 Hello my friends and welcome to episode 70 of Patterson in Pursuit. I've got an extremely fun interview breakdown for you today with my conversation with Dr. Michelle Beloss Walker. We had a conversation about feminist philosophy. And for the first 15 minutes or so, I think we were roughly on the same page. And then as the interview went on longer and longer, I felt like the wheels started getting a little bit shaky and then by the end, well I won't spoil it for you but suffice to say, we very strongly disagree. I spoke with Dr. Walker several months ago when I was in Australia. She teaches at the University of Queensland. Before we dive into it, let me tell you about the Meditation app, 10% Happier. Meditation for fidgety skeptics. They've been sponsoring the show for the past several weeks and I've gotten some very good feedback from you guys who are taking advantage of the one month free trial that you can get by going to steve-patterson.com slash meditate. The host of the app is Dan Harris who's the author of the New York Times bestseller 10% Happier and he goes around interviewing professional meditators about the basics of meditation and then starts from the basics works into more advanced concepts. If you like the style of this show where I'm going around talking to people about the basics and then working into advanced concepts, chances are you're going to like this app. But don't take my word for it. Stay skeptical and investigate meditation for yourself at steve-patterson.com slash meditate. All right, I hope you guys enjoy my interview breakdown of episode number 51, my conversation about feminist philosophy with Dr. Michelle Bullos Walker. All right, so the beginning of her interview talked about just definitions for what is feminist philosophy and she brought up the point kind of right off the bat that by just being a woman doing philosophy is going to affect how society perceives the work that you're doing and I think there's some measure of truth to this probably more so in past centuries but I think at present women do face some kind of double standard in their work. Only reason I say this is because I know in talking to my wife when she's had professional jobs she is treated differently. She's kind of poo-pooed, padded on the head, not taken as seriously as if she were a man. This seems especially true in the medical world. If you go to a doctor's office and you're a woman it seems like they practically assume that something's wrong with your mind and your head and you've got some psychological problems rather than biological problems. So I have seen this however my suspicion is also that it gets blown way out of context. If you're serious about talking philosophy I think the majority of people are just going to be trying to treat your ideas seriously and not obsess over the fact that you have a different set of genitals than they do. But this interview I felt like the first section we at least had some common ground to the extent that there are insecure people out there who are not comfortable treating a woman's ideas as they would a man's ideas that's a problem. The feminist element helps us ask questions about what is going on when it is or why it is an issue that being a woman and doing philosophy is a big deal. It shouldn't be a big deal. So when you say it's a big deal are you saying is this an institutional criticism from about the philosophy profession or are you saying this is a more and even broader critique of society in general? It's both. As you'd imagine it's both because at the institutional level we know statistically that there are definitely fewer of us of women doing being paid let's say as professional philosophers but that fits within a social context that assumes that the philosopher is already a male or a male body or a masculine body and is confused when confronted with this notion of a woman occupying this very privileged position. So this is where we start to disagree a little bit. It comes up a lot more later in the discussion but it's about economics. So used as evidence of the problem of discrimination in the philosophy profession is the fact that there are fewer female philosophy professors than there are male philosophy professors. I don't think the most likely explanation here is because of the patriarchy or because of discrimination against women. I think it's a kind of natural consequence of men and women being different. Men and women throughout their lives make different choices they think a little bit differently and so we would expect to see discrepancies in their chosen career paths but more on that later. So on the one hand yes it's true that women have been somewhat marginalised often downrightly excluded like the 18th century particularly we'd talk about a period of time where women are physically barred from the practice of philosophy. But throughout that entire history philosophy women do exist and one of the important things to point to is where they do exist and when they do exist to point out who they are and to learn as much as we can about the work that exists. So on the one hand feminist philosophers are involved in recuperative work finding that work that does exist it's not easy to do obviously but championing it once that work is found and discussed and there are some very very high profile and classic cases and names there and the work of those women philosophers who haven't been mainstream but who have existed is just fabulous work. And I find it very hard to disagree with that and that seems like valuable work I come at it from the perspective that because I think men and women do think a little bit differently female insights can give you a new perspective on ideas that you know the male mind can't necessarily solve or that the male mind doesn't see quite as clearly or from that particular angle. So I buy the idea that throughout history there is some degree of silencing of women's voices and I think that means the project of trying to hear those voices is valuable but again I think the closer we get to the modern era the less I'm convinced that the reason we have relatively few female philosophers is because they're literally excluded from the profession. So those voices exist and we want to claim those voices on the other hand women have been sadly lacking in number and you know effectively we have been marginalized and in many instances excluded and silenced and that's a problem. So then we had a brief exchange about something I love talking about which is the relationship that my wife and I have had in the context of philosophy. So my wife Julia is my partner in philosophy pretty much every idea that I feel like is good enough to bring to market. I run by Julia we talk about it she hits me with skepticism she's always my first line proof reader she pokes holes in my argument I try to poke holes in hers and on top of that entirely due to her existence. I think I kind of discovered the meaning of life which is love. So my philosophy is massively impacted by my wife as is my ethical system. So I wondered if part of the reason that women aren't as well represented in terms of works of philosophy that we read is because they're playing this massively important role behind the scenes so the men maybe get the public credit but behind them is all of the work the conversations the insight the support that goes unseen perhaps that is part of the reason that we see this disparity. What I think is that the idea of a man and a woman two people being able to explore and express and motivate each other to think more carefully about issues whether they be love or reason or rationality or whatever that this is a marvelous thing I think this is a fabulous thing but that's occurred historically within the context of let us just loosely refer to it as a patriarchal social context now that's changed from time to time and that's changed from place to place patriarchy doesn't exist in the same form in all under all circumstances but what I mean by that is that structurally what happens is that what might even occur within the context of a really supportive relationship between two people then is contextualized within a social context that says the man is usually paid for that work and gets the social recognition in the public sphere whereas the woman's contribution to that becomes the silent foundation of of the identity that that man then then builds and develops through his public career. Now the part that I might disagree with here is the implication that this is kind of nefarious that there's a social context in which everybody thinks oh you know the woman doesn't get the credit the man did the work I'm not sure if putting it in that kind of negative social context is necessary a good example of this is mothers pretty much everybody knows that mothers do kind of unsung heroic work they do this massively important job raising kids raising future people and yet they often get virtually no credit I don't think that's because society doesn't value mothers I just think it's the nature of that role is one that is generally less in the public eye for better and for worse. Why do you think that's the case that there is this the male I think that's a good way of putting it the male gets paid for it or is seen as like the part of his career and then the woman most frequently not as much why is that the case if that's kind of a social thing so that's the first question go ahead. Can we go straight at that then well very simply at one level it's because structurally at various times women are literally excluded from the public domain so they they cannot or have not obtained work paid work in this case as philosophers so it's the economically ideologically culturally there are ways of excluding women from the public domain so in one sense one of the important things that we need to talk about is the fact that you've got these various oppositions in Western culture not only in Western culture but specifically for us then and they vary over time and place too but you've let's say we've got man and woman we've got men and women we've got masculinity and femininity but we've also got the public and the private and the public domain historically this is what patriarchy how we can define patriarchy in one sense if you like the public domain is the domain that that men have a privileged access to men go back and gain sustenance and support in the private domain in and through the family in and through the wife the partner in and through the mother importantly but they then once sustained and nourished they go back out into the public domain to be social subjects or citizens or whatever they become and historically women have had limited access to that public domain I think there's some truth mixed in with some ambiguity here so first of all the ambiguity is the tense verb tense is this what's happening at present or is this a historical description of what has happened very important and we get into in a minute but where I think there's truth is that women really have been barred or discouraged at the very least from pursuing careers which are seen as traditionally male dominated I'm not talking about being a firefighter I'm talking about being in the intellectual sphere my guess is that part of the reason for these social structures isn't fully nefarious like I said I don't think it's a cabal of men getting together ringing their hands and saying how can we exclude the opposite sex from the workplace I think it's something like this that men and women are different our brains work differently on average we choose different careers from one another and so you get a kind of natural striation in the social order I don't have any problem with that as long as it's natural and people are freely making choices but then I think you get a type of people let's call them social authoritarians who think that those natural patterns need to be enforced that those natural patterns are the way it must be that women in general choose more nurturing career path so more nurturing work than men and if a woman chooses otherwise well that's not her place or a modern version I'd say of the social authoritarian are those radical feminists I don't think my guest is one of them but those radical feminists who disparage women for choosing traditional gender roles so if a woman wants to be a homemaker she wants to be a mother she wants to go into the service sector she wants to be a nurse traditionally female roles now the the social authoritarian says oh you're promoting the patriarchy you shouldn't make that decision you should go be an engineer or be a philosopher or a politician I'm not a fan of the social authoritarian I think there's a balance here you can respect that men and women are different in general they're going to be choosing different careers but for those who don't fall into that that average belcher that's totally fine if you're a man that wants to live your life in a way that's seen as traditionally feminine great if you're a woman that wants to be an engineer a computer scientist you want to take on traditionally masculine career great so long as you're freely doing it as long as you're being true to yourself I don't think people have any reason to stick their nose into your business and even have an opinion on the matter so it's not surprising that women have had limited access to careers in philosophy or two identities as philosophers that's exactly the second question that I wanted to ask you about when we apply that lens historically I think that's pretty clear especially if you read some of the writing of various philosophers on their thoughts about women it's pretty explicitly that they're not fit for this particular domain so do you think that that is still the standard Western culture today because why would have these conversations with people and when I interact with the world at least I mean I've only been around for a couple of decades but it doesn't seem like it has that same explicit exclusion from the workplace so that's the first question do you think that the that type of deliberate exclusion from the workplace is still going on today and if not where did things start changing okay well there's there's ways of thinking about this and one is that you have periods where women are literally excluded from the public domain or the workplace or or the institutional practice of philosophy and that's obviously problematic but there we can say now that that in certain Western countries in certain parts of the Western world women now have that access that access though is still mediated because that access depends on available finances and we know that women are financially less less well off than men we know statistically that's the case hang on I need a citation on that one I'm assuming she's talking about the gender pay gap which in pretty much every version is a load of baloney I've seen gender pay gap arguments that are so crude as to literally add together all of the money that men make all of the money that women make divide that number by how many men and women there are and say aha men are paid on average x percent more than women and that's evidence of the patriarchy and double standards some of those analyses don't even account for differences in jobs differences in how many hours men and women work differences in the relative risks that are associated with different jobs so if you're a lineman working on live telephone wires chances are you're a man and chances are you're making a ton of money because you're taking a huge risk by being up on those telephone poles so pretty much every way you split the gender wage gap it fails to show anything substantive and maybe that's not what she's talking about I'm not sure there's a bunch of really great work online just eviscerating this notion that won't seem to die that you know men get paid a buck 20 for every dollar that a woman makes or something like that so there are all there are still prohibitions or or mediations that make it difficult for women to access in say the institutional study but even when women do access the institutional study or even a career in philosophy there are still dangers and pitfalls and some of those uh go along the lines of what kind of philosophy do you do once you're there so it's not just enough to to study philosophy or to become a philosopher but do you then get a chance to in a sense think independently write independently or do you which historically has also been the case for some women who've gained that privilege access they've become faithful faithful um faithful kind of disciples of male philosophers and have worked often these philosophers are long dead but they've often become faithful commentators on the work of these philosophers in an attempt to make sure that the the work of that particular philosopher lives on while not in a sense promoting their own work or their own independent thought that's what i'm not saying that happens all the time it doesn't not by any means but historically as women have made partial gains into the public domain um it hasn't always been the case that just accessing the public domain has been enough for women to actually become philosophers in their own right so if i understand her argument correctly she's saying that because in some cases women are commenting on the ideas of other thinkers rather than creating their own ideas this is also evidence of some kind of discriminatory structure in professional philosophy i mean my perspective is this is a problem of academia it's not a problem having to do with men or women it's a problem that academics in general with stuck within the system are faced with there's countless countless papers written by men commenting on the ideas of obscure thinkers about ideas that don't matter and will never matter just because they face the economic incentives to publish or perish within the academic system the amount of critical independent reasoning taking place within the academy especially in philosophy as far as i can tell is approaching nil so how would you respond to somebody that says the the key part is that women have the access kind of structurally and culturally that people aren't explicitly saying you know you can't have this career as a woman that's that is important and let's say that that's been achieved in the west that there's not there's not a gender requirement for being a philosopher how would you respond to somebody saying the discrepancy that we see in the the different areas of research from biology to philosophy to social sciences and economics those gender differences are based on the choices of women so if somebody said women in general aren't usually as interested in original contributions to philosophy as men how would you respond to that obviously i disagree but i'd i'd look again to the structural the structural conditions that that support or or don't support women in educational possibilities and i'd say i don't think it's ever the case that women are not interested in those things but i would say that again structurally young girls and young women are often dissuaded in a range of complex ways from having an interest in those things and i think that's a different thing this seems to presuppose the idea that without cultural influences we would have a kind of 50 50 split men and women in every single field there would be no differences that women and men would naturally tend to choose the same things i see no evidence of this and and i see mountains of evidence to the contrary the best thinker i've ever encountered along these lines is thomas soul he does incredible deep analyses of differences in social groups so for example why is it that immigrant chinese all over the world tend to have higher socioeconomic status than immigrant africans well he says it's not biology it's cultural differences it's they tend to choose different things and specifically when he's talking about immigrant populations coming to the same country he says they were different when they got on the boat so they're different when they got off the boat in other words differences in culture are going to naturally reflect in socioeconomic differences i think the same things that play here differences in men and women are naturally going to play out in differences in choices that those men and women make can you give some examples of of that like where they would start and well if that's complex even i think again that comes back to really basic ideas or the really basic oppositions that still throb in the heart of the western cultural imaginary and that is something along the lines of we still have this division this oppositional division between reason or rationality on the one hand and irrationality we still have this division between reason and emotion we still think from primarily in terms of body and or mind and body and the problem is that particularly with the that dichotomy or that opposition between reason and irrationality it is still has historically been and is still in the contemporary day used to ground the difference between men and women and masculinity and femininity in really often subtle ways sometimes not so subtle too but whether from advertising to you know to scientific discourses and the the presumptions that go behind certain scientific methodologies or philosophical methodologies we still can find plenty of evidence of this separation of reason and irrationality aligning with masculinity and femininity and i would add i think that's a good thing i don't care if you call reasonability masculine reasonability in this sphere of philosophy is a good thing i'm not exactly sure what she's getting at here it sounds like she's saying that we have a distinction between reason and emotion that we view a rational method is better than an emotional method is somehow sexist or biased towards men because women are seen as being more emotional and irrational if that's what she's claiming then i would say unabashedly any influence towards the acceptance intolerance of irrationality or emotionalism in philosophy is a bad thing if you want to call that feminist philosophy you want to call the influence of women that's a horrible thing i think that's very insulting to women too i married a very rational woman who would not in any way want standards to be lowered so that we try to demasculinize rationality now again i'm not exactly sure if that's what she's saying it seems a bit vague to me so if you guys kind of understand what she's getting at then feel free to correct me in the comments so in something like you said there are the presuppositions and and our approaches to scientific inquiry my intuition is to think of course i'm open to being wrong here my intuition is to think that some division between rational and irrational not on gender lines but some division between those fears is correct that there is something like rational thinking about something and there is irrational thinking about something are you saying that that division itself is is a mistaken division or are you saying that when it's tied to gender that's when that's a mistake i think it's a difficult thing i think that we all intuitively feel comfortable the sense that there there are reasonable statements and there are rational statements or there are reasonable worlds and irrational worlds particularly in the modern time but it is that overlay it's the really the series of very complex interconnections between reason and rationality and masculinity and scientific notions of proof and evidence and whatever it's it's the interconnections that separate femininity and the feminine and woman and and passionate spheres from those realms that that to me is the the most obvious problem all right now i'm going to go out in a limb here and try to interpret that maybe i'm going to be wrong but it sounds like what she's saying is this notion of scientific reality is an idea that generally comes from men it's a kind of a the traditional male way of thinking about things and it's a problem that if we demasculinized our way of thinking about reality then we would see that it's more soft than that perhaps that perhaps emotion should play a larger role in our epistemological process now if that's what she means then i'm of the persuasion to say okay well the soft line of thinking actually probably should be excluded because that's the reality is the way that it is we can grasp at it through various methods there's a right way of doing it and there's a wrong way of doing it if we were to take the line of reasoning that said you know the feminist way of approaching science is that reality is a little fuzzier or as you might say a little more complex it's less concrete than we men think it is then i'd say nope that's a wrong-headed belief system for reasons i can point out and i think it is rather insulting on behalf of rational women that one of the claims of feminist philosophers if not dr michel bullos walker than others who've written about science that they argue the general scientific method is this male dominated patriarchal line of inquire and reasoning about the natural world as if it's a bad thing so are you saying that the way that that kind of the standard approach to science the reason evidence logic data gathering very linear approach are you saying that that is itself something which is masculine or that is are you saying that that is socially considered as being the masculine approach to howie definitely the latter i i don't see it as masculine and i certainly don't see it as male but i do see it as a tradition that many men have been engaged in and i like to think of these things more in terms of a kind of cultural imaginary that we have this this kind of set of beliefs about reality which we don't question very readily about how we divide the world how we understand the world and our our beliefs about masculinity and femininity are structured by this imaginary not by reality but by this imaginary so this is operating at a not yet conscious level really and and that's important that that then just does so much work in determining or structuring the possibilities of little boys and little girls and various groups you know from an early stage on again it sounds like this is a criticism of the scientific way of thinking about the world i mean i've got my own criticisms of scientism but it comes from kind of a rationalist scientific perspective what i do find remarkable is a couple of claims here near the end where she said this is operating at a not yet conscious level if that's true lots of questions about the metaphysics of how that works but how does she have access to it which ties into the second question which is she's talking about this as like a cultural structure it's remarkable to me that some people view themselves as being able to speak on behalf of culture and to be able to get into the cultural psyche that is somehow external to just their belief system they've tapped into the public mindset the public not yet conscious mindset i readily admit i'm not able to do that or at the very least i'm not able to make confident proclamations about the state of the not yet conscious cultural mind i do ask her some more direct questions about the metaphysics of what she's talking about a little later on so if i were to try to rephrase that correct me if i'm wrong is your claim that even the way that most people conceive of the nature of the world of reality is already structured in maybe an incorrect fashion that even the way that we approach thinking about the world already contains some kind of a an elimination of possibilities what i'd say is that it's mediated and that for us reality is connected with a set of fantasies as well and i don't mean that that's absolutely terrible and possible that's just the way i think things operate we have a kind of fantastic view of reality in a sense and in that we separate these notions of masculinity and femininity out all too strongly and that's because the overlying structure or let's call it really the underlying structure is still a patriarchal one if our society were not patriarchal the imaginary wouldn't separate masculinity out into the superior categories of rationality and femininity out into the inferior categories of irrationality i do not understand this is the patriarchy so deeply lodged in our communal subconscious not yet conscious mind that it affects fundamentally the way that we approach reality and the way that we think about reality is structured in terms of male and female because of the patriarchal mind i really don't know but just to go back a step to you mentioned before or you asked whether or not i saw that as a fair distinction or not rationality and irrationality i guess intuitively you know i do but at the same time i acknowledge along with a lot of other philosophers that rationality and irrationality and not it's not a fixed relation and it's not a fixed opposition it's absolutely historically constructed it changes it varies it it it modifies and that that's important we have in the west we have dominant ways of of thinking about those terms rationality and irrationality but the claims of rationality largely produce the question of what is irrational so irrationality doesn't exist in its own right it is the kind of it's produced through the imaginary of of rationality if you like if that makes it i don't know the imaginary can we debate this what is this theory the imaginary is this fundamental i don't understand it here's a candidate for universal timeless insanity somebody believes that a logical contradiction is true they believe that squares can be circular that dogs can be not dogs that bachelors can be married that as far as i can tell is an objective criteria perhaps one of the only objective criteria for determining sanity logical consistency or specifically if somebody rejects the law of identity meaning they think something is the way that it is not then that means they're crazy they could be crazy five thousand years ago or they could be crazy ten thousand years in the future that's always going to be crazy you use the term the fantastical and imaginary for talking about how descriptions of reality can you unpack that a little bit more for me so are you saying that we really don't have any kind of reasonable connection or or reliable connection to the nature of the world and we're and it will kind of making things up because when i think of those words that's just what comes to mind it's fantastic it's just like storytelling that may or may not correspond to anything it's not as it's not as extreme as it seems i don't think that we are out of touch with reality i just think realistically that reality is produced you know in in the sense that we overlay from the experiences and the events of our lives we overlay a whole realm of cultural knowledge or cultural history or what i was referring to before as the imaginary and that filter we filter our reality through those those beliefs and values that we have inherited largely so no i'm not trying to pretend that you know reality is that we are totally out of touch with reality intuitively we have a sense of what's happening around us but our relation with everything that happens around us is also mediated at a somewhat not quite conscious level by by unacknowledged assumptions beliefs and prejudices so again i think there's a bit of truth mixed in with some vagueness here this is i think a pretty common line of reasoning that people have they think that reality is constructed because what they conceive of as reality is the nature of their experiences or the content of their experiences they'll say things like maybe reality is out there but all i experience is my representation of reality so my reality is different from your reality because your experience of the world is different i think that's a bad way of using the term reality it might be true that my experience of the world is different from yours in other words my perspective is a different perspective than yours but the cause of the phenomena that we're experiencing can still be an objective and external reality so if you and i are looking at a vase between us your perspective on the vase is going to be different than my perspective on the vase your internal picture of the world is going to look different from my internal picture of the world that doesn't mean your reality is different from my reality means your representation of reality is different than my representation of reality the cause of our experiences is the bits of matter located in space in the external world which is impinging upon our senses and representing the world to us in two different ways but we can still talk about it and those two different pictures of reality are still going to usually have a heck of a lot in common now it's also true to say that there are some measure of subconscious belief systems which also impact the way that the world is represented to us a good example would be your religious beliefs so if you believe that god is actively intervening in your everyday life it's not something you're an idea you're consciously holding it's it's in your subconscious belief system that as you interact with the world you're going to be seeing signs of god everywhere if you believe that everybody's looking at you funny it's a subconscious belief you have insecurity problems then the way that you're interacting with the world is going to be different because your representation of the world is going to be taking every glance as if somebody's judging you so i agree those belief systems definitely affect the way that the world is represented to us however i still think it's an external reality and i think it's the case that these subconscious beliefs aren't external to our own minds there's not a cultural mindset there's not this kind of abstract community thought or community way of thinking as far as i can tell all beliefs are located in the mind or minds of individuals so if you've got a cultural belief all that means is you've got a set of beliefs yourself in your mind which is shared by other people in their minds not by the group mind a lot of what we've been talking about comes back to the question of philosophy not just as an institution although that's that's really important but philosophy as a discipline and a lot of what we've been talking about is is kind of maybe it's a little clearer when we think about what it is that philosophy as a discipline is or what it does disciplines on on the whole are mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion so philosophy sets itself up in the west as a discipline at specific times and places and in doing that it excludes whole worlds outside of itself and says that's not philosophy and to a large extent philosophy starts by its definition or its disciplinary nature is to say philosophy is not what's irrational or philosophy is not what's feminine or philosophy is not what's literary or any number of other things and so its definition often starts in a negative sense and then reason rationality careful consideration ideas like this are often then seen as counters to what's irrational so one of the things that i'm trying to suggest here is that masculinity and femininity get mapped on to that complex process and that in philosophy the the whole notion of discipline is to include and exclude and in that sense masculinity and femininity get caught up in that inclusion and exclusion and on the whole in the west masculinity gets included inside all of the positive terms and values whether they be reason or rationality or whatever they are and femininity gets constructed outside of that disciplinary boundary so on one level we can just simply say that masculinity is the kind of inside to philosophy and femininity is the kind of outside so of course that explains historically why women have been excluded from philosophy on the whole but the the situation is so much more complex because by setting up an excluded zone outside of the discipline of philosophy philosophy actually has brought the feminine into its core because it needs the notion of the feminine to define itself against so it's central to philosophy even though it's kind of silenced in that center okay where does this theory come from is this an empirical claim is this a theoretical claim is this self-evident where does this insight come from that philosophy defines itself as being masculinized by contrast to the non philosophic which is the feminine and so though philosophy as a discipline is necessarily exclusive it's actually including what it tries to exclude because it wouldn't be itself if it didn't exclude something i mean maybe i could come up with lots of other theories what's the reason for believing these claims that's what i want to know because as it's presented it just strikes me as kind of fanciful storytelling as a way to try to paint the history of philosophy or the discipline is philosophy in terms of a struggle between the masculine and the feminine which seems like an artificial imposition onto our concept of what philosophy is also an interesting thought is that what claims does one object to here where is the room for discussion is it when we say well really the whole exclusionary thing you know that's not right disciplines don't have to be defined by what they exclude or maybe we say well no what has been included isn't necessarily masculinized and what's excluded is feminized actually it's a mixture of the two i mean with claims like this there's so broad so many huge a priori theoretical claims i i don't even know what to doubt so the the normal spatial logics that we'd think about in terms of inside and out women a men inside women out masculine inside masculine out a feminine out these don't operate really so in that direction they are so much more complex and philosophy has is inhabited by what it's trying to expel so if we set up those parameters and we say okay masculine on the inside by definition we're going to say that means the other stuff on the outside which would be caught up and that would be femininity nature is out there too we should never forget nature and a whole host of other things so okay so can you give me some specifics for claims that are so if i were to say something like philosophy can be understood as pursuing the true nature of the way things are in the world that's the kind of really abstract way of thinking about it can you give me an example of where that would exclude like the feminine part of that the femininity in that conception the your description is philosophy is the philosophy is the pursuit of the truth the truth and or trying to explain the all the phenomena that we experience in some kind of coherent way well at a basic level i mean some of the feminist epistemologists would respond to that by saying whose truth and whose whose particular journey you know whose which journey is this that we're specifically talking about how do we proceed what what are our methodologies and and who's limiting the question of truth here then those individuals would have a mistaken understanding of the nature of what truth is and what existence is whose truth might be a compelling response to somebody who's a relativist or somebody who's not read my book square one the foundations of knowledge which you can buy on amazon but there's no my truth or your truth there is the truth which is the way things actually are in the world so maybe to put it more simply steve is to say at any given time who the philosopher that is undertaking that particular pursuit that the daily the real bodily experiences and context of that philosopher matter the fact of who that philosopher is what that philosopher is where that philosopher is or when that philosopher is that matters and so the question of truth then is contextualized a little more than then eternalized this line of thinking was popular with the marxists back in the day they saw intellectual claims as being kind of representations of class philosophies so there's bourgeois logic there's proletariat logic in this case there's the philosopher in the 21st century's logic and the philosophers 14th century's logic it's all relative based on kind of socioeconomic and cultural differences rather than there being one eternalized truth as you put it this position is wrong and self-refuting these philosophers are making eternal truth claims about eternal truth claims in other words they're saying it is true that x y z and in doing so they have presupposed the eternality and objectivity of the truth so when you ask the question who's truth that comes that question is also a statement about the nature of truth what we mean by the term truth when you ask the question or when a feminist epistemologist would ask that question is the claim that the nature of truth is itself kind of unique to the individual pursuing it or is the claim that there is no such thing as this what we think of as this objective truth out there that everybody is everybody has access to does that is that itself a kind of claim about the nature of truth there are so many different perspectives on this obviously and it's not it's not for me to actually um answer that question but what i would do is to say go and look at the myriad different approaches to feminist epistemology that have emerged in the last you know a couple of decades it's amazing what's out there and each of those approaches will give you a slightly different response um as i mean it's not dissimilar to the fact that epistemology generally will give you those kinds of incredibly varied responses feminist epistemology is is similar in that sense that it there's uh there's such an array of different possible responses there on the one hand i think that's a fair response to say well i can't speak on behalf of everybody on the other hand i have this sneaking suspicion that it would be very difficult to answer the question that i posed because either way that you answer you're going to be setting yourself up for some difficult follow-up questions this is a kind of rhetorical technique that i've seen many times i don't know if it's at play here but i've seen many times where people will make grand remarkable claims and then when you ask a little more specific to get to try to get very clear is what you mean by x such and such they say well it's very complex it's very difficult or maybe they kind of shift the subject matter may they say well it's not for me to say so it's a way where you can get a bunch of ideas out there like truth is relative to the speaker of it and then if anybody presses you on it you can say well you know it's not really for me to say you can check out the work of these other philosophers so one question that we didn't talk a lot about but i really want to know i want to go into more detail with you is if somebody were to say that distinctions we see in the pursuit of different fields not just in terms of academic pursuits but also career pursuits we see you know a very large amount percentage wise of you know startup founders or men let's say in my observations of the world i do see differences on average there are certainly exceptions between the behavior of your stereotypical man the behavior of your stereotypical woman where i would say it seems like the individual choices on net that are being made by women seem to be less risky isn't right word risky in an economic sense so that to be the founder of a startup seems to be itself a more masculine decision or something like that so do you think that those kind of traits that we see really are purely as a as a function of social constructions and kind of cultural conditioning or do you think that there is a genuine difference between the choices that women make on their own free will or the and the choices that men make well again you've asked a lot of questions really all together it's complex but one would answer please yeah um number one i guess i've got i've got to think about the word choices there because for me choices i mean we can get caught in a very liberal individualist kind of way of thinking there and i want to resist that in some senses that choices don't occur in in any free context choices occur within a context that already i've been referring to here is as patriarchal in that sense okay so that's a very critical claim here very central is even the notion of free choice she's saying is only understood in the context of the existing patriarchy that the patriarchy runs so deep as to exclude the existence of men and women truly making free choices so if we talk about if we try and put these two things side by side men's choices and women's choices already we have this intuition that the way men choose and the way women choose is maybe not equal and that goes into a whole range of different experiences and educational possibilities and limitations that may or may not have occurred within those contexts so it does come back to the sense that if you've got a culture that is reinforcing in subtle and not so subtle ways time and time again that men are active and defiant and and risk-taking and women are risk a and more passive and and more relational then it won't be very surprising to find that that may or may not be the case if we go and do some empirical evidence out in in the world of startups but to me that doesn't confirm a difference between masculinity and femininity it suggests more that masculinity and femininity is still linked to these defining kind of oppositional terms or couples in the western imaginary male female rationality irrationality active passive in this account i mean that's a really important one active activity and passivity is is prime against a way you know a way of thinking through how we can understand the difference between man and woman or masculinity and femininity so the claim is that it's a more plausible theoretical explanation for the differences between men and women to say that in the not yet conscious cultural psyche the patriarchy is so deeply lodged that women don't really freely make the choices that they make though in practice they seem to make decisions that are less risky than men in reality that's just because the choice has been taken off the table for them to me this seems a bit insulting to say hey women you guys think you're actually freely choosing things you think you actually hold these values because you are a rational agent but no in reality even your decisions when nobody's pushing you into what career path you're going to go you've got a loving and supporting family no your mind is still framed by the patriarchy that seems to somewhat take away your own free will so in a hypothetical scenario if you were to interview let's say 50 different women and most of them say i'm not really interested in philosophy or i'm not really interested in doing a startup they might report they might say it's my own free decision to make but would you say they're even in the way that they're conceiving of their choices it's already going to be it's already going to be kind of framed for them i to some extent yes but i think that's absolutely true for young men as well because you know young men will see themselves as as as more actively pursuing more risk taking more challenging projects so it's something that occurs on both levels i think so in a society where you didn't have that let's just idealize a society do you think that we would see a equal distribution of career choices and life choices between the sexes well part of what feminism is is a is to think utopian in an utopian manner and yes we can all think toward this notion where yes all of those things would be possible but then we're talking about a society that would uncouple those conceptual connections so you would uncouple masculinity from rationality from activity from risk risk taking and you would uncouple femininity from passivity from irrationality or whatever sets of oppositions you want to talk about that's no easy task obviously but but it's an important task and that's partially the work of feminism notice how that was complete a version of the question questions incredibly important if we could get to this utopian society would the decisions and their career choices that men and women make would they be split equally if the answer is yes where's the evidence where's the theory that backs this up if the answer is no there would still be career and life choice difference between the sexes because men and women are different yikes that's a slippery slope because then you say okay well then how much of a difference would there be and how do you know so it's a catch 22 if you say that there would be no difference you've got no evidence whatsoever to back that up and then the tons of evidence to the contrary and if you say yes there would be a difference well that kind of concedes the point and now you're just talking about a measure of scale which you got to somehow back up your arguments saying oh there would actually be the distribution would be 37 percent women being startup founders instead of 10 percent or whatever it is so okay maybe a maybe a better way for me to ask this so we kind of the starting point is there are biological differences so we would agree that there are biological differences that's complex interesting choice of words that's complex if you go back and listen to the full interview whenever that word comes up that's complex or that's difficult little red flag should go up it's actually not very difficult to say what is patently obvious that yes there are definitely biological differences between men and women there are obviously differences but biology never occurs outside of culture so the way that we determine what by what those biological differences are the that way is is always going to be mediated again by the social context so yes of course there are bodily differences but what those bodily differences are can be absolutely discussed to me this is just my theory to me this sounds like putting a stake in the grounds that one could come back to later because the argument that i'm making is very straightforward men and women are biologically different we think a little bit differently and therefore why wouldn't we assume that that's going to play out in terms of life choices that we make if she can make a little asterisk here at the biological differences now now she can say well actually maybe biological differences are only understood in the cultural context and the cultural context is the problem which kind of throws a little bit of cloudiness into the whole situation so maybe what we think are objective physical biological differences are in fact only perceived as such because of a cultural rational western scientific patriarchal mindset that we're bringing to the table okay so let's say there are bodily differences and let's not quite get to the cultural implications of what were those bodily differences manifest and how we described them but there are bodily differences do you think that also applies to the mind and the way that those bodily differences give rise to different physical traits that we have do you think it would also give rise just naturally starting with the bodily differences to different ways of thinking it's a loaded question i don't see why that's a loaded question it seems like very straightforward question my guess because i believe my guest is very smart is that she didn't like where this line of questioning was going to lead um let me backtrack let me backtrack and say that there are bodily differences but biology and body and difference take on different values are valued differently in different contexts and so the values of those differences are not stable and not fixed so the way that we absolutely appreciate and understand those differences is complex it's really complex and we really don't give enough credit to how complex that is remember what is it about the word complex yes so that one was complex it's complex it's really complex i actually do think there are differences of course between bodies and those are now complex differences because the question of masculine feminine or male female is not the only range that we have to consider but i do think there are differences and i do think those differences give rise to different experiences with some obvious examples um on both sides uh but but the the way that we come to understand or appreciate what that means is complex and it's still occurring within a context that values masculinity and devalues femininity so is the claim that yes there are bodily differences but even by saying so we've said that men are superior and women are inferior we can't even mention what biological differences are without making some kind of cultural judgment i must confess i am skeptical so if we were to take the line of reasoning that said there are bodily differences that are manifested as somebody gets older and we have you know what we what we call men and what we call women in a biological sense you're going to see you know men in general have careers doing manual labor for bodily differences you're going to see more lumberjacks let's say that have those bodily differences that to me would would largely explain some career choices the literal you know the the big beefy guy is going to have a more successful career doing big beefy things and somebody skinny and wimpy like me isn't this going to be that is not going to have a successful career doing uh difficult things um so that that i could see the career discrepancy there but our if we follow that line of reasoning would we say well some of those bodily differences are also mind differences and would naturally result in differences of choices so at this point when i said that there was a bit of tension in the air to say okay there are physical differences between men really big beefy men are going to have successful lumberjack careers i'm not because i'm not big and beefy okay that's that's not controversial but if you say if you suggest that well there are mental differences you could let you know the hair on my skin probably raised a little bit has the tension in the room also raised like with women for example there's a dominance of women in like caretaking industries now is that because this is something that is that women are more disposed to do for those bodily differences or is it that those are uh those emerge from our kind of cultural categorizations of how those people with the bodily differences should act so if somebody were to take the position that you know in in a ideal society where you still have bodily differences you would have a substantive striation of people with these bodily differences do these career choices these people with the other bodily differences have those other career choices how would you respond to that if i said even in an ideal world we'd see something like that there's always going to be difference and and and division of labor of course but i guess i don't agree with your line of thinking so much what i would say and certainly if you we go back to your example of the the worker in child care or was that the example that you gave yes so there was two the one was the the lumberjack versus me would be a terrible lumberjack and then the child care which seems to be a more what we consider to be the feminine caring okay what i think about child care is that it's well i'm going to approach this from a really different way i want to say first that i think child care is one of the most important things that we could or should be doing in our society it's the basis of so much but because it has been historically associated with women and women's work and defined as women's work it has no cultural value or it has very little cultural value unfortunately it's very poorly paid at least in this country it's very extremely poorly paid poorly remunerated and that goes along with its low status is that this point that i can no longer be polite i must say this is almost certainly false the reason that child care does not pay well is because of pure supply and demand there are a lot of people who are able to supply child care cheap child care it's not a skilled position in an economic sense you don't need to agree you don't need formal training that means there are a lot of young ladies in particular who are able to supply their services there's a finite demand for those services and therefore the going labor rate is very low it's the same reason that being a lawnmower when you're 16 does not pay very well because there's a lot of other people with that same exact skill set who can do the exact same job and so your labor does not fetch a high price to associate cultural value with economic wages is a mammoth mistake mammoth gigantic cannot overstate it wages do not come from cultural value they come from the laws of supply and demand in economics period now all of this isn't because of the work that's done it's very hard it's very demanding and it's very important work but it goes along with the fact that by being considered the epitome of women's work it's not really seen as work at all and that that makes it possible for us to refuse to remunerate that work at a level that it should be remunerated at sorry where does this should statement come from it should be remunerated at a higher rate but should according to whom who makes these incredible declarations about what is the fair going rate that a laborer can get for the services that they're rendering to in their employers notice that she also imported another false theory in economics which is the labor theory of value that if somebody works really hard they deserve a high wage that's not the way that wages work you get paid based on the value that you create relative to supply and demand for the service that you are providing there are plenty of very difficult jobs which pay poorly because lots of people can do them think farm labor and there are plenty of fairly easy jobs which pay very well you could think of being a tenured academic within the system you don't have to produce very much and yet you get very very high wages even if you don't create that much value in the world and and the fact that it is seen as as non-professional work and that it has very low cultural status these things are all important so it's that to me that makes more sense of what's going on men are not going to be attracted to to work of that status i mean i don't know the situation of lumberjacks it's really outside of my field of expertise but i imagine that one of the things that may occur in the case of the lumberjack is that in exchange for extremely physical and possibly dangerous work that there would be fairly good compensation that's that's a realm that's so often they're not not open to women interesting so when you are viewing compensation for work you're viewing it as this relationship with how a culture values that work being done so if there's a low you know like the child care work is very well played you say that is directly correlated to how a culture values that work now she nodded here she didn't say yes but i'm gonna pat myself on the back here because this is a great example of having extreme passionate deep disagreement with somebody and still remaining polite with them i liked dr bullos walker we got along very well she was very polite we had a great conversation afterwards and yet on this point i think she's completely wrong with huge implications but i think we still were made friends well maybe until she listens to the century breakdown see my my intuition is to view it more just in terms of economics or supply and demand or something like that i would say well there's a there's a huge amount of labor that's available for child care and so naturally we would have relatively low wages in that area just because there's so much supply that's available and versus something like being a lumberjack there's a lot fewer people that want to be lumberjacks and so we would have the count amount of compensation go up how would you respond to something like that well i'd have to resist from saying something like that it's delightfully naive i guess the irony honestly i think it's inevitable whenever you're talking with somebody with these particular political dispositions this particular worldview it's just a matter of time before the condescension drips out you see it's a simple naive understanding of the world to grasp the laws of supply and demand and understand where wages come from no instead we have to talk about deep seated not yet conscious patriarchal cultural beliefs which means that we all have a negative view of child care and a more positive view of lumberjacks and that's where wages come from unsurprisingly on the left there are very very very many cases of people that may have really good intentions but are completely clueless about even the most elementary laws of economics they just don't understand how business works especially because so many of them get stuck in academia they never leave they never experience the real world they're genuinely unaware of business of where wealth comes from of what employment is and so they come up with these theories about an employee's wages comes from his worth as an individual or whether or not society values him from a gender perspective or crazy things like this because I guess from my own perspective I just think there's so much more over determining those what counts as work in the first place and I think one of the problems with the question or the example of child care is that it is not actually seen as work at all what how do they get what why are they paid if it's not seen as work please tell your theory to 16 year old girls all over the world who are not doing work and somehow are getting paid maybe they're just getting paid for their sheer worth as a valuable individual when you say that it's not seen as work why do you say that if it's the case that people are getting some kind of compensation why would we say well it's not seen as work I think it comes back to what I was saying before or suggesting before about the division again in western societies it operates differently everywhere between the public and the private I think child care is this confusing state that is actually now occurring the public domain but it's seen in terms of it's you know being the relic of the private domain women are working now and thus child care paid child care is needed and yet it's a confusion of public and private this is really a problem for the the kind of the dominant imaginary or the we might even think of it as the capitalist imaginary here no I think capitalism has no problems with it it can just extract surplus labor and and it's done with it I don't think that's a problem whoa extracting surplus labor that's marxist economics that was definitely just proven over the course of the 20th century but in the masculine or the patriarchal way that our society orients itself this is work that really still should be happening unpaid and unseen in the private sphere and so it is not valued and it is not well paid I have never in my life encountered anybody that has the thought that child care should go unpaid that makes no sense to me now I can find some measure of agreement and say hey people probably don't appreciate how hard child care is okay I agree with that in no way does that mean therefore everybody deserves has some moral entitlement to a larger wage that's just not the way it works shoveling dung is also an incredibly difficult job I wouldn't want it and I respect those who are employed as dung shovelers but that doesn't mean that because you've got a hard job that you're entitled to higher wages it confounds uh having child care in the public domain confounds the purity of the public sphere and the private sphere and we're not supposed to confound those two things I've never heard anybody express any kind of sentiment or belief remotely close to that to me this is just fanciful storytelling to try to piece together a narrative that has fallen apart in a very short amount of time so surely this is not the only circumstance you say there are other areas in which there is this of two minds you have the the public sphere and the private sphere can you give some other examples of where this would be the case oh the very obvious case is elderly care exactly the same mentality operating the sense that this is traditionally women's unpaid work and it should be occurring in the private domain what on earth is it doing in the public domain okay we have to do it then let's devalue it and let's underpay it I mean what as if there's some board of wealthy white men sitting around thinking these thoughts oh what is this work doing in the public sphere oh well if it's there I suppose we'll only give them five dollars an hour since that's a women's job kind of sounded like the emperor from star wars the reason that elderly care and child care does not pay very well is because it is economically unskilled work that means anybody can do it assuming you have a functioning body which means there's a very large supply of labor not as large a demand so the price that you can fetch for the labor is low that's it that's the only reason that it should be an unpaid woman's job has no factor into the equation whatsoever where's the evidence of this do you think that that is kind of a conscious thing do you people do you think people are consciously thinking about or this is just all kind of behind the scenes is subconscious no no I don't think it's I don't think it's conscious and I don't think it's subconscious I think it's not yet conscious or not quite conscious these are the what I'm trying to suggest is that philosophy operates here in a more important way than we give it credit for these these conceptual divisions between the public and the private these matter and yet they're not things that we tend to talk about in a conscious way at work over the over the photocopier you know that we don't tend to think of well how's your public and private you know going today Steve are you managing to mingle or not but I think so so in the west we we make these divisions we have these conceptual oppositions that are hierarchically organized we have the public up here and the private here and the public is the domain of masculinity traditionally and the private is the domain of femininity traditionally according to whom this is one weird conceptual scheme of thinking about how society operates I certainly don't think this way I doubt many people do and she's acting as if oh this is just established this is just the way that it is and it's problematic and so they these impact in really significant ways in situations like work in situations in many other situations in educational situations as well too if you think about education there's another similarity there the younger the chart the younger the educator or sorry the younger the the the level of education to the higher the salary and the status goes up so you start at the at kindergarten what we would call kindergarten or or prep here with low status and low salary and by university if you're teaching and educating at that level you have more status and more salary not terrific you know but more and again i think that's this sense that that as the child gets older the child moves from the private to the public domain and so that process of education becomes more validated yeah or it's the case that as you go higher and higher up your level of education it requires more and more skill from the teacher lots of people can teach kindergarten fewer people can teach eighth grade fewer people can teach twelfth grade fewer people can teach college fewer people than that can teach postdoc students so as the supply of the laborer decreases the wage that that individual can gain in the marketplace increases this again is a completely crazy perspective on where prices come from they come from the not yet conscious rather than simple supply in demand this type of reasoning strikes me as purely religious just theoretical speculative religious in this weird narrative context this weird ethical system that's not challenged and i i view it as kind of a tragedy to be honest so when you think of that kind of compensation for educational work you're putting it in the context of how society in general values it it's not as much supply and demand it's not you know it requires more training or anything like that it's this is is this kind of like a manifestation almost of the uh cultural values yeah i certainly would see it in those terms supply and demand will come into it but they will operate in complex ways on top of this division between public and private i would like to hear how the theory of supply and demand is incorporated a little bit into this very unquestionable and obvious split between public and private and the gender associations therein can you unpack the metaphysics of that it's not a subconscious belief it's not a conscious belief it's a not yet conscious belief if we're gonna say try to say precisely what is it or where is it yeah what is it so uh when we when we say that the society is kind of manifestation of some of these cultural values prior to their manifestation and where do they where are they located in like this public conscious how does that work okay complex complex let me try and respond to that at one level it comes back to what i've referred to before is a cultural imaginary which sometimes manifests as a masculine imaginary so it's this this very amorphous set of beliefs and values that that exist at the not yet conscious level but that are shared by in a dominant social form or a dominant cultural form so maybe that's one way of thinking about it but the other way of thinking about it comes right back to the fundamental metaphysical distinction between mind and body and we tend to think of understanding and ideas and beliefs and whatever occurring at the purely conscious level of mind what i would take from the phenomenological traditions is something more along the line of an embodied consciousness so that's a complex way of saying or responding to your question where does all of this kind of exist where does it lie i think when things are not yet conscious that's when we know that what we're we're dealing with is an embodied consciousness so it's not that our mind has all of the conscious contents and that our bodies know nothing of that if we follow a philosopher like someone like say Maurice Muller Ponti his notion of embodied consciousness makes sense because it's it's consciousness that in fact we the body subject carries with it or develops or has and that that's that can become conscious that knowledge or that that belief or that idea can become conscious but it also remains at a level not yet conscious and that that's it's impacting on us without us consciously being aware of it aha now think about this the note the metaphysical notion of the not yet conscious of the patriarchy all these belief systems this is central this is absolutely pivotal this is like to a religious person whether or not god exists like this is the whole theory revolves around this and that's the attempt at explaining it it's the embodied consciousness but it's not in our minds it's not not in our minds but it can be but it's out there and somehow we're talking about it even though it's not really in our conscious mind this is fuzzy fuzzy fuzzy fuzzy fuzzy you'd think that this would be where the conversation starts like oh man let me tell you about this amazing metaphysical thing the embodied consciousness and oh there's this belief system that's outside of our minds but it still could affect our minds and wow look at all the implications it's like no this kind of comes at the end of the conversation like oh yeah there's what if we if you get the metaphysics of this wrong the whole theory just falls apart is that are those not yet conscious beliefs are those in every individual's mind and they're not yet conscious of it or is there some kind of a broader uh like a Jungian like meta conscious i'm just trying to think you're starting to sound like Jung i'm trying to think of if if it's the case that there are these what you could call beliefs or values that we're not yet aware of does that mean that there's some kind of an imprint of them in every individual's mind then they could become aware of them or is it that it's it's bigger than that oh again complex question maybe the only way i can respond to that is to say these things that are not yet conscious i actually see philosophy's role as being precisely to actually plummet these things or to try and to access these things the the role of critical thought is to take the not yet conscious and as much as possible make it conscious so we might even talk about that as i'm you know i'm an examined assumptions or whatever but but something along those lines now feminism here sits beautifully within the context of philosophy for me because it's doing the same thing it's doing the work of taking taking that not yet conscious and trying to make it conscious so in this context what feminism is doing is taking the not yet conscious of the masculine imaginary and of patriarchy and trying to bring it to consciousness in a way that will benefit men and women alike this to me sounds like mysticism central claims about this not yet conscious thing that drives our behavior and we don't even have free will because it exists and i ask well what is it as well like it's a hard question and i can try to answer it vaguely this way but prior to its reaching that level of consciousness where is it it is embodied it is embodied in each individual well i guess it's embodied in each individual in so far as as yes we are part of larger social and cultural collectives that share these imaginaries or they share this imaginary so would you say then that the kind of the metaphysical analysis of it is that there is some kind of a larger collective mind for maybe that's lack of a better term or unconscious belief system that actually has some kind of existence to it that each individual mind is illuminating or is it that it's in everybody's individual mind it gets i wouldn't call it mind at all i would simply call it which got it to use a 60s term ideology okay you know yes we share there's there's a shared ideology or better still set of ideologies that interact in complex ways and yes we partake of those ideologies i mean the french philosopher Louis Alteze had a good way of of making the kind of distinction between the ideological state apparatus and the repressive state apparatus that each culture has its repressive obvious ways of making us toe the line but it has its more subtle ideological ways of helping us toe the line by internalizing the values of that dominant ideology or or culture it doesn't help to answer the question by calling it a new word now we're calling it an ideology what is an ideology is it inside our minds is it in other people's minds is there some some communal mind out there in which it's embodied and then we just kind of soak it up none of these questions are answered absolutely central and foundational and if there's any mistakes here well the whole thing falls apart and yet to me it really does sound like religious superstitious thinking but i would imagine chronologically it comes about after the fact to try to justify the claims that she was making earlier so we start with the conclusions in mind about the patriarchy and injustice and why there are differences between men and women and then we try to piece together some remarkable narrative about the embodied mind that is an ideology that we can't really talk about what it is or how it exists that takes away our free will until we become aware of it so that is my interview breakdown for a very fun conversation with Dr. Michelle Boulos Walker hope you guys enjoyed my commentary if you've got thoughts on the matter make sure to leave a comment leave a rating and a review on iTunes if you're very enthusiastic head over to patreon.com slash Steve Patterson and you can be a supporter of the show and i'll talk to you guys next week