(00:18:18.726):
these ideas that we should be fulfilling these certain roles,

(00:18:22.689):
even though they don't come naturally to us,

(00:18:24.750):
even though every woman does not want to have endless children.

(00:18:27.953):
Every man,

(00:18:28.493):
obviously,

(00:18:28.894):
we know from the men in our lives are not suited to go out and fight

(00:18:33.978):
and kill people.

(00:18:35.299):
But that is the pressure that the patriarchal family is under.

(00:18:41.306):
Now why did that emerge as it was?

(00:18:43.910):
Why is it that men emerged as the powerful group within that system of doing things

(00:18:50.800):
and not women as the powerful group within that system?

(00:18:53.424):
Because there's no reason why it should be one way or the other.

(00:18:57.068):
I think one of the necessary conditions here is patrilocality,

(00:19:01.409):
which is where do people live after they get married?

(00:19:05.170):
Now, generally,

(00:19:06.690):
most societies on earth,

(00:19:08.110):
in fact, pretty much all societies, you have some kind of movement in marriage.

(00:19:12.351):
It's not a good idea for a small community to just marry within themselves

(00:19:15.652):
over many generations, because we all know that's very unhealthy.

(00:19:19.913):
It's not healthy for

(00:19:27.622):
Patrilocality is where the wife or the bride moves to live with her husband's family.

(00:19:34.652):
And in many modern societies,

(00:19:35.974):
for example, in the U.S., So for a woman to go and live with her husband's family...

(00:19:58.965):
Essentially, she is a stranger in their home then, right?

(00:20:03.687):
She's surrounded by people who know each other,

(00:20:05.908):
who have a loyalty to each other from birth,

(00:20:08.110):
and she is the new one, which makes her immediately vulnerable, right?

(00:20:12.192):
And we see this play out.

(00:20:14.393):
I think it's sometimes very difficult for Americans to understand this because

(00:20:19.335):
of this nuclear family arrangement that Americans tend to have.

(00:20:22.557):
But certainly,

(00:20:23.737):
when I speak to Audiences in Latin America,

(00:20:27.504):
Asia and Africa,

(00:20:28.445):
they immediately recognize that fraught relationship of the daughter-in-law

(00:20:33.668):
in her family's, in her husband's home and how devastating that can be.

(00:20:41.312):
So you see in countries like India...

(00:20:44.194):
Their entire soap opera is written about this,

(00:20:46.196):
the daughter-in-law and mother-in-law relationship, right?

(00:20:49.418):
And how difficult and tense that is because the mother-in-law is the one with

(00:20:52.581):
the power and the daughter-in-law doesn't have any.

(00:20:55.183):
And a lot of abuse happens within those relationships to this day

(00:20:59.807):
that daughters-in-law are routinely in some countries mistreated, abused, abused.

(00:21:06.733):
Not just by their husbands,

(00:21:07.894):
but by the entire family and sometimes even the children in that family.

(00:21:11.736):
So the children who are already there,

(00:21:13.497):
but certainly by mothers-in-law and certainly by husbands.

(00:21:17.439):
And that is the result of being a kind of stranger in their own home.

(00:21:20.600):
So these things together,

(00:21:21.901):
you know, these gendered expectations together with patrilocality then create...

(00:21:26.954):
This very warped version of the family,

(00:21:30.115):
very warped version of marriage in which two people,

(00:21:35.076):
you know,

(00:21:35.317):
these partners who are supposed to,

(00:21:37.917):
you know, who could have a very loving relationship.

(00:21:42.479):
That relationship then gets,

(00:21:45.340):
because of all these different competing pressures, then gets warped and disliked.

(00:21:51.515):
Turned into something very, very ugly.

(00:21:53.636):
And that is part of what we see playing out to this day,

(00:21:57.299):
even though we don't necessarily live in such tightly patriarchal societies,

(00:22:02.602):
that pattern still persists.

(00:22:06.624):
You know, I mean,

(00:22:07.545):
one of the things that I write about a lot is that when you form a relationship

(00:22:11.287):
with somebody,

(00:22:11.727):
whether it's a romantic relationship or a friendship or anything,

(00:22:15.095):
You can make that relationship whatever you want it to be because that's what

(00:22:18.577):
a relationship is.

(00:22:19.738):
It's you and me agreeing we're going to build something together.

(00:22:23.820):
But over and over in patriarchy, we see, let's just make this relationship terrible.

(00:22:31.325):
Let's see how destructive we can make this whole thing for the individuals in it and

(00:22:35.607):
for the society.

(00:22:36.548):
It's just wild.

(00:22:38.869):
And you talk about Men as a tool of the state and the family as a tool of the state.

(00:22:44.524):
And I'm just struck by this insight,

(00:22:47.366):
especially at this moment,

(00:22:49.327):
when in the United States,

(00:22:50.387):
there's so much pressure coming from our government for women to have more babies,

(00:22:55.791):
women to submit to men,

(00:22:57.311):
women to have less control over reproduction, maybe to give up voting rights.

(00:23:01.474):
And I think that really,

(00:23:03.015):
really confirms that that's very much central to this project of patriarchy.

(00:23:07.797):
So it's just...

(00:23:09.554):
It's unfortunate to see,

(00:23:11.175):
but it's interesting to see kind of the confirmation in our current historic moment.

(00:23:17.239):
Yeah, absolutely.

(00:23:18.760):
I mean, I would just add that this plays out in very subtle ways,

(00:23:23.142):
depending on where you are in the world.

(00:23:25.124):
So certainly in the US,

(00:23:26.965):
we see it in the form that you've just described,

(00:23:29.426):
that this expectation on women to have as many children as This rise

(00:23:34.110):
of pronatalism very much speaks to these histories of patriarchy and the role

(00:23:40.456):
of women.

(00:23:41.317):
What is your job in terms of how you serve the state?

(00:23:46.042):
It's to have as many children as possible.

(00:23:49.145):
Sometimes when we talk about women not having kids as being selfish, who are they...

(00:23:54.532):
Not serving by not having kids, really.

(00:23:57.674):
You know, they're the ones having them.

(00:23:59.535):
They're the ones looking after them.

(00:24:00.916):
They're not serving the state.

(00:24:02.557):
That's the idea behind that kind of rhetoric, that language.

(00:24:06.079):
So we have to always keep that in mind that we're not serving ourselves here.

(00:24:10.781):
We're not even serving society, really.

(00:24:12.462):
It's really serving the state that just needs population rise,

(00:24:17.205):
even in a world in which populations are so high,

(00:24:20.327):
in which sometimes we complain that there's too many people.

(00:24:23.510):
We still have this expectation on women.

(00:24:27.312):
So it is very strange.

(00:24:28.813):
But this idea of submission to men...

(00:24:31.855):
Certainly that plays out within patriarchal families,

(00:24:34.476):
but in these extended families,

(00:24:37.596):
which is kind of the bigger rule in human history,

(00:24:41.177):
you would have also seen submission to the husband's family.

(00:24:44.818):
So it's not just him, it's also his mother, particularly.

(00:24:48.499):
So that,

(00:24:49.079):
like I said before,

(00:24:49.879):
that mother-in-law, daughter-in-law relationship is a very subservient one.

(00:24:54.380):
And you can see this in the writings,

(00:24:55.840):
for example,

(00:24:56.340):
of the Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernisi,

(00:24:59.521):
That the daughter-in-law would be expected to refer to the mother-in-law as

(00:25:02.964):
though she were her mistress.

(00:25:05.626):
The father is a master, but she is the mistress of the household.

(00:25:09.429):
She is subservient to her and she has to do whatever she says.

(00:25:14.393):
So again,

(00:25:15.874):
just going back to this question of biology,

(00:25:17.495):
we have to be very careful about assuming that this is some kind of biological need

(00:25:22.699):
that men have to dominate.

(00:25:24.521):
Everybody wants power.

(00:25:26.922):
Everybody wants status.

(00:25:28.243):
Women want status too.

(00:25:30.559):
It's just about what are the circumstances within the social organization

(00:25:35.429):
that you're in that gives you access to that status and power.

(00:25:39.473):
But trust me, everybody will try and get it if they can.

(00:25:43.116):
That's so true.

(00:25:44.236):
I have my husband says the like fundamental human desire and interactions

(00:25:50.261):
with other people is to feel important.

(00:25:52.443):
Yes.

(00:25:52.844):
You make people feel important.

(00:25:54.405):
They like you.

(00:25:55.065):
Yeah.

(00:25:56.798):
And I think it's so true.

(00:25:59.220):
So I think this is a good spot to shift to talking a bit about Unfair,

(00:26:03.765):
which is your book about scientific sexism.

(00:26:05.887):
And I just want to add as a note for readers

(00:26:08.028):
that I really feel like your three most recent books really should be read together,

(00:26:14.174):
because I think together they form a really coherent theory

(00:26:18.438):
of like everything we're dealing with.

(00:26:20.100):
So I While they are three different books and we're talking about them

(00:26:23.901):
as three different books,

(00:26:24.902):
in my own mind, I conceive of them as sort of one overarching

(00:26:29.404):
book.

(00:26:30.624):
I'm glad you do that because there is a thread.

(00:26:33.826):
There's a constant thread throughout all of them.

(00:26:36.307):
Yeah.

(00:26:37.207):
Well, they're so helpful together for understanding why things are the way they are

(00:26:41.409):
and why they don't have to be that way.

(00:26:43.190):
Yeah.

(00:26:45.303):
I want to talk a little bit about how the idea of gender as this natural, innate,

(00:26:49.890):
fixed,

(00:26:50.271):
permanent thing helps uphold patriarchy and probably the wider supremacy culture

(00:26:55.679):
as well.

(00:26:58.752):
Well, again,

(00:26:59.992):
as I was saying,

(00:27:00.512):
so if you look to these early states and the pressures that they were putting

(00:27:05.513):
on young men and young women,

(00:27:07.734):
and this is the root of this gendered opposition,

(00:27:11.994):
but also the gendered roles that we have today.

(00:27:14.455):
This idea that a woman's role is as a mother and a man's role is as a kind

(00:27:19.536):
of protector or defender, which puts huge pressure on all of us, right?

(00:27:25.717):
It kind of...

(00:27:28.016):
And we can see the repercussions and ramifications of that even into the present.

(00:27:33.161):
So, for example, a few years ago, I wrote a piece about this for the Financial Times.

(00:27:39.307):
During the Ukraine war,

(00:27:41.228):
quite early on,

(00:27:42.990):
a lot of young Russian men were trying to flee the country to avoid conscription.

(00:27:47.494):
They were being forced into the war effort because so many were dying and

(00:27:51.178):
the Russian government needed more and more conscription.

(00:27:54.278):
Soldiers, all these young men were leaving.

(00:27:57):
So the government put out an advertising campaign,

(00:28:00.822):
an army recruitment campaign, the slogan of which was be a man, right?

(00:28:07.347):
This was the idea.

(00:28:08.868):
If you fight for the state, you are fulfilling your gendered role in society.

(00:28:15.352):
This is your job in society, which is incredibly difficult to

(00:28:22.330):
In every single way,

(00:28:23.691):
it reduces men then to this very simple,

(00:28:26.533):
very singular thing, which is so, so dangerous.

(00:28:30.296):
At the same time,

(00:28:31.518):
the government also put out a new national honour for women,

(00:28:39.244):
that if you have more than 10 children, we will give you a medal.

(00:28:42.287):
It's called the Mother Heroine Medal.

(00:28:44.529):
So again, for a woman...

(00:28:47.648):
To fulfill her obligations to the state, then she is having lots and lots of kids.

(00:28:52.469):
And what is happening in Russia is actually getting replicated.

(00:28:55.689):
This has been horrifying for me to witness over the last few years.

(00:28:59.970):
When I wrote The Patriarchs,

(00:29:01.170):
it wasn't as obvious as it has become in the last couple of years or so.

(00:29:07.452):
But this idea, it's repeated, not just in Russia, in Hungary, in Turkey.

(00:29:11.872):
You see it in the United States now.

(00:29:13.853):
I just read today that...

(00:29:17.066):
Pete Hegseth,

(00:29:18.167):
Secretary of Defense,

(00:29:19.267):
is going to be measuring men's testosterone levels in the army,

(00:29:23.049):
in the military, to see how high or low they are.

(00:29:27.792):
This idea that your ability to meet the standards,

(00:29:32.415):
gendered standards of the state are determined by your biology.

(00:29:36.517):
Now, what does that mean for anyone who doesn't meet those gendered standards?

(00:29:39.879):
Of course, then it means that you don't fit into...

(00:29:42.980):
I think that's part of the reason why there has been such a backlash towards,

(00:29:50.343):
in these very right-wing,

(00:29:52.043):
religiously conservative states,

(00:29:54.164):
this idea that this backlash towards transgender people,

(00:29:58.265):
intersex, queer, anyone who doesn't, and not just gender and sexual minorities.

(00:30:04.452):
All of us who don't fit the pattern tightly enough,

(00:30:08.113):
who aren't in that narrow enough little tiny box that meets their expectations

(00:30:15.456):
for what a man should be and what a woman should be.

(00:30:19.137):
Any woman who's not having kids is not really a woman.

(00:30:22.824):
Childless cat ladies.

(00:30:24.145):
That was the accusation made to Kamala Harris.

(00:30:29.353):
We have to fulfill these roles.

(00:30:31.375):
Otherwise, we're not really men and we're not really women.

(00:30:34.840):
And that's the dangerous thing here is that That is a very patriarchal idea,

(00:30:40.506):
that this is how you fulfill your obligation to the state.

(00:30:43.007):
And I think the most anti-patriarchal thing that we can then do is just be us,

(00:30:48.231):
to just be ourselves and not pretend and not force ourselves

(00:30:52.274):
into these tiny stereotypes,

(00:30:54.636):
these very niche stereotypes, these demands that others have of us.

(00:30:59.140):
Because I can promise you they won't give you ultimate happiness.

(00:31:02.962):
Really, they're designed in order to serve people The elites at the top are in power.

(00:31:08.727):
They're not there for you.

(00:31:11.209):
I think it's important also that gender is structured such that there's no way

(00:31:18.555):
that anyone can really fully meet the expectations.

(00:31:22.859):
I have this piece that people seem to really like that I called Welcome to Motherhood, Fuck You.

(00:31:28.542):
And it's all about how there's no right way to be a mother.

(00:31:33.064):
If you breastfeed your child, you're doing it wrong.

(00:31:35.304):
If you don't breastfeed, you're obviously a child abuser.

(00:31:37.985):
However you give birth, it's wrong.

(00:31:39.406):
However you discipline or don't discipline, it's wrong.

(00:31:42.186):
And so motherhood creates this additional domain through which we can discipline women.

(00:31:47.431):
But even outside of motherhood,

(00:31:49.472):
I don't know a single woman who's not been repeatedly called ugly

(00:31:54.355):
and also been repeatedly called too pretty or too vain or too obsessed with

(00:31:58.998):
the way she looks because the standards exist such that we can't live up to them.

(00:32:04.561):
And so then we're just disciplined according to our failure on those standards.

(00:32:07.803):
So we might as well just be who we want to be.

(00:32:09.987):
Yes, absolutely.

(00:32:11.408):
And I think that's a journey that many of us go through.

(00:32:14.530):
I'm a mother myself.

(00:32:15.751):
I have a 13-year-old son.

(00:32:17.692):
And it's been a very long, slow realization for me.

(00:32:21.414):
And actually, it is through my own work that I have been able to challenge myself.

(00:32:28.050):
I thought I lived a very egalitarian life.

(00:32:30.713):
I did everything on my own terms, that my marriage was on my own terms.

(00:32:33.995):
But when you become a mother, you're absolutely right.

(00:32:36.718):
Every single one of us then faces these social expectations,

(00:32:40.080):
these social demands on us as though people have a right then

(00:32:44.264):
to tell us how we should be living and how we should be parenting.

(00:32:48.067):
And living more generally,

(00:32:50.029):
every choice that we make, even the choice to go back to work and everything.

(00:32:56.020):
And it's been very liberating,

(00:32:58.043):
I think,

(00:32:58.324):
for me in my 40s to realize that I'm just going to do things my way

(00:33:05.133):
because nobody's happy anymore.

(00:33:07.489):
Anyway, so why shouldn't I just make myself happy at the very least?

(00:33:12.193):
And, you know, I love my son.

(00:33:14.415):
I take very good care of him, as does my husband.

(00:33:17.078):
But I'll be damned if I'm going to kind of subsume my entire life

(00:33:20.761):
to other people's expectations and then still,

(00:33:23.744):
you know, end up dissatisfied with my life at the end of it.

(00:33:27.107):
I'm just not going to do that.

(00:33:28.608):
Because no matter what you're doing, someone thinks you're doing it wrong anyway.

(00:33:31.891):
So who cares?

(00:33:32.672):
Yeah.

(00:33:35.515):
So let's talk a little bit about Superior,

(00:33:37.615):
The Return of Race Science,

(00:33:38.876):
which I just I love so much because I was before I shifted to this work,

(00:33:44.037):
I was a medical journalist.

(00:33:45.477):
And I feel like I saw so much

(00:33:49.298):
of what I felt like was old school racist science being repackaged

(00:33:54.338):
as something almost progressive.

(00:33:57.439):
In the book, you argue that the scientific consensus is that race is a social construct.

(00:34:01.700):
So it certainly is.

(00:34:03.525):
Affects our lives and life outcomes,

(00:34:05.409):
but it is not a biological reality,

(00:34:07.633):
yet it remains treated as such,

(00:34:09.397):
even in the very sciences that say that it's not real.

(00:34:13.364):
Um, Talk to me about that, that weird outcome.

(00:34:16.624):
How's that?

(00:34:17.884):
Why?

(00:34:18.444):
Well, again,

(00:34:19.024):
like you,

(00:34:19.624):
it's very difficult to cover the topic of human difference as a journalist or as

(00:34:24.446):
a researcher and not see race pop up repeatedly in scientific papers

(00:34:30.527):
in very inappropriate ways.

(00:34:32.028):
You know,

(00:34:32.388):
it happens even to this day that people are researching racial differences

(00:34:36.169):
between people's brains and, you know, their psychology and do research.

(00:34:40.450):
Black or Asian people more susceptible to certain diseases.

(00:34:44.894):
It's just bizarre, you know, that this happens.

(00:34:47.516):
You don't need to understand the history of how these racial categories came

(00:34:51.979):
about very much to know that all of this is impossible, right?

(00:34:56.983):
We don't exist as different breeds or different variants.

(00:35:00.626):
We are one human species and We have almost, you know, we're almost identical in that.

(00:35:06.606):
In a clinical sense, we're almost identical.

(00:35:09.108):
The biggest amount of variation is between individuals.

(00:35:12.650):
And this is why we,

(00:35:14.752):
you know,

(00:35:15.012):
when people carry out clinical trials for new drugs,

(00:35:17.794):
you need to include very large cohorts,

(00:35:19.636):
not because groups of people are different,

(00:35:21.937):
because on an individual level, we're all different.

(00:35:24.239):
You know, I have a penicillin allergy.

(00:35:27.822):
My husband doesn't.

(00:35:28.742):
My son doesn't.

(00:35:30.478):
But you have to take all of this stuff into account.

(00:35:35.339):
And I think people miss that because these categories are so salient

(00:35:39.700):
in our everyday lives, right?

(00:35:41):
They kind of shape so much of how we live.

(00:35:44.761):
And for a very long time, they were treated as biological, right?

(00:35:48.002):
Throughout the 19th century,

(00:35:49.642):
well into the 20th century,

(00:35:51.042):
and to some degree,

(00:35:51.702):
even today,

(00:35:52.663):
they are still treated as genetic,

(00:35:54.463):
even though they have Barely any, next to zero genetic coherence whatsoever.

(00:36:01.656):
We still imagine that they do.

(00:36:03.439):
You know, we still imagine some meaning there.

(00:36:05.622):
So Superior, which came out in 2019, really was the book I authorised.

(00:36:11.050):
I always wanted to write.

(00:36:12.211):
You know,

(00:36:12.431):
this is why I became a journalist in the first place was because I grew up in

(00:36:15.433):
an area in which the far right were very active in London in the 80s and 90s.

(00:36:21.037):
And this was an everyday part of my life.

(00:36:22.919):
And so it's a really important thing for me to say.

(00:36:28.343):
Little was I to know that in between 2019 and now

(00:36:32.826):
that race science would go completely mainstream,

(00:36:35.408):
you know,

(00:36:35.708):
that these scientific racists would actually grab the reins of power for themselves.

(00:36:42.110):
Yeah, it's really stunning.

(00:36:44.432):
But I feel like the roots of this existed certainly in 2019 and didn't ever really go away.

(00:36:54.179):
So there's this fairly well-known study,

(00:36:57.661):
I think it's from the late 2010s that I'd have to double check,

(00:37:00.904):
which found that about half of white medical residents believe

(00:37:04.046):
at least one just outlandish racist myth,

(00:37:06.548):
like such that black people feel less pain or they have thicker skin.

(00:37:10.651):
Yeah.

(00:37:12.328):
And when I tell people about this study, they think I'm lying.

(00:37:16.834):
They're like, oh,

(00:37:17.355):
you're just one of those leftist feminists just making things up

(00:37:20.699):
because they just can't comprehend that people would believe something so foolish.

(00:37:25.886):
How is it that some of our most brilliant minds are endorsing these ridiculous ideas?

(00:37:32.522):
This is something I address in my next book,

(00:37:34.905):
which is coming out in January,

(00:37:36.206):
is how does a system of classification designed for political purposes

(00:37:41.331):
or bureaucratic purposes then find its way into biology?

(00:37:46.517):
How does it transfer from one system, from one way of thinking into another?

(00:37:50.942):
And it happens so deftly.

(00:37:54.611):
And so completely that people don't actually fully realize that it's happening.

(00:37:58.674):
So I don't want to go into full detail about how it happened, but there is a story there.

(00:38:02.177):
There is a whole lineage of how that happened in the United States,

(00:38:05.600):
then got exported to the rest, the same idea got exported to the rest of the world.

(00:38:12.165):
But it is bizarre.

(00:38:13.145):
It is like living in the twilight zone sometimes

(00:38:15.928):
when you're speaking to people who very firmly believe We'll say to you,

(00:38:22.028):
race is a social construct.

(00:38:23.869):
And yet at the same time,

(00:38:26.451):
I think this person should be given a different drug because they're black.

(00:38:31.714):
It does feel bizarre.

(00:38:33.315):
Even when Superior came out, I have a lot of doctors in my family.

(00:38:35.917):
And I remember one of them saying to me, Angela, that can't be true.

(00:38:40.460):
Different races do, they have different diseases, they need different treatments.

(00:38:45.663):
That's just how it is.

(00:38:46.944):
I was just like, you've That is just isn't, you know, it's in the medical textbooks.

(00:38:52.985):
It's there.

(00:38:54.045):
It's been part of training for such a long time.

(00:38:56.266):
Although I have to say since 2021 or so,

(00:39:00.868):
and the pandemic was a kind of high watermark for a lot of this.

(00:39:04.389):
We saw a lot of these weird claims being made.

(00:39:07.090):
I don't know if you remember, but certainly early in 2020.

(00:39:11.272):
There were medical professionals,

(00:39:13.475):
experts at some of the best universities in the world saying,

(00:39:16.578):
well, maybe this virus won't affect these racial populations in quite the same way.

(00:39:22.204):
Maybe some racial populations will die or contract the virus at lower rates.

(00:39:27.630):
There has never in human history been a virus that Has affected one race differently

(00:39:35.290):
or, you know, that one race has been immune from a virus and another race hasn't.

(00:39:39.672):
It just doesn't work that way.

(00:39:41.053):
You know, genetics just doesn't work that way.

(00:39:44.094):
It affected animals, for goodness sake.

(00:39:46.675):
Why are we even arguing over the possibility that?

(00:39:52.006):
Race would be a factor in who gets COVID-19 and who doesn't or who dies from it.

(00:39:57.190):
But this was real,

(00:39:58.291):
you know,

(00:39:58.531):
that in that kind of heat of the pandemic, these kind of claims were being made.

(00:40:03.135):
And it was after that, that many researchers...

(00:40:08.159):
And medical experts,

(00:40:09.201):
medical bodies then decided to look at the use of not just race in research,

(00:40:15.750):
but also race correction, which is a whole world in itself.

(00:40:18.675):
You know, this is the idea that different races have different beliefs.

(00:40:26.014):
They decided to look at all of this again and fix it because it's a very,

(00:40:31.324):
very unscientific way of looking at patients.

(00:40:33.785):
And it actually means

(00:40:34.646):
that certain socially disadvantaged groups get poorer treatment as a result.

(00:40:41.989):
Because,

(00:40:42.249):
for example,

(00:40:43.490):
when it comes to kidney function,

(00:40:45.991):
there was this assumption made in the 1990s that...

(00:40:51.731):
Black patients have different natural creatinine levels from white patients.

(00:40:56.836):
So when their kidney function was measured,

(00:41:00.320):
they had a different baseline,

(00:41:02.742):
which meant that a black patient that was equally sick as

(00:41:06.926):
a white patient would be less likely to get treatment or less likely to get

(00:41:10.810):
a transplant when they needed one.

(00:41:12.912):
I'm so glad that you're mentioning this.

(00:41:15.335):
Yeah.

(00:41:16.220):
So we had, it was right at the beginning of the pandemic.

(00:41:19.181):
So I think it was before the official guidelines changed.

(00:41:22.163):
But of course, you know, official guidelines don't always influence things.

(00:41:25.945):
There is a very well-known young,

(00:41:28.326):
like younger than 30 Black activist here who died from kidney failure.

(00:41:33.668):
And what happened was his kidney started to fail and he was very sick.

(00:41:39.331):
But we have this test that suggests that,

(00:41:41.892):
well, you know, Black kidneys just naturally work less well.

(00:41:45.635):
They have to show worse signs of kidney failure before they can get dialysis,

(00:41:50.477):
before they can get on the transplant list, before they can get medication.

(00:41:54.158):
And by the time they put him on the transplant list,

(00:41:58.019):
he was essentially already dying and died very quickly after that.

(00:42:02.741):
And I've heard lots of stories where this has happened,

(00:42:05.342):
where someone is obviously sick,

(00:42:07.103):
but because their numbers aren't the right number, we don't treat them.

(00:42:11.124):
But if they were white, the number would be right.

(00:42:14.463):
Yeah.

(00:42:15.644):
And that's the kind of bizarre way that race gets imported into science and medicine.

(00:42:23.551):
But for well-intentioned reasons,

(00:42:24.993):
the people who made these decisions were very progressive,

(00:42:28.336):
well-intentioned people who thought they were recognizing differences

(00:42:32.579):
between racial groups that would help improve medical treatment for these groups and

(00:42:40.827):
It just went so horribly wrong because this presumption of difference is

(00:42:47.232):
the fundamental mistake here.

(00:42:49.093):
We can't presume that these differences exist.

(00:42:51.315):
We have to understand why it is that they exist.

(00:42:55.420):
Black American patients are having worse health outcomes.

(00:42:58.723):
It's not because they're born different.

(00:43:02.766):
It's because of the lives that they have,

(00:43:04.468):
the way that they're treated, the care that they get within the health system.

(00:43:07.610):
It's a whole host of things that lead to that.

(00:43:10.533):
To assume it's because they're born different is a huge mistake.

(00:43:14.456):
And just with tragic results.

(00:43:16.277):
So you mentioned your new book.

(00:43:18.139):
So I want to give you some space to talk about it.

(00:43:20.501):
It comes out in January.

(00:43:22.726):
I have not read it, so I don't know anything about it.

(00:43:26.549):
So I would love it if you would spend these last few minutes telling us

(00:43:30.353):
about this book, what it's called, how you wrote it.

(00:43:33.736):
You know,

(00:43:34.016):
don't give away too much because people need to go out and buy it,

(00:43:36.998):
but what can people expect?

(00:43:39.432):
Well, I think it's born out of this frustration that,

(00:43:43.474):
you know,

(00:43:43.794):
everyone would say to me, well,

(00:43:45.134):
if gender is a social construct and race is a social construct,

(00:43:48.636):
then why do we still use these categories?

(00:43:50.417):
Can't we just dismiss them?

(00:43:52.037):
And the stock answer that people like me would usually give,

(00:43:55.158):
and certainly scientists and sociologists will often give,

(00:43:58.580):
is that, well, they're still socially salient, right?

(00:44:01.501):
They still matter socially, so we have to keep using them for social reasons.

(00:44:06.607):
And I started to wonder if that was a good enough response.

(00:44:10.909):
Does that really get to the heart of it?

(00:44:13.010):
What does it actually mean then to retain categories that we know,

(00:44:19.114):
depending on how they're defined, can have such...

(00:44:22.015):
What's devastating impacts on people's lives?

(00:44:24.758):
What does it mean to retain them for progressive reasons, to help people?

(00:44:30.824):
And this is something I wanted to investigate.

(00:44:33.967):
And I spent very many years looking at it.

(00:44:37.350):
And it's been painful and difficult because I've also had to revisit some

(00:44:40.833):
the assumptions that I had, some of the narratives that I believed.

(00:44:45.313):
And had written about before and then dig underneath them

(00:44:49.076):
and ask actually what's really going on here.

(00:44:51.518):
And what I found again and again is these categories which were retained after

(00:44:57.062):
the 1960s for civil rights purposes mainly,

(00:45:00.224):
you know,

(00:45:00.524):
for in order to track inequality,

(00:45:05.268):
measure discrimination and also administer things like affirmative action or,

(00:45:10.692):
you know,

(00:45:12.508):
For women and minorities to kind of address these policies,

(00:45:16.469):
administer these policies,

(00:45:18.189):
actually again and again have been seized by the right,

(00:45:22.610):
the conservative right often, and are now working against us.

(00:45:28.952):
They're actually harming us more than they're doing us good.

(00:45:32.293):
And this is...

(00:45:35.238):
It's happened in such a subtle way that we haven't fully understood it,

(00:45:40.041):
but at the same time as we have,

(00:45:43.342):
and I'm on the progressive left,

(00:45:44.983):
I'm very much a progressive myself,

(00:45:47.524):
but we have people on the progressive left calling for more classification,

(00:45:52.026):
more data.

(00:45:54.252):
Data disaggregation by sex and race without fully appreciating how that data

(00:45:59.255):
then gets abused and misused and sometimes in really, really dangerous ways.

(00:46:06.639):
Because I fundamentally think that categories that were designed

(00:46:10.562):
for one purpose can never be fully repurposed.

(00:46:14.390):
Somehow their original logic always comes through.

(00:46:17.851):
It always leeches through somehow.

(00:46:20.952):
I have a number of stories in the book of where and how this has happened,

(00:46:25.313):
but altogether it paints a disturbing picture,

(00:46:29.334):
and I think one that will be uncomfortable for many people,

(00:46:33.796):
but I think is incredibly important, especially as we go forward politically.

(00:46:38.337):
What is the next iteration of politics post-Trump going to look like?

(00:46:43.919):
What are we going to lean on in terms of how we design our societies and how we look forward?

(00:46:49.842):
And we have to think very carefully about what role human classification is going

(00:46:53.923):
to play in those societies.

(00:46:57.483):
I'm thinking about years ago when I was pregnant with my first child,

(00:47:01.404):
I was putting a lot of thought into like,

(00:47:03.364):
how are we going to talk to her about gender?

(00:47:05.445):
How are we going to talk to her about race?

(00:47:07.225):
All of that.

(00:47:08.846):
And I read an article by Rosalind Barnett,

(00:47:14.787):
who has written extensively about the harms of teaching children

(00:47:19.328):
that there are innate gender differences.

(00:47:21.768):
And one of the things that she said was that Very young children,

(00:47:26.032):
as soon as you give them a category,

(00:47:28.715):
they see those categories as opposite and they immediately try to fit everything in

(00:47:34.241):
that category.

(00:47:35.142):
So, for example,

(00:47:36.323):
if they have the category boy and girl and they see just one boy who plays soccer,

(00:47:41.769):
they assume that a girl is something who doesn't play soccer.

(00:47:45.013):
Yeah.

(00:47:46.080):
And that really stuck with me,

(00:47:48.280):
this idea that their brains have these very simple categorization systems,

(00:47:52.021):
because I thought, well,

(00:47:52.861):
you know,

(00:47:53.141):
if they start with these overly simplistic categorization systems,

(00:47:57.462):
then by the time they're,

(00:47:58.922):
you know, 7, 8, 9, 10,

(00:48:01.743):
able to understand more,

(00:48:03.623):
they've already had years and years and years of these harmful binaries.

(00:48:08.364):
And I think that has influenced my parenting.

(00:48:11.684):
You know, we're certainly not doing gender-blind or race-blind parenting.

(00:48:16.455):
I'm mindful of when I make a category relevant, when it doesn't need to be.

(00:48:21.799):
Yeah.

(00:48:22.280):
And I think, you know, it's been the same in my household.

(00:48:24.781):
And I'm very lucky to live in New York City,

(00:48:26.383):
where at least compared to other places where I've lived before,

(00:48:32.227):
that pressure is a bit less.

(00:48:34.965):
Or maybe that's just in my social milieu.

(00:48:36.826):
That's just the nature of where I live and how I live.

(00:48:40.847):
But I have noticed that my son growing up just doesn't think about gender that much.

(00:48:45.468):
It's just not that important to him.

(00:48:47.088):
And I think that's true for a lot of children

(00:48:48.369):
because gender doesn't really matter very much until you hit around puberty.

(00:48:53.050):
That's when you really start thinking about it.

(00:48:54.750):
Little children, what difference does it make to them?

(00:48:58.944):
You know,

(00:48:59.184):
it doesn't really matter very much other than the expectations we have on them

(00:49:03.847):
as adults, right?

(00:49:04.907):
Yes.

(00:49:05.367):
Well, and it's important to parents.

(00:49:06.848):
I mean, that's the thing that I see over.

(00:49:09.349):
And I'm stunned by how many times when I meet other parents,

(00:49:13.591):
the very first comment they make to me is one about gender.

(00:49:16.893):
Yeah.

(00:49:17.613):
Oh, girls are so much easier.

(00:49:19.294):
Oh, I'm a boy mom, so my life is crazy.

(00:49:23.016):
And I, you know, I have...

(00:49:25.437):
Two girls who are not like super into the pink sort of stuff.

(00:49:31.121):
So they dress like fairly gender neutrally and often in like stereotypically boy clothing.

(00:49:35.663):
So I have a toddler who likes to wear suspenders and a bow tie, which is very funny.

(00:49:40.647):
But people often assume she's a boy.

(00:49:43.768):
And the attributions they make solely on the basis of assuming this girl

(00:49:49.152):
who identifies as a girl is a boy are just wild to me.

(00:49:53.394):
I never...

(00:49:55.103):
I'm never not surprised and sort of demoralized by it.

(00:49:59.665):
It's very strange.

(00:50:00.565):
Yeah.

(00:50:00.845):
And I think the hardest thing as a parent living in a gendered society,

(00:50:04.467):
as all of us do, is just letting your kids be themselves, right?

(00:50:08.708):
That you want them to fit in.

(00:50:10.849):
So I think this is a lot of the pressure that we face as parents is

(00:50:14.070):
that we want our children to be themselves,

(00:50:16.191):
but at the same time, we want them to fit in.

(00:50:18.352):
And I think that's where a lot of this kind of return comes.

(00:50:21.478):
You know,

(00:50:21.679):
when I was growing up,

(00:50:22.421):
we were kind of moving away from it,

(00:50:24.786):
but we've come back to it now that you go to a toy store,

(00:50:28.456):
everything is pink and blue and You go to any store,

(00:50:31.044):
everything is pink and blue, but also the gender reveal parties.

(00:50:34.127):
Is that what makes any difference?

(00:50:35.468):
Who cares?

(00:50:36.589):
A baby is a baby.

(00:50:39.653):
What are you assuming about that child when you have a gender reveal party?

(00:50:44.457):
All of these things,

(00:50:45.418):
I think,

(00:50:46.179):
are part of this social anxiety that our kids are not going to fit in,

(00:50:50.644):
that we have to make sure that They are lubricated into the gendered norms of

(00:50:56.236):
the society that they're in, otherwise people are going to treat them differently.

(00:50:58.922):
And that's a real fear in a country Or in a world in which there is a backlash

(00:51:04.541):
against gender and sexual minorities,

(00:51:06.261):
in which it can be dangerous in certain places to express that kind of difference.

(00:51:10.702):
But as I said before,

(00:51:12.523):
an anti-patriarchal society is one in which we can just be ourselves,

(00:51:16.064):
in which we don't have to worry about what other people think about us based

(00:51:20.405):
on our gender or our race or any other category in which we can just be taken

(00:51:25.766):
at face value as we are.

(00:51:28.947):
And actually,

(00:51:30.008):
not just in childhood,

(00:51:31.048):
I've noticed,

(00:51:31.769):
I wrote a piece about this recently,

(00:51:33.489):
there's a new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London,

(00:51:37.551):
looking at aging,

(00:51:38.552):
and they asked me to write an essay for a book to accompany that exhibition.

(00:51:43.174):
And I wrote about how as I grow older,

(00:51:47.015):
I've noticed that That gender again matters less than it did when I was in my 20s

(00:51:55.291):
or 30s.

(00:51:56.772):
So just as when you're a child gender doesn't matter very much,

(00:52:00.155):
in old age it starts to matter a lot less as well.

(00:52:03.477):
It becomes less of a salient thing in how you live and how you think about yourself.

(00:52:09.902):
And that for me...

(00:52:13.382):
It says a lot about who we are as individuals,

(00:52:16.806):
that we don't have to kind of be attached to categories,

(00:52:19.689):
even if they matter at some points in our lives,

(00:52:21.671):
we don't have to be attached to them all the time.

(00:52:23.513):
And I certainly feel less attached to my, like,

(00:52:26.956):
I don't go around saying, I am a woman, and this is what it means to be a woman.

(00:52:31.261):
I just, you know, why would we do that anyway?

(00:52:35.265):
Yeah.

(00:52:36.147):
It's almost as though societies aren't forcing you to do that all the time.

(00:52:39.068):
But if you didn't have that pressure, would you ever state that?

(00:52:42.808):
Would you ever feel the need to say, I'm a woman and this is what it means to be a woman?

(00:52:47.929):
You're just yourself and that's okay.

(00:52:50.670):
That's fine.

(00:52:51.190):
That's how it should be.

(00:52:53.710):
I think that's a lovely, parting message.

(00:52:57.751):
I mean,

(00:52:58.051):
isn't that what we all want is to just be able to be the best versions of ourselves

(00:53:02.012):
and allow our children to do the same?

(00:53:04.609):
Yeah, absolutely.

(00:53:05.589):
You know,

(00:53:05.829):
I just saw,

(00:53:06.410):
I will just say to your listeners,

(00:53:08.190):
because I would love them to watch this documentary as well.

(00:53:10.131):
I was just watching the documentary about the chess grandmaster, Judith Polgar.

(00:53:15.192):
I saw that too.

(00:53:17.433):
It was fantastic.

(00:53:18.694):
But you know what was astounding to me throughout that was here is this chess player

(00:53:23.355):
who is clearly brilliant,

(00:53:24.836):
who is beating everyone,

(00:53:26.756):
but people still didn't believe that she could be a great chess player just

(00:53:30.758):
because she was a woman.

(00:53:33.167):
Those classification systems that you were mentioning before,

(00:53:35.488):
that as children,

(00:53:37.008):
once a category is introduced to us, it's very difficult for us to think outside it.

(00:53:43.330):
That happens for all of us.

(00:53:45.291):
Here are these great chess champions,

(00:53:47.911):
these self-proclaimed geniuses,

(00:53:51.252):
telling us on camera that they couldn't believe

(00:53:53.633):
that any female chess player could ever beat them just because they were a woman.

(00:53:59.470):
It sounds bizarre when you hear it expressed like that,

(00:54:02.331):
but that was the case for Judith Polgar,

(00:54:04.032):
and thank goodness that she proved them all wrong.

(00:54:07.053):
Well, but it exists still.

(00:54:08.374):
So I have two daughters who are chess kids,

(00:54:12.455):
and my youngest is quite young,

(00:54:14.236):
and she's one of those young kids who just immediately took to chess

(00:54:18.778):
and has those internal maps of chess.

(00:54:22.619):
It comes naturally for her, not truly naturally, but she's just really good at it.

(00:54:27.521):
And The thing that has made me so angry is when people find out

(00:54:33.571):
about her chess playing or watch her playing chess,

(00:54:35.652):
they say, oh, that's so special for a girl to do.

(00:54:39.554):
And it just makes me want to light myself on fire because,

(00:54:42.896):
of course,

(00:54:43.437):
the coded message there is,

(00:54:45.458):
well, you're a girl, so you're probably not actually that good at it.

(00:54:49.760):
You know, people used to say that to me about maths.

(00:54:51.981):
I studied in engineering at university, so there were very few women in my department.

(00:54:56.184):
But I remember once I went to give a talk,

(00:54:58.957):
And someone said, Angela's very good at maths, which is very unusual for a woman.

(00:55:02.838):
Oh, God.

(00:55:03.679):
The audience would just, what is this?

(00:55:06.940):
It's very strange.

(00:55:07.980):
It's just, you know, that's how classification works.

(00:55:11.362):
There's a hidden harm there because there's almost an invitation to claim

(00:55:16.944):
the compliment of, yes, I am better than the other women.

(00:55:19.805):
Yeah.

(00:55:20.614):
And so it puts talented women into this weird position of like policing other women.

(00:55:25.959):
And if they do, they get praised for it.

(00:55:28.802):
It's horrible.

(00:55:30.804):
Yeah, absolutely.

(00:55:31.705):
We should just be able to see people for who they are.

(00:55:34.467):
Yeah, just like what you like.

(00:55:36.609):
Yes, exactly.

(00:55:37.750):
Exactly.

(00:55:40.514):
All right.

(00:55:40.754):
Well, Angela, this has been so wonderful.

(00:55:42.916):
Thank you so much for coming on.

(00:55:44.257):
I would encourage everybody to go out and get all of Angela's books because they're so good.

(00:55:49.520):
Her new book will be out at the end of January in 2027.

(00:55:54.184):
Once we have pre-order links,

(00:55:55.965):
I will put them in the show notes and I'll put all the other information in

(00:55:58.927):
the show notes as well.

(00:56:00.608):
That's so kind.

(00:56:01.229):
Thank you.

(00:56:01.769):
I appreciate it.

(00:56:02.890):
Angela, thank you so much.