Helen Lewis

It will be through little tiny tweaks to the tax code or things like that, right?

Yeah, that piece really reminded me of, there's a book from the 2000s by Ariel Levy called Female Chauvinist Pigs.

And it's about the way that women coped with working in really male-dominated workforces where they were like, hell yeah, I love going to the strip club with the guys.

Because the implicit promise was, yes, there are women up on stage who we think are whores and whatever.

But I'm like an honorary guy.

And then there comes a moment where you find that you're not an honorary guy.

Actually, oh no, they think this way about all women.

And I think it was the philosopher Kate Mann, this was her theory of misogyny, right?

It promised an exemption for good girls.

Like if you do things right as a woman, then actually you kind of get exempted from it.

And then you cross one of those invisible tripwires and you discover that you're on the outside now.

And so I read that piece and I oscillated between sympathy and what did you think was happening here?

And I guess that's the point about the kind of semi-jokey, semi-ironic.

You think you're all doing ironic sexism because actually we live in this incredibly, you know, feminized gynocracy.

And then you find out actually no, it's extremely unironic sexism.

But also, I think the interesting thing is that what is the left doing wrong that all of these things happen and people have direct experience of misogyny and yet they still don't feel that the left is for them?

Because they just can't stay normal.

They just have to let themselves go and let their unchained id all over the place.

Yes.

And you're right.