Helen Lewis

Bureaucracies have been... Kafka was onto this when it was all men.

This is just a quality of bureaucracy.

It's just now that we have moved into a situation in which the majority of people in things like HR, university administration...

you know, they are female, that it's become, well, hang on a minute, this is just yet another sign of creeping evil feminization.

The other one that got to me was, you know, I looked into the Larry Summers thing.

First of all, those, his reported comments were very much skimming the surface of what his private emails to Jeffrey Epstein reveal his views on gender to be.

And I'm not entirely confident that I want to say that his colleagues obviously knew him a lot better, didn't think this is a very good chance to get rid of somebody who we think might be a liability to us.

Often in cancellations that I've covered, there has been something else going on, something office politics-y going on.

The other thing that I found out was 2006, the year that happened, four-fifths of Harvard's tenured faculty were men.

So the claim is, you know, there was a feminist backlash to the things he said, but it took place within an organization that was still at that point ruled and run by men.

So it's not as simple as suddenly Harvard became a citadel of women and therefore at that point it didn't tolerate anybody saying anything it disagreed with.

There's much more complicated things going on.

Well, she was on exactly the same problem in that episode of Ross' show.

She's on with Lea Libresco-Sargent, and they bring up a discrimination case, which she frames as being some women ejected to a kind of slightly porny poster.

And it turns out to have been a pretty explicitly pornographic poster.

And the woman, you know, in a very male-dominated workplace, experienced that as sexually aggressive.

Once you get to that stage with an essayist where you go, I'm going to have to go and follow every single citation down the rabbit hole to find out if you've really...

represented this or have you just, you know, have you come to a conclusion first and just have this chain of stuff that lines up?

That to me is fatal.

So I tried, you know, like you, I tried to read things with an open mind.