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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Terri Gross. Repeal the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. And then let the men of the House vote for the household. If you think that anyone who advocates for that is too fringe to be taken seriously, think again. It's the view of Christian nationalist Douglas Wilson, the pastor who co-founded CREC, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches,
CREC has a network of about 170 churches, including the one Secretary of Defense or Secretary of War Pete Hexeth belongs to. Wilson was the guest pastor in February at the Pentagon's recently created monthly Christian prayer service. Hexeth prayed beside him. CREC also has a network of Christian schools, and Hexeth's children attended one of them.
Wilson is influential in the growing movement that's sometimes called masculinism, which believes feminism has been emasculating men, men should have more power than women, and that a woman's place is at home, raising children and following her husband's wishes. My guest Helen Lewis writes about masculinism in her Atlantic article titled, The Men Who Want Women to Be Quiet.
It's subtitled, A Virulent Form of Misogyny Has Become the Single Most Important Force Holding Together the American Right. Wilson is one of the people she interviewed for the article. Lewis is a staff writer at The Atlantic with a focus on the intersection of politics, society, and digital culture.
She's also the author of Difficult Women, A History of Feminism in 11 Fights, and The Genius Myth, A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea. Helen Lewis, welcome to Fresh Air. So before we get to Pete Hexeth and Douglas Wilson, what is masculinism and how does it compare to regular old misogyny, patriarchy?
Well, masculinity Humanism is a word that has been around for quite a long time now. It's the idea essentially that men should be in charge, that that's the way that the world should be ordered, that you get now new versions of it that are about talking about biology. Men's hormones mean that they're more suited for government.
But it's not exactly patriarchy in the sense that it is a political ideology. And it's one that its adherents will kind of argue for. And I didn't want to just say sexism or misogyny, because I think that is a kind of conversation ender. You know, we can all agree that's bad. Well, I say we can all agree that's bad. Obviously, quite a lot of people don't agree that's bad.
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Chapter 2: What is masculinism and how does it differ from traditional misogyny?
And what that did was place creationism, which is a biblical but scientifically unsupported idea, up against the best ideas of modern science and just said, well, let's just really weigh them up about which one we should be teaching to children as fact. And this is a kind of version of that.
And I think because it's affecting half or slightly over half of the population, it's considered more respectable to kind of dally with extreme anti-feminist ideas than it would be to say, I think black people shouldn't vote or I would take the vote away from Jewish people.
I think those would, even in some of the excesses that we've seen in the last couple of years on the right, still be considered not enjoyably spicy ideas, but kind of flat out off the table in a way that Repeal the 19th is not treated like that.
So you describe masculinism as the single most important force uniting the American right, bringing together an unlikely constellation of pastors, senators, preachers, influencers, podcasters, and fanboys. Why do you think it's the most important factor uniting the American right?
You know, when I was writing this, I was thinking about what are the linking strands between MAGA and the kind of loose constellation of influences around that. And it was just in the middle of a very, very big split over Israel. You know, you have people like the podcaster Tucker Carlson taking a very different line from the White House, criticising the White House very strongly on that.
And you also had Tucker Carlson hosting the very, very right-wing podcaster Nick Fuentes on his show, which the Heritage Foundation refused to condemn. And then there was then a mass walkout from the Heritage Foundation. Lots of people upped sticks and went to Mike Pence's new foundation. These things are causing really big schisms. You might think as well of the splits over regulating AI.
For example, there are very different views on that. Free trade generally versus protectionism. America first isolationism versus foreign policy adventuring. These are really deep splits that I think whoever succeeds Donald Trump will have to manage very carefully. I mean, you've seen J.D. Vance has been given the poison chalice of being the face of the Iran negotiations.
Any successor to Trump is going to have difficulty holding his coalition together because the only thing really they can agree on is that Trump is the alpha king. But maybe the one thing that they do all agree with is traditional gender roles are better. Men should be men. Women should be women. Women have got a bit too uppity. It's better that they should be seen and not heard.
Or at least they should succeed in kind of MAGA approved ways. And there's a very strong aesthetic look about many of the women at the top of that movement. That is very traditionally feminine, you know, iron femme, really. So I just found it was it was basically apart from the persona of Donald Trump, one of the only things that I could see that really united them.
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Chapter 3: What are the political implications of repealing the 19th Amendment?
And that doesn't seem to be, to me, maybe something we should exclude from this discussion either. Having kids is really hard work.
Well, it's time for another break, so let me reintroduce you. If you're just joining us, my guest is Helen Lewis, and we're talking about her article in The Atlantic titled... the men who want women to be quiet. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air.
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You describe Nick Fuentes as Douglas Wilson's intellectual heir. Now, Fuentes is one of the more extreme podcast provocateurs. You describe Fuentes as a self-professed Christian, anti-Semite, and virgin. Why do you mention virgin in there?
Right. There's a theorist called Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick who wrote the book about homosociality, men who only associate with other men, who see themselves in other relationship to other men. And that's Nick Fuentes. His is a world of actually no women at all.
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Chapter 4: How does Douglas Wilson's view of women challenge modern feminism?
They don't really matter to him. You know, which you might say is also true of somebody like Andrew Tate, who is, you know, a pimp by his own admission. The women aren't there just kind of as a way of keeping score to impress other men with how amazingly virile you are. And Nick Fuentes is a more extreme version of that where he's like, well, look, you know, I don't even want to sleep with them.
So let's hear Nick Fuentes from one of his podcasts. And in this, he's talking about the problem with women. And this is from his podcast, America First with Nick Fuentes. And it was recorded on February 11th of this year.
Our number one political enemy is women. Because women constrain everything, every conversation, every man, everything. They have to be imprisoned. They are the ones that are hurting the fertility rate. They are the ones making us sympathetic to poor people, which are also brown people. I want you to understand something.
When you're sympathetic to poor people, you're sympathetic to brown people because brown people are poor. OK, not all poor people are brown, but most brown people are poor. So women are making us sympathetic to poor people, a.k.a. brown people. Women are making us sympathetic to George Floyd.
Women are the reason that their fertility rate is low because they're getting educated and they attack every man as a rapist and a pedophile. And. They're henpecking and controlling all the men. So just like Hitler imprisoned gypsies, Jews, communists, you know, all of his political rivals, we have to do the same thing with women.
It's not subtle, is it? He's not a man who's ever heard the word dog whistle. It's just gone straight to the whistle. The thing I find interesting about that is it doesn't surprise me that he's also an anti-Semite because in both cases the analysis of what's wrong with the out group is the same.
So both Jews and women are simultaneously weak and useless but also an evil cabal that is controlling the world. And I just find that really, really fascinating that that is two historical groups that he's managed to weave together into this seamless mythology. And the other thing you see there is he's also talking about empathy, which is the masculinist's most hated emotion.
Because, you know, Doug Wilson has a podcast episode called The Sin of Empathy. Gad Saad, the Canadian marketing professor who's a big favorite of Elon Musk, had a book called Suicidal Empathy. You also hear about Toxic Empathy.
And this is woven completely into their critique of the problem of women having political power, is they think that women want equality and they want to help the underdog. And that means that they, for example, support immigration or they're not tough enough on violent crime. They're not racist enough. Well, in the case of Nick Fuentes, yes, that they just don't hate brown people, as he puts it.
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