 the question of like how feminism plays into the sexual revolution and the degree to which are we living in a patriarchy? Are we living in a matriarchy perhaps? You know, are women miserable? If so, like why are they so miserable? Anakachyan had some really interesting insights on that. Can we roll that? All of us here on stage are the winners of the sexual revolution and the sexual revolution is the winner of the culture war. We finally found a way to have it all and yet we're still not happy. Realistically, men really only had a few decades of enjoying the fruits of the pill before Title IX and Me Too made male sexuality presumptively illegal and yet here we are still having the same debate from the same assumptions. Women are objectified and oppressed though it's no longer clear by whom. The patriarchy is alive and well though apparently there's also a crisis of masculinity. No offense but the idea that we live in a society where men are in charge is funnier than anything Tim Dillon has ever said. Both men and women are invested in maintaining the fiction that women are the fairer sex, not operating out of ordinary incentives just like everybody else. If you disagree you're either autistic or an incel or both which means you're right-wing and you're not entitled to an opinion. The problem we now face is that this unofficial style has been officially baked into the system. The most problematic legacy of feminism is that it made topping from the bottom the top down procedural thing. So my beef with the sexual revolution has less to do with its incoherent attitudes towards sex than with the way the resulting chaos has been leveraged to capture the institutions, the university, the media and so on. What this means in practice is getting rid of the sexy 60s counterculture stuff while keeping the sexless school marm HR department stuff. I mean this is the view that I think most closely aligns with how I get things. I really appreciate her bringing the Title IX and Me Too era into this and basically saying if we're living in such a patriarchy why is it that there is so much you know so many so much HRfication of our institutions that end up in many cases depriving men of due process and acting frequently with this assumption that they have erred that they have done something wrong when in reality the facts don't necessarily support that. How did you react to Anna's clip? I mean she's like I'm quite sympathetic to a lot of it. Again this might be like the part of the opposition that I like agreed with the most. It's like I said like feminism happened and like men don't have a place anymore and this sucks. To be clear I think it's worth it. I grew up in a culture where we didn't really have feminism and it was worse than the way men have it today quite clearly but that doesn't mean men don't have it bad today and I think like we're just like a bunch of primates kind of reacting to what came before in unnuanced and uncompassionate ways and I think like as a culture we're sort of doing a thing where like man women had it shitty for a long time now men should have it shitty. What are men good for anyway? Which is another big part I feel like I don't hear talked about is like men used to have the function of dying in wars and fighting bearers and there's no more wars and no more bearers to fight but like women are still giving birth to children and having to do childcare that's like an ancient burden that hasn't gone away and so we're like why why men like I think we sort of culturally figured that like the balance of inherent gendered obligations is now no longer like men are paying their fair share in some way which of course is not their fault but I think this is partly some of the reason why we're seeing this general backlash so we just need artificial wombs so then we can make it even. Yeah I mean what I hear in that clip is that there's a that you know Anna thinks and I think there's a lot to what she's saying that the discourse is sort of stuck in a past reality that does not exist anymore and that doesn't exist. In some ways it doesn't exist. I mean there's pockets like I grew up in this world like there's there's echoes of like treating women like shit that still happen and I think in most like like Western media liberal big city culture that like where these people are coming from they're not very exposed to like women being treated like shit but across the world in conservative cultures like women don't have rights and in like conservative cultures in the America still women like are treated like secondhand citizens. Give viewers I mean Zach and I know a little bit about this from an earlier interview two years ago that we did with you but give viewers a little bit of a sense of the background that you come from. Yeah just conservative fundamentals to evangelical homeschooled Christianity in Idaho like you know pastor type dad in a stay-at-home housewife mom where I was expected to grow up and become a housewife. Yeah I remember asking my parents like why why do you think I should go to college if I'm supposed to be a housewife and they answered well you can go to college to get a little bit of education so that you can homeschool your children and of course meet a husband there. And so like oh that's my life. Yeah so do you feel like there there's a sort of romanticization going on in that debate because I mean I know I watched the whole thing in preparation for this and you know both Luis and Anna say like they're not for you know getting rid of abortion or rolling back access to birth control there's basically no policy changes that they're proposing but it seems to be more about a vibe or something like that especially in Anna's case like that we have this weird battle ongoing battle of the sexes that is mediated by some HR type bureaucracy. So like I mean do you share that sense and is there a way to break out of that sort of rigid regulation of sexual norms without reverting to the like oppressive you know of barefoot in the kitchen for every woman past? There's this like the concept of I mean I'm actually forgetting the term but it's like when a new religion starts it's really aggressive and terrible at surviving like early Christianity or like what new converts to Christianity tend to be way more devout and insane than people who like grew up in it for many generations like when Islam first started it was like go kill everybody and now like we have a lot of people who are Muslim have like a watered down version. I think this is like a natural process and I think right now we radically changed our tech suddenly we're having sex without getting pregnant this is crazy society has changed very rapidly and I think that we're in the process of like very early stage cultural rearrangement. I have kind of good faith that like in the same way that a new social tech in the past like took a while to like calm down and stop destroying everything like we developed sort of a mimetic immunity in the same way we're going to have this like we're like trying to figure out how to handle it like people have freedom and they're mad at the previous thing and they're like lashing out and reacting and men are going ah this hurts me and like this is just not sustainable like in order for a civilization to thrive we're going to have to figure out how to move forward and my guess is that this is not going to look like shaming women who are socio-sexual like you can't have like a wonderful thriving society without generating backlash by alienating a portion of your members this is just not going to work so figuring out some sort of system where we're like hey wide varieties of what you want are okay if you wouldn't want to do the pride and prejudice all the way sex in the city like we're going to be here for you and also maybe have compassion for men I don't know like I think just like learning to have cultural compassion because like right now men are sort of the other they're they're considered like the villain role and I think as more people are like giving birth to men and raising men and like figuring out how to make that work I think we're going to see us chill out culturally what was the thing said on the debate stage that you most disagreed with something onto the clips that we showed I mean I mean I don't remember but probably if they were talking about violent porn at all that's usually the one where I'm like that mostly I can find like a good argument for the other side like well yeah I could see it you know this too for some people but with the that's always the thing that gets me as like oh the other male sexuality like oh we're catering to like men want to just have ridiculous sex with women that women don't want I mean in a way your you it seems your project is to push the sexual revolution further because you are an advocate for decriminalizing legalizing all sex work that would be a major change in American culture do you have any expectations as to if that were ever realized what would that look like like what what sort of changes might we expect and are we as a as a culture are we are we ready for that given this ongoing battle of the sexes or whatever we want to call it I mean like legal we legal and culture are different questions and they're hard like if I like we're in control would I change the laws sure if I were control would I change culture like I don't think I'm I don't I can't even see them how to do that I think has to be a slow change and I mean to some degree I'm trying by doing things like this like being a public sex worker and to be like hey guys it's okay there's lots of ways to be a human and they're not wrong just because they're different from you but I yeah decriminalizing sex work would be a fantastic start like if you're going to protect classes at all I would like people like sex workers to be protected along with other minorities like sex workers can't often have trouble getting loans for houses participate in the financial system are often debanked we've had like you know operation choke point as I'm sure you're familiar went and did have a massive chilling effect on anybody doing business with anything that might be considered obscene yeah and this is all just making it hard to survive and to do business with sex even if everybody involved is consenting adults I think it's like a massive shame hey thanks for watching that clip from our conversation with Ayla about porn laws the sexual revolution and the freedom to browse the internet privately and speak anonymously you can watch another clip right here or the full conversation over here