Helen Lewis

you know you have freely chosen each other and every day you make that commitment to stay together it's not like with one of you leaves you'll be destitute and you know or you know whatever it might be or the or you're living in fear all the time you have freely made this commitment to me that is a much more positive vision for a heterosexual relationship than the kind of thing that i'm seeing in this which is you know about kind of you know capturing a woman and kind of and

holding on tight to her and having these kids that are there because essentially they're miniature versions of you right that they perpetuate your empire you see that in the kind of elon musk belief that he wants to use surrogates to have like you know to make himself the modern genghis khan i mean man so many of our friends i know have like zero or one kid yeah and that's why i'm like i'm always banging the baby drum because i'm like man civilization's gonna

Where's the bit in that about how joyful it is to be raising children?

You know, the idea that, you know, these are their own independent human beings.

They're not really, you know, the carriers of your glorious surname into eternity.

I didn't have a particularly emotional reaction to it.

And I think I've just burned out my circuits after 15 years of writing about feminism.

Because I just feel like misogyny is so deep a bigotry, it's so casually indulged, it's not treated seriously.

If these guys were going around saying, I don't think black people should vote, I don't think Jews should vote, it wouldn't be seen as, oh, aren't they kind of cute and they're putting some edgy things in them.

Actually, has even Nick Fuentes gone that far, right?

Whereas you can say it about women, because there's an assumption that it's a part of a continuum that starts with kind of stand-up comics doing stuff about how their girlfriend is annoying.

This is all kind of good rumbustious battle of the sexes fun.

I mean, I know that these people despise me and everything about my life.

And I sort of don't care because I like my life and I think it's a pretty good life.

You know, there is service involved to other people.

And I think that I try and think about other people more than I think about myself.

And all of those things I do find a bit missing in this literature.

I think it's also why it's so popular now is that a lot of it is essentially self-help.

And that is the dominant literary genre of the age and the kind of dominant social media genre of the age.

Yeah, I think about this a lot because, you know, it's a cliche to say at this point, but for people who have lost religion, you know, you have lost a lot of community and regularity to your life and a rhythm of your life too.