 On Thursday August 6, Cardi B dropped her brand new music video featuring Megan Thee Stallion and the song was called WOP. In less than a week, the video already has over 76 million views on YouTube. The song is about women getting laid and although it's massively popular, conservatives like Ben Shapiro had a problem with it. I did a poll over on my Instagram asking if you all wanted me to cover this topic and it was an overwhelming yes. And by the way, if you're not yet, follow me over on Instagram at the Rewired Soul because I just love interacting with all of you and I've been posting polls lately to get ideas for upcoming video essays. But anyways, personally, growing up with 90s R&B which later turned into people like Lil Jon and the Yin Yang Twins talking about their exploits, I think it's about time female sexuality gets a bit more normalized. As a progressive who grew up here in Las Vegas around plenty of sex workers, in my humble opinion, if you're a woman who wants to get yours, do you boo. I'm not alone either. There's been a lot of talk about the double standard between male and female promiscuity for years, but I feel that the majority of liberals and progressives are all about women doing their thing. On the conservative side of the aisle, things are a little bit different. For those of you who don't know, Ben Shapiro is a prominent commentator in the conservative community who is held on a pedestal as one of their most quote unquote intellectual speakers. In recent weeks, he's been talked about quite a bit and not just for his comments on this new music video, but for his ignorant statements about racism and discrimination. Recently, he was on the Joe Rogan podcast exhibiting his lack of confidence when it comes to the fact that racial disparities still exist in 2020. If you want to watch an excellent video on this subject, I highly recommend you check out the new video from some more news titled, How Ben Shapiro Pretends Nothing Can Be Done About Systemic Racism. But today, we won't be talking about Ben Shapiro pretending systemic racism doesn't exist. We're going to discuss his commentary on the new track, What? The other day, he went viral for discussing the song while reading the lyrics, which became an instant meme. Here's some of the lyrics. You ready? Whores in this house. There's some whores in this house. There's some whores in this house. There's some whores in this house. Hold up. I said certified freaks seven days a week. Wet ass P word. Make that pull out game week. Yeah. You effin with some wet ass P word. P word is female genitalia. Bring a bucket and a mop for this wet ass P word. Give me everything you got for this wet ass P word. Beat it up. N word. Catch a charge. Extra large and extra hard. Put this P word right in your face. Swipe your nose like a credit card. Hop on top. I want to ride. I do a Kegel. Spit in my mouth. Look in my eyes. This P word is wet. Come take a dive and continue along these lines and it gets significantly, significantly more vulgar. But if you're like me during this year of what seems like the apocalypse, the highlight of 2020 has been all of the remixes. Whores in this house. There's some whores in this house. There's some whores in this house. There's some whores in this house. I said certified freaks seven days a week. Wet ass P word. Make that pull out game week. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You effin with some wet ass P word. Bring a bucket and a mop for this wet ass P word. Give me everything you've got for this wet ass P word. Beat it up. N word. Catch a charge. Extra large and extra hard. And the icing on the cake was when Ben Shapiro managed to not only embarrass himself, but his doctor wife as well with this statement after he found out how he was going viral for reading these lyrics. His tweets said, as I also discussed on the show, my only real concern is that the women involved who apparently require a quote unquote bucket and a mop get the medical care they require. My doctor wife's differential diagnosis, bacterial vaginosis, yeast infection or trichomonas. While this has become a great meme. I wanted to take this opportunity to analyze why Ben Shapiro hates this song through the lens of moral politics. People like you and I find his statements about the new Cardi B and Megan the Stallion video absolutely ridiculous. But I feel that it's extremely important that as liberals, we try to understand conservative morality. This is crucial because the reality is that it's an election year and Ben Shapiro was speaking into an echo chamber of conservatives who 100% agree with what he had to say. Well, his wife probably didn't agree with his confusion as to how their female body works, but we'll get into that another time. So if you saw my previous video on Shane Dawson's cancellation through the lens of moral politics, you already have a little bit of a better understanding of where liberal and conservative morals lie. Although we may never convince a conservative that the new Cardi B track is morally okay, having a little better understanding of conservative morality makes it a little bit more possible to potentially get conservatives to align with our political ideals. So, as we dive into the topic of conservative morality, think of yourself as a spy or a secret agent getting into the mind of the other side. If we ever hope to win some of those swing stays, we need to have a better understanding of what matters to conservatives as well as what it likes through their moral lens. But before we get started, if you're new to the Rewired Soul, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell. I do video essays on a wide range of topics to help us improve our critical thinking skills. Here, we believe that by improving our critical thinking, we can also improve our emotional intelligence as well as our overall well-being. If you're like me, you see Ben Shapiro talk and what he says on most topics seems completely irrational. Many of us get extremely frustrated hearing about his stances on various subjects. In most cases, he comes off as racist, homophobic, and transphobic. But today, we're going to take a look at what he said about WAP and how misogynistic his views seem to be. As you can see from the following clip, he tries to take the broad topic of feminism and boil it down to an extremely weak argument. Now, you and I both know that the feminist movement isn't currently and never was all about a woman's right to talk about sex in a song. You and I know that since the dawn of time, women have been treated as less than in most societies around the world. Women have had to fight for their right to vote, get better jobs, and are still fighting for equal pay. Aside from that, they also have to put up with receiving unsolicited pics, have to worry about walking alone to their car, and if they're lucky, they won't work in an environment where they're sexually harassed on an hourly basis. No matter how much you or I may dislike Ben Shapiro, I think it's important that we accept the fact that he's not entirely stupid. More importantly, it's lazy to think that anyone with opposing political views as you is intellectually inferior. While our side prides ourselves in equality and reducing stereotypes, I'm often surprised at how easily we stereotype conservatives. If we hope to make any progress, we need to educate ourselves, use some critical thinking, and start understanding their morality a little bit more. One of the most cited researchers on moral politics is Jonathan Haidt. His book, The Righteous Mind, is a bestseller, and he introduces the idea of seeing morality like taste buds. To introduce this idea, he shares a little story. And it goes like this. When I was a graduate student in Philadelphia, I had a really weird experience in a restaurant. I was walking on Chestnut Street, and I saw a restaurant called The True Taste, and I thought, well, OK, what is The True Taste? So I went inside and looked at the menu. The menu had five sections. They were labeled brown sugars, honeys, molasses, and artificials. And I thought this was really weird. And I went over to the waiter and said, what's going on? Don't you guys serve food? And it turns out the waiter was actually the owner of the restaurant as well and the only employee. And he explained to me that this was a tasting bar for sweeteners. It was the first of its kind in the entire world. And I could have sweeteners from 32 countries. He said that he had no background in the food industry. He'd never worked in a restaurant, but he was a PhD biologist who worked with the Monal Chemical Census Center in Philadelphia. And in his research, he discovered that of all the five taste receptors, you know, they're sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savory. When people experience sweet taste, they get the biggest hit of dopamine. And that told him that sweetness is the true taste, the one that we most crave. And he thought he reasoned that it would be most efficient to have a restaurant that just focuses on that receptor. That will maximize the units of pleasure per calorie. So he opened the restaurant. I asked him, well, okay, how's business going? And he said, terrible, but at least I'm doing better than the chemist down the street who opened a salt tasting bar. Now, he quickly admits that this didn't actually happen, but he always tells this story to kind of get your wheels turning and introduce you to his theory of moral foundations. He breaks them down into the following six categories. Care and harm, fairness and cheating, liberty and oppression, loyalty and betrayal, authority and subversion, as well as sanctity and degradation. Through his research, Heidus found that the strongest morals for liberals, or quote unquote taste buds, are for the morality of care slash harm, liberty slash oppression, and fairness slash cheating. For conservatives, their morals are a little bit more spread out. They care a lot more about things we liberals aren't too passionate about. As you can see from this diagram, the main difference between liberals and conservatives is that conservatives care a lot more about the sanctity and degradation foundation. So, in order to have a better understanding of why Ben Shapiro and other conservatives are so appalled by the new Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion track, we need to understand the sanctity and degradation foundation a little bit better. Heidt describes this foundation as, a foundation that was shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. It underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way. It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants, an idea not unique to religious traditions. Disgust is a powerful feeling that we often don't give too much thought, but there have actually been a lot of psychological experiments around disgust. In one experiment, they surveyed people in one of two conditions, either in an empty hallway or near a hand sanitizer. When near a hand sanitizer, which reminds people of cleanliness, people tend to answer questionnaires in a more conservative way, as they're reminded of the Sanctity and Degradation Foundation. So, now that we know that Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion made Ben Shapiro feel icky, let's take a look at another view of moral politics that comes from the American cognitive linguist, George Layhoff. If you're like me, not only were you flabbergasted by Trump's victory in 2016, but you were blown away at how many women voted for Trump. Then, there are people like Ben Shapiro who have no problem showcasing his misogynistic views and we wonder how someone like him is even married. Well, when we look at morality through a different lens, these answers start to make more sense and we understand why conservative women aren't on board with the new Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion track either. In his book, Moral Politics, rather than having a moral foundation approach like Jonathan Hyde, George Layhoff helps explain political morality by making it analogous to parenting. He describes liberals as having a nurturing parent morality while conservatives follow a strict father moral model. Here's a list of traits in the strict father model. One, a belief that children learn through reward and punishment as an operant conditioning. Corporal punishment such as spanking is favored in this model relative to other models. Two, a belief that children become more self-aligned and self-disciplined by having strict parents. And three, a belief that the parent, particularly the father, is meant to give out rewards for good behavior as well as punish bad behavior. It's also important to understand that conservatives are extremely traditional. They believe in a world where the father is the head of the household and women are there to take care of the children in the home. So, Ben Shapiro and other conservatives believe that WAP is an atrocious song because they don't view these women as women, they view them as daughters. Also, a major aspect of the strict father model is honor as well. So, they believe that women are bringing dishonor to the family when discussing activities such as sex. So, why do so many women vote for Trump? And why do so many women agree with Ben Shapiro? Well, because they have a completely different view of morality, these women are perfectly content with this quote unquote traditional idea of what a woman should be and how a woman should act. Meanwhile, liberals are far more progressive and see women as independent human beings who should be able to act in whatever way they please. This also explains why there's an ongoing debate about which side hosts the most snowflakes. While conservatives call us snowflakes for fighting against racism, misogyny, and discrimination against the LGBTQ community, conservatives are far more sensitive when their traditional values trigger their own feelings of disgust. One of the most recent examples I can think of is when this woman went viral in July for tweeting the following. Cartoon network after hours. They throw it in your face. They hope you're not the kind of parents who monitor what your kids watch and do. They're busy conditioning them. What do you see here? I see witches abusing babies. This is not okay. This is not funny. Hashtag these people are sick. This mother is a white woman and her profile reads as follows. Pro life, pro 2A, proud member NRA, conservative politics, hashtag drain the swamp, hashtag women for Trump 2020. So during this election season, we can take one of two rounds. We can be lazy and think that conservatives are immoral, irrational, and lack intelligence. Or we can start applying critical thinking to try and understand how conservatives think. As a liberal, I find it a little hypocritical of our side to throw blanket statements on conservatives. And in my opinion, it makes us no better than Ben Shapiro. In his interview with Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro denies systemic racism exists by refusing to believe that a child's environment molds who they are. You and I know that's ridiculous. You and I know that with black men being incarcerated at extremely high rates, it's no wonder there are more fatherless homes in the black community. We also know that Ben Shapiro is wrong to think that it's as simple as a black kid in the hood choosing not to sell drugs or not to join a gang. We know that how you're raised shapes who you are and what is normal for you. So we need to extend this to conservatives as well. When a person is raised in a conservative household, they're going to be molded to have conservative morals. And unfortunately, kids raised in a racist or misogynistic household are going to be molded to have racist and misogynistic views. But you and I are better critical thinkers than Ben Shapiro. And we know that if we hope to change minds, we need to have mature conversations and practice some empathy. All right, everybody. I hope you enjoyed this video essay. And yeah, I was really excited to make this because I've been meaning to wanna jump into conservative morality. Like I've mentioned, you know, this is something that I'm really interested in. I think we need to start better understanding both sides so we can have better conversations. So I hope you enjoyed this video. A lot of you voted for it over on my Instagram. Again, don't forget to follow me over on Instagram after we are in Seoul. 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