The Rise of the Femosphere: Who Are the Women Giving Up on Men? (Dr Jilly Kay)

[Music] Hello, it's Celiza Philby here and welcome to Radical. Conversations about the global trends changing our world and radical ideas for the future. A moles away for a few weeks, yes doing traders. So there will be a few of us sitting in for him in the meantime. I'm an author and historian who specialises in generational change. And as some of you may remember, I've also been a previous guest on Radical. And speaking of generational change, that brings us onto our topic this week. Because something I'm fascinated by is the radical change that's happening amongst young women. Recent surveys indicate that young women's perspectives on politics, economics work, and especially sex dating and relationships differ sharply from those of men. Let me give you some examples from recent polling done by Merlin Strashty for the new statesman. So Gen Z women are far less likely to say that they feel happy, ambitious, excited and fulfilled than their male peers. 48% of young men believe the economy works well for people like them. But that's compared to just 34% of young women. And 60% of the young women polled said they would find it difficult to date someone who had a different view on Gaza. For those with a different view on Donald Trump, it was 74%. And only 35% of those under 25 said that they had a positive view of men. Now, all of this has coincided with the rise of the femosphere, an online space that mirrors the manor sphere in its skeptical, often pessimistic outlook towards the opposite sex and heterosexual relationships. Now, fortunately, I am joined by the idol guest to unpack all of this. Dr. Gilli Kaye, she's an expert in feminist media and cultural studies at Loughborough University, and just so happens to be the person who originally coined the term "the femosphere". So Dr. Gilli Kaye, thank you so much for joining me. We've heard a lot recently about this term "the femosphere". Could you just define what we're really talking about when we use that word? Thank you so much for having me. So I always think when we're talking about the femosphere or when I'm trying to define it, you first of all really have to understand what the manor sphere is. So if we think about the manor sphere as this kind of loose collection of anti-feminist communities, influences that's been around for some time now that really sort of took hold in 2014 and has sort of been increasing in influence and power and becoming more mainstreamed since then. And the manor sphere is an ecology of seemingly quite contradictory groups. So you have in cells, involuntarily celibate men, pick up artists, Christian nationalists, men's separatists, so all sorts of seemingly disparate groups. But what makes them cohere is essentially a commitment to anti-feminism and what's known as the red pill philosophy, which is this idea that you see the truth of the world, you wake up to the brutal realities of life, you see that women and feminists are sort of manipulating and orchestrating and have the world and have power over society. That's the manor sphere. The femosphere, well when I first started researching it, really what I was starting to notice that there were communities online which were essentially kind of mirror images of the manor sphere. So in communities such as femme cells, so women who were involuntarily celibate, female dating strategists who were kind of trying to use emotional manipulation to kind of strategically gain advantage over men in dating, women's separatists. So essentially mirror images of the manor sphere. And is that a fair sort of summation to call them a mirror image of the manor sphere? I use the term mirror image because they will often purport to be opposing the manor sphere or providing an alternative to the manor sphere a kind of way for women to fight back against the sort of normalization of manor sphere tactics in everyday life and dating. But what they end up doing, even though they purport to be in women's interests and often purport to be feminist, what they end up doing is reproducing and mirroring the same logics as the manor sphere. So a really deep sort of bio-essentialism, this understanding that men and women are fundamentally different and hardwired in evolution, evolutionarily determined ways, a really deep fatalism that you also get in the manor sphere. And even though they sort of purport to be feminist, it's actually a real deep patriot of social justice and collective femininity. And some might say that equating the feminist fear with the manor sphere is somewhat unfair and disingenuous and that there are serious legitimate reasons for the rise of these feminine-only spaces online, you know, really sort of attacking the patriarchy. What would be your response to that? I mean, I would always want to be really careful not to suggest that this is simply an equivalent or it's just as problematic or that, I mean, I just don't think it's equivalent in the same way at all. There's just not the existing kind of cultural infrastructure of misundry as there is as misogyny. So I just, I really reject any sense that it's it's equivalent, but I also don't think it's the opposite to the manor sphere. So we're definitely, you know, many listeners would sort of, I think, recognise the picture you're portraying this sense of a growing divide between particular young men and young women. And there was a recent article in the New Statesman that really sort of set out this idea of this rise of a very particular corner of the feminist fear, which is this rise of this new radical feminism. Could you just explain that element, that sort of flavour of the feminist fear for us? In a way, I see that as being somewhat different, we're quite different to some of the reactionary spaces in the feminist fear that I've been looking at because it is sort of underpinned by a much more progressive politics. So as the New Statesman article kind of pointed out, these are primarily young women who, for example, are supporting like the Green Party, taking a kind of pro-trans position, pro-Palestine. So that is quite different to the kind of the more reactionary spaces that I was looking at. We're actually quite anti-political. But I think what we can say about that phenomenon is that I would see that as also a reaction against liberal feminism. I think that's what ties them all together. These are all kind of responses and rejections of, and why politically, culturally, in some many ways, economically aligned to liberal feminism, these new radical feminists. Why are they rejecting liberal feminism? When many would argue that liberal feminism has brought them untold rewards, they are, have greater access to the workplace than ever, they've got greater economic individual freedom than ever, greater social sort of freedom. What in your view is this reaction against liberal feminism? Well, I think it's the promise that liberal feminism made that it would give access to all of those things and that it would lead to gender equality and women's flourishing. But as we know so many young women, as young men, are feeling deeply pessimistic about their futures, deeply anxious about their job prospects. So even though liberal feminism kind of gave that promise of access to work, being able to, you know, in the kind of terrible phrase, have it all. And that's patently not transpired. And so they are reacting against that. And so these are all different reactions against that. So you have like the sort of tradwives who are saying, like, paid work has failed women, so therefore you retreat to that home. Back to the kitchen sink. Back to the 1950s, as they might say it. But then you also have more kind of left responses to that, which are like, work isn't paying. People are miserable, including women. Women are also having to face misogyny and harassment at work and all these additional pressures. So I think that's kind of, that's what ties them together even though they are, they're, they're different responses to the same kind of thing. What I'm sort of sensing you're saying here is this new radical feminism isn't just a sort of anti-men. There's a layer in here that's about economics. There's a layer in here that's about geopolitics. There's a multi-faceted rationale behind these core beliefs. How does it divide within the sort of socio-economic groupings there? And what can we say particularly about these young women? Who are they? What economic group are they in? What jobs are they most likely to be in? I think from what I have seen in my research looking at these online communities, a lot of these communities are people that have been to university and now feeling precarious, feeling anxious about their future. I think worried about the investment that they've made in university and that's not going to be paying off, worrying about, well, what does this mean for my future? So there is, I would say, it's, there's often the sense that this sort of these angry young women are sort of like sort of progressive lefties who are actually a really entitled and are actually really secure and I just think that's not really fair at all, but why not? Well, because I guess we even, I suppose because even for middle-class women now are experiencing these economic conditions, this material constraints, huge anxieties about their future, huge anxieties about potential future children that they might have. So I mean, that goes back to what you were saying about how this is not simply some kind of anti-men knee-jerk response. It's sort of a, you have to see in the context of these economic social conditions which are also impacting men. So I mean, really, I suppose it's just to me, it seems it's not that surprising that women might also be reacting in a similar way or we might be seeing sort of similar kind of divergent responses in the same way that men One of the things that was, it's kind of evident when you look at this new wave of radical feminism, is it's political, we talked about left wing and capitalist line. But also many of these women talking about their sense of feeling greater alignment and solidarity with marginalized people here in Britain, in Gaza, across the world, and as women they feel that pain and they have greater empathy for the world in a way that they can't see men, sharing, they can't see men exhibiting in the same way. Where do you think that sort of fits in this sort of portrait that we're building of this new radical feminism? Let's just say there is this discourse online about how women maybe have this greater empathy with marginalized communities. In some ways that's laudable, in some ways you know there is a big backlash against empathy. So like a community kind of embracing empathy seems to be a good thing. I think the only problem there is if it does take this very essentialistic line, which is that women are doing this because they're naturally kind of more caring, more attuned to the social, more interdependent. We know historically women have not always voted more left wing than men, that's not been the case. There's not something innately leading women to be more left wing. It's nothing to do as like our deep essences of being caring human beings. Do you think there's always been a radical left wing feminist fringe, a particularly evident in the 1980s with the women of Greenham Common in the 1960s? My mum was marching with CND against nuclear war. There was a real pessimism as a future of the world then. What's new about this? Well I think you're right, so this isn't entirely new, there's always been pessimism, there's always been anger, there's always been a more radical kind of response to these things. I think there's a few different things that are new about this. One is that we've had in the last decade or so the unprecedented popularity of feminism. So feminism has been popular in the wake of MeToo. What sparked that? It was before that it was kind of like sort of turbocharged a bit by MeToo, but really kind of in the 2010s, he started to get the rise of very popular sort of celebrity-oriented feminism. So in the 2010s, unlike previous decades, for example if you asked a celebrity in an interview, are you a feminist? The response would almost for a female celebrity, the default response would be yes. Feminism had become kind of an unprecedentedly cool, unprecedentedly popular, there's a great book by Sarah Benay-Wise called Empowered, which charts this. And why was that? Why did that happen? It's a very good question. I mean feminism had before that had been kind of repudiated, had been demonised, was not popular at all, it was not cool to call yourself a feminist. It's interesting that that happened in the 2010s, like in the period of austerity. I mean my sense is that it was maybe young women looking for something, a kind of an optimistic narrative in the face of, you know, economic austerity. But I think what's happened now is again this, this is a realization that that was a kind of empty form of feminism. It promised kind of empowerment, it promised choice, but it was really not grounded in any kind of collective movement. So I think if you look at the 1960s and the 70s, feminism was grounded in a much broader left movement, it was part of a kind of organised labour movement. There was a sense of, you know, that collective solidarity with them. Solidarity, and this belief that collective action could lead to something. And I think we're in a place now where that really, distressingly, as far as I can see, as far as I see it, is we don't have that sort of, that grounding. There is no kind of organised left, really, in the same way that there was at that time. So it's the sort of pessimism which is not leading necessarily to action. So what it seems to me you're sort of saying there is this 2010s had quite atomised, individualised feminism. And now we've seen a much more collective sense of it and obviously facilitated by tech. Let's just go down that line of argument for a moment. Now some would say that this is, we've created these divided worlds between young men and young women, facilitated by tech. We're seeing each other less in real life, we're living our lives online, we are gaining that sense of solidarity, and sometimes misinformation online. And that is a negative force in society. So I would say that, I don't know if I would use the word collective to understand what's going on, I would say it's more networked, which is not necessarily the same as collective action. So it's people kind of joining up online, connecting and communicating in a certain way, but which I think is fundamentally different to collective organisation. It's not organised, it's connected, it's networked, which I think, and again I don't want to generalise and I don't want to dismiss some of the really important feminist activism that is going on and which takes place partially online too. But I feel like there is something about the sort of conditions or the architectures of digital media, which mean that it's, in my view, it's just much more difficult to have collective, meaningful collective organisation. It's critical in identity formation. These are young women who very much are building their identity, yes, through online sort of influences. But this is critical to their sense of self. Yes, and I suppose there are all sorts of other influences as well, but it is absolutely central to the way that people understand themselves, see themselves reflected. And I don't like the way in which sort of so much of this is sort of dismissed as just being identity politics, which is just sort of frivolous and doesn't mean anything as a distraction for real politics. But I do think there is a way in which feminism online can often be seen as more of an identity rather than a kind of process or an action. So within these kind of online logics where it's about self-presentation, about defining oneself, that sometimes can become more important than actually doing stuff. So this idea, the most important thing is to say you're a feminist and to be seen to be a feminist and that kind of becomes an end in and of itself. So again, without wishing to dismiss or devalue important stuff that's going on, there is a kind of logic, I think, which is shaping a lot of this. When we talk about this radical new feminism and indeed the broad, broad of feminist fear, what percentage of people we're actually talking about when it comes to who's engaging with this content? Well, we're talking about a minority, a majority, how can we even? It's really, really difficult to know. And I think again it's useful to go back to the manosphere and think about how it was that the manosphere in some ways is sort of a niche sort of phenomenon which is not really. Most men are not actively seeking out and rotate or, you know, whoever it might be. But there was a really interesting study done by Dublin City University on the manosphere which showed that they set up these SOC puppet accounts for boys between the age of 16 and 18. And they were just completely sort of dummy accounts, they weren't set to follow anybody and that they found within 26 minutes these accounts were being fed manosphere content. Right. I've not done a kind of quantitative study or anything on this but from talking to a lot of my students who are doing a lot of work around this area, they find that similar kinds of things happen when they are on TikTok. So it's not necessarily really extreme content they're seeing but it's often these kind of more subtle ideas about most men at trash, most men of no value to you, only a minority of men at high value, go boy sober, you know, try to. And what's go boy sober? Right. So go boy sober is a kind of phenomenon that I would see as part of the hemisphere which is sort of started in 2024 and it's this kind of online trend which is encouraging women to go sober to detox themselves from heterosexual relationships as a sort of way to self care, look after oneself, like exit the hellish hellscape of dating for a period of time or permanently. And that's again, it's a kind of recognition that dating is really, really difficult and distressing who can be, you know. I'm certainly glad I don't date in the 20s. That's my overriding thought. What else? What else are we seeing sort of, you know, so we've got go boy sober, what are the. we know man in finance is another? Yes, looking for man in finance. So yeah, sort of. and I would classify that as the sort of part of the sort of female dating strategist's kind of element of the hemisphere which is giving women seemingly kind of concrete advice about that. This is how you find a high value man and high value man is basically defined as being a wealthy man. So presumed there's also a low value man, right? Yes, a raw being. There's high value, there's low value, there's zero value and there's negative value. So like, and there's. so it often then gets into this. Again, this is the kind of mirroring of the manus' rheologic, you know, in the manus' fear they talk a lot about high value women, low value women and so on. Very dehumanizing language, a lot of that language is mirrored by female dating strategists who will say that men are scroats as in. Scroats. As in what's Scroats? Well, it comes from the Scroat him. Scroat him. Scroat him. And it's because in the manus' fear they'll often call women like really horrible words to do with genitalia. So it's kind of trying to mimic that and weaponize it against men. This is another interesting thing that there's an increasing sense that men, any men who kind of tries to engage with feminism or tries to be an ally is a performative male and therefore is not really to be trusted. Okay. And so there's like this broader sort of like suspicion of any man who is trying to be left wing or progressive or feminist. because there's a sense that well, because men by nature have this sort of evolutionarily determined, desire to, you know, impregnate as many women as they can. This is all just part of their strategy and they're therefore not to be trusted. And so therefore it makes it very difficult to have any sense of kind of solidarity in terms of feminism. Are you, I think, hinting that the fact that when it comes to the online world, young women and young men are living and seeing and inhabiting completely different worlds? I think we probably can't say that in terms of like absolutely, but I think yet, I mean, on the whole, yes, there is this big divergence, it's kind of algorithmic divergence. So like a lot of students do their work, their dissertations on this where I work and look to see how the feeds of men and women are differing. And so the men are seeing things like cars, racist jokes, only fans' models, and women are increasingly seeing things like get ready with me, make-up videos, beauty, influencer kind of content. So yes, there is a massive role that algorithms are playing here in kind of entrenching and intensifying a very kind of reductive genetic advice. And obviously that ricochets out into the dating. How are you seeing this impact? How young people are dating? It's becoming, the broad sense is like how bad dating is. So there's this term like heterop pessimism, which is increasing the use to kind of describe the dating world. So heterop pessimism is a term that was coined by a writer called Acerosin and it essentially signals increasing disenchantment with heterosexuality, disappointment, negative feelings towards it, which are primarily expressed by women. But what it then becomes is not just simply a pessimism, but a deep fatalism that this is, well, this is just the way that men are, men are biologically determined to behave this way. So there's nothing that can be done about it. And then it's also not accompanied by any desire to kind of exit heterosexuality. You know, people carry on dating men for the most part. But with this kind of resigned sense of all this is really awful, but there's no alternative and there's nothing that can be done. And, you know, as the data shows as well, is that it's also feeling into a pessimism around marriage and having children amongst women. Yes, yeah. Compared to even young men. Yes, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, another student has just done a dissertation on this who is looking at, you know, increasing pessimism amongst young women about having children, partly because they see don't trust men to be good fathers, good partners, also because of the broader kind of state of the world, the climate, anxiety around that. So this all feels quite bleak. Let me just imagine here, if let's imagine, you know, two people going on a date, what advice would you give to the young man trying to navigate this environment? I mean, it's really hard to give individual advice to individuals because I do think it is really a sort of structural problem that we need to get to grips with. Does he pay? Well, this is the big question. Does he open the door? This, I mean, it is really, really difficult. And that, so the, you know, the kind of discourses of like red flags, you know, if he doesn't pay, that's a red flag. If he does this, it's that's a red flag, you know, green flag, red flag, that discourse is very, very normalized now. Right. So it is really difficult to do that. I mean, of course, it's not impossible. And so much of this does seem much bleak when you look at it entirely online and look through these kind of communities, look at it through that prison. Like I think on the ground, it's not quite as bleak and terrible as one might imagine from looking at these influences. Well, I would say to young men and to young women is that whilst dating is really, really difficult and heterosexuality is driven with problems, and particularly in this kind of current technocapitalist iteration of it, it's the worst thing you could do is let that lead you to a fatalistic idea that, well, this is just the way that things are. And this is, there's nothing that can be done about it. And all men are like this and all women are like that. I just think that is an absolutely political and social dead end, actually. But then it's also really difficult because you don't want to put the onus, particularly on young women, for example, to say, well, you know, you've just got to be a bit more open-hearted and you've got to just be a bit more trusting. Indeed. And, you know, some young women might say, you know, one in four women are either sexually, it's also direct, but of course, as a life, you know, the opposing view would be the reality is, we live in a patriarchy, rates of sexual assault and rape are, and particularly convictions around those things are terrible. We are educating ourselves about the reality of living in a patriarchy, and it's empowering. Again, I think this is what makes it so much more complex and why it's not just like the manus fear, because it is responding to these actual conditions and, you know, entrenched misogyny and all those things that you were talking about. There's this community called the female dating strategy, and they have this sort of doctrine that they call feminist realism, which is this idea that, look, there's all this evidence about how terrible men have been to women throughout history, how they've dominated women as a class, and I would agree with that. So, but then it's the sort of realism or fatalism part, which comes after that, which is that therefore, there's nothing that we can do about this systemically or collectively as a feminist movement. That's kind of nowhere in the picture. All you can do is kind of strategise individually, sort of play the game, try and do the best for oneself. Of course, that's understandable in lots of ways, but as the basis of a feminist politics, that's really, that's a real dead end, and historically feminists have sort to collectively work to transform the conditions of society, so that rape and sexual assault will no longer exist or will be eradicated. But in this kind of logic, it's just seen as inevitable, it's seen as there's nothing you can do about it. I hope you're enjoying my conversation with Dr. Julie Hay. If you are, then you can subscribe to this podcast on BBC Sounds so you don't miss future episodes. Also, if you do subscribe, make sure you've got those push notifications turned on, and that way, you'll get an alert whenever we publish a new episode, so you'll never miss out. Thank you, and now back to Dr. Julie Kay. Why do you think that certain feminists online, certain feminists in society, are so reluctant to believe the narrative of male victimhood? It's quite, I think that's really difficult to answer because in some ways, it's a kind of logical response, if you think about how women have long been told that you're victimising yourself, this isn't a real problem, sexual harassment is not a real problem, misogynist is not a real problem, it's all in your head. So in a way, it's kind of directing that same logic against men and saying, look, you're crying false tears, we live in a patriarchy. Again, I think this idea that young women are doing really well, maybe relative to men in education, but if you look at the whole picture, which is the context that's happening within, you know, we're getting really good grades, even if you get all straight a's at GCSE, that's not necessarily going to guarantee you, I know from your own work around intergenerational inequality, that's not necessarily going to guarantee you success in life, so doing well in education is not in no guarantee of kind of social power. I do think it's problematic to look at men and say, well, this isn't real, you're not feeling excluded, you're not feeling, I mean, historically, I think feminism has been about not just trying to transform conditions for women, but recognizing that men are injured under patriarchy too, and that's what I worry is kind of lost a bit when you get this competitive kind of sense of like who's doing better, who's doing worse. Young people are all really struggling in different ways, and that's mediated through gender, but you know, there is lots of shared sort of experiences there too among young people. And if you ask any millennial in their 30s, now, the majority of them, of course, are in joy income households, where men need women as much as women need men economically, what do you think of the real long-term consequences of this divide amongst Gen Z men and women? I suppose that is the key question, like where is this all going? I mean, what's interesting among, well, there are some women in the feminist sphere who are advocating, you know, things like women's separatism kind of reswaring off men altogether, but ultimately the main goal for most women in the feminist sphere is marriage and children, but it's just in a much more kind of transactional approach to marriage. So there's a lot of the sort of advises, don't marry somebody for love, don't marry somebody because you're attracted to them, don't in fact even like sexually attractive men are a dangerous because you might fall for them when actually they're not going to be the best long-term partner for you because they're not going to be the most economically. This sounds very Jane Austen. Exactly, it's like a weird sort of replay of Jane Austen. What about the rise of celibacy? Kind of leading onto that declining birth rate. Yeah, so I mean, that is a significant new phenomenon where obviously young people are having less sex with one another and more and more our celibate, whether that's involuntary or voluntary, so there's both going on, so there's in the feminist sphere, there's femme cells who would see they want to have relationships, but they feel that they can't. And then there's people who are kind of going boy-so, but in the same way that you would detox from drugs or alcohol, the heterosexuality scene is so toxic. And obviously this is not just a UK example, and many the voices that people are listening to from an international pool, there's actually also some more extreme examples of this kind of behaviour in places like South Korea. What's happening there? Yes, well, and I think South Korea is really interesting because that's actually a much more kind of organised movement. So this is not just a kind of online disparate collection of influences, this is it. something which is much more kind of you know I think you could call that a movement and that's the 4B movement where women are swearing off. There's the 4Bs which means the 4 nose so you say no to dating, marriage, sex and children. Okay there's a lot of nose. There's a lot yeah no there are some others as well but those are the 4 kind of yeah there is the 6B movement as well I believe but they frame themselves as a radical feminist movement which is a response to the deep misogyny within South Korea. So that's not a response to economic hardship that's a response as we were talking about earlier on in the UK context that is a response to the patriarchy misogyny and the real sort of barriers that are in South Korea for women would you say? I think well yes absolutely but I think there's also an economic context there with like the you know the prevalence of debt and and how in South Korea and how many young people are in deep debt so there is it is underpinned by a sense of economic insecurity so it is in conditions of economic insecurity and precarity that these these formations are really flourishing. Why is it so extreme in South Korea? Well one explanation is that misogyny is very overt and often you know experienced in a very overt way on a daily basis perhaps more than the UK and that movement has been kind of gathering pace for a while so before the 4B movement you had this movement called Magalia in South Korea which literally means mirror what they were doing was like mirroring the tactics of misogyny since South Korea yeah so it's been it's been kind of gathering pace there for a while but then when Trump was elected in the US you had women in the US sort of wanting to being inspired by the 4B movement and as a response to Trump being elected we're then saying well we're also going to swear off men and sex and dating as a kind of active feminist resistance. I would see that as again a symptom of how powerless maybe people feel like in terms of collective politics and these all sound like quite radical responses to a very intensely radical time but many women would not say that they're radical we're labeling them as radical feminist but many of them would say they're just you know adhering to a form of common sense. Yes and that that discourse of common sense is and pragmatism is really prevalent so a lot of them would say that this is just pragmatics this is just unjust responding to these conditions and doing what makes sense so yeah in some ways this is an imposition you know in the term you know most people are not calling themselves "femistry or activists" either but I think what's kind of going on there is it is a kind of echo of radical feminism so you know historically radical feminism it's a very complex and nuanced movement during the second wave but broadly sort of saw women as a sex class who had their own material interests some of them believed that you know you needed to have kind of separate women spaces separate women's culture that women had to sort of organize and kind of live separately it's a kind of strange echo of that where there is this discourse that women are the sex class who have material interests but then generally the response is not to organize some kind of utopia for women to go and live in it's to use that knowledge then to strategize individually to get the get the best marriage that you can and marry the richest man that you can but I mean there'd be loads of men or perhaps parents of boys thinking they're nice normal respectful they don't want to be lumped in or even associated with the Andrew Tates this world yeah what would you say to those men I agree and I really think they agree with that impulse which is to reject the idea that this is something innate to all men and that all men are traveling in this direction what I would say is that again it's the manosphere logics have become very kind of very mainstreamed even like the red pill philosophy which developed in the manosphere Elon Musk talks about being red pilled and so it's actually really difficult to avoid it and because it's so baked into the the logics of these big tech platforms and the algorithm rhythms of these platforms really tend to encourage it again it's like that study show that even if you're not looking for this content it's probably going to appear on your feed it is really difficult to avoid it and also obviously one of the we talked about algorithms and we've talked about tech a lot here but obviously one of the things that's really shaping gender relations is particularly pornography and the age at which the average age that a young boy is exposed to pornography now is around sort of eight nine years old far less innocent than it was in my day when it was just you know penthouse magazine so what how are you seeing that sort of major issue which clearly is is is we're worrying trend yeah infiltrating all of the things that we've been talking about when it comes to gender relations yes I mean porn is really important I think in the in the manosphere and the hemisphere in different ways I mean so in the hemisphere there is this sense that actually high value man men are the ones who are able to restrain themselves and not watch porn so they talk about kind of low value men as being porn sick you know they've watched so much porn that they've become adult their brains have become adult and they're no longer kind of functioning humans and they've kind of lost their value so that's often you hear that kind of discourse in the hemisphere I mean in the manosphere there's this really interesting move which is like men who are sort of swearing off pornography because they see it's almost like feminizing them that it's kind of making them dependent that it's making them kind of but is there a link between the rise of pornography and the proliferation of online porn and access to it and the rise of celibacy in the next women it's a very good question and I mean I do think those those two things have happened at the same time and it feels like the rules of sex and indeed dating and the rules of even marriage and kids are fundamentally breaking down right right and nobody really knows how to respond to this right how do you respond to you know a world in which you know often violent misogynistic pornography has been seen by you know so many people by the time there is you know a very young age and women are seeing it in the bedroom without being too graphic about it you know when these aren't things that they're just saying online they're seeing them in their intimate relations with men yeah and again this is where they're kind of you know I wouldn't want to just completely disavow everything that's going on in the hemisphere because a lot of what the discussion is you know how do we navigate the fact that you know we're going to bed with these guys and they're wanting to strangle us or how do you find a man that's not going to do that you know which seems to me a quite a legitimate thing to be asking so oh this is the power and hold of the the network effect that you talk about is you know many women would say what I'm seeing online with influencers talking to me about how they're portraying men and what they've seen mirror is my own real-life experience with men there's not a disconnect there's a nice alignment and I'm connecting with these voices online because it's what's happening in my bed it's what's happening on dates it's what's happening in my social groups yeah yes and also it's what's happening in the data in some ways you know this this can be seen as a kind of echo or contemporary iteration of some kind of like consciousness raising of like oh yes I can see my own experience reflected here I'm going online I'm talking to all these other women they're having the same experience too and that was the kind of the model of consciousness raising in the second wave women getting together sharing their experiences recognizing a shared oppression and then doing something about it so again it's like I think that's a legitimate and good thing that that's happening it's just that then that is leading then not to a sense of well what could we do about this collectively as a feminist movement to to change these conditions it's that oh well some men or most men are destined to be like this this is just the way that men are there's nothing we can do about it so there is a logic to it on an individual basis you can see how that that makes sense but then again as a basis for like politics and moving things forward if we're ever going to get out of this then we know there has to be some kind of collective response and belief that things could be different is he undu pessimism some might argue there's you know it's never been easier to get as educators women are now it's never been easier to build a career build a business there's so much more access to opportunity information that's what many would argue and I think that's what it's why it's important not to sort of simply look at back and think well liberal feminism has completely failed so I think when we talk about liberal feminism this is the kind of dominant form of feminism that we've seen which has been about you know getting women into more women to education more women to position to leadership but the problem with that it's done that without necessarily addressing you know so that then women are then having to work a full-time job and then also have their caring response bill so if we're talking about these radical new feminists you know reacting against liberal feminism well how feminists actually are they such a good question because I would see that you know you have to really I think it is really important to think about what is what what is feminism and is this actual feminism in some ways you know I don't want to be the police and say well you're a real feminist and you're not a real feminist but at the same time a lot of what you see online and in the feminist sphere they're kind of like doppelgangers of feminism they're using the language of feminism but because it is so individualistic and it's not really connected to a broader movement I would say it's not it's not in that same tradition as say like like so socialist feminism or even radical feminism so it's some of those communities are like women like on university campuses for example who are online influences or following them but they're also involved in kind of campus protests or other forms of kind of activism so I wouldn't want to dismiss that completely and say that's not feminism at all but certainly some of the like hyper online kind of communities which are saying it is feminist to manipulate them unemotionally for your own personal game within within dating I mean I don't see that as meaningful feminist. No and why is it that the most affluent feel the greatest sense of victimhood? I am always a bit hesitant about this kind of framing that that people who are kind of the most engaged are somehow the most privileged and therefore we can sort of dismiss it because I think, again, even if you are highly educated, you're not necessarily, it doesn't necessarily mean you're in a great economic position. For some, for example, some of my students, it's, without being sort of too bleak and pessimistic about it, sometimes learning about the world, you really sort of realise actually how problematic things are, how deeply ingrained misogyny is, how problematic capitalism has been and the devastation to people's lives. So I think, you know, in some ways, if that does correlate if people it's to do with education and which is a good thing. How many of them are, would say, or categorise their boyfriends, their dads, their brothers, their nice cousin, male cousins, in that distinction of, is there good men, bad men? I mean, there's a question there about, you know, where online stereotypes collide with people you love. Yes, exactly. And I think, I mean, but a lot of these influences are talking, you know, kind of these sort of feminist influences are talking, I think, in a more nuanced way about men. So that hashtag not all men a while ago, which is to say that you can't just simply let men and women, men as being either good or bad. And I feel like a lot of these influences do recognise that there are nuances, but also that we live in a patriarchy so that, you know, all men, even if they're not actively harming women, they're part of a society, part of a structure in which, if they're not actively working against that, they're sort of complicit. And I have sympathy with that. I think that that's a fair statement. But there are some who are, are taking, and I always want to be really careful with using the word 'messandry'. There are some who are taking what can only really be called a 'messandrist' or, so you do think there is a strand of that, absolutely. And I think that's, again, I don't think it's something we necessarily have to be worried about in the same way that we have to worry about male supremacy in the manor's sphere. It's just not going to have the same kind of implications or real world kind of effects. But there is definitely a strand of 'messandry' and female supremacy. So like this group, the female dating strategy, like explicitly call themselves like female supremacists, feel that women are fundamentally like superior to men. And that's just really not helpful at all, because I mean, I just think that's, again, that's the kind of mirror of the misogyny. It's just like, well, you say that you're better than women, well, actually, we're better than you and it becomes this kind of zero-sum game, which is not good for anybody. But again, I would really want to emphasise that 'messandry' is not the same as 'messogyny' in terms of its scale or power. And before we get to the solutions, because I think we should, what do you think, you know, back in the day, back in the 70s, you had really hard one, hard thoughts through big ideas, books on subjects, you know, speeches, collective action. There was a intellectual coherence. I mean, there was nuance and there was probably contradiction, mass contradiction, but there was big feminist treatise. Nowadays, this feminism is fragmented. It's more internationalised, probably than ever before. Would you say that it's less intellectual? Is there a problem that we no longer have big intellectual tightens of feminism? We just have a lot of loud, angry influences. And I mean, a lot of influences do engage with feminist theory and, you know, make content, which is about making it digestible and accessible to their audiences, which I think can be really great. But I mean, I would probably say that is true, that's true in the extent that it's true of all kind of public intellectuals, that we don't really have public intellectuals in the same way, partly because academics don't have the time and space to be able to, you know, to be able to have enough time to think right. And historically, like in the second way, you'd have feminist academics who would have time to be able to go and join in activism. And you know, and so you would have intellectuals as part of the feminist movement, there wasn't that kind of distinct line between them. Now, overworked academics who have so bound, caught up with admin and other kind of duties. I mean, it's really, really hard to have time for activism and to be really involved in these movements. So I think that's probably a real problem. And we are living in the age of bite-sized content. Let's just now sort of ponder on the solutions. I was finding this the hardest thing to tell. And I suppose it depends if you're thinking about solutions that you could offer to individuals to navigate their lives or solutions at the kind of social or physical level. Let's start with the individual. Okay. And I think we need to distinguish between young men, young women. What solutions do you think? Well, the right to ace a seresson who coined the term heteropessimism offered this kind of what I think is quite good advice, which is that if you are heterosexual, then try to resist this idea that well heterosexuality is really awful. I wish I wasn't heterosexual, but I kind of am, so I've just got to go along with it. If you are heterosexual, just think openly, okay, well, what is it? What do I like? What do I like about men if you're a straight woman? What is it that I am attracted to in men? What are the good things that I see in men? And to take a more, I don't know, like hetero-optimistic view and. Okay. Yeah, optimism, right. Okay. And so again, that also comes with all those caveats that these women are also having to navigate normalisation of misogyny and the undruetatification of the dating world. So it comes with that caveat, but not to just assume that men are inherently going to be exploitative or are only interested in you because of some kind of like innate biological drive to can pregnant as many women as they can, which is a lot of what people think. So I think taking a leap of faith maybe whilst also being attendant and not diminishing. Okay. Okay. And young men, I suppose if I was going to be giving individual advice to young men in my life, I would be saying, you know, be really conscious of your algorithm and the content that you were seeing because even if you're not looking for this stuff, a lot of it is going to inevitably going to turn up on your feed and just be really conscious about that. I would say against this kind of idea that any man who engages with feminism is a performative male, not to stop engaging with that, you know, to think critically about, you know, what masculinity means and to be in solidarity with women. I think what you're saying is just alert your antennae. Walk around the world. Yes. Conscious and aware. Yes. Any more strategic solutions, you know, should we get those tech overlords to clean up the algorithm? Should we make this, these platforms less addictive? Should we ban internet dating? What, what, what, I mean, what do you think in terms of just bringing the genders together more and aligning also at a policy level, you know, we are fully aware of the gender pay gap, the motherhood penalty, the care penalty that women still carry very much. So we're also very acutely aware of the disadvantage of young men in the education system. So in your view, what things at a sort of policy and strategic level or even at a business level, can we hope for? I mean, for me, I suppose the most radical proposition would be, be like to break up the power of the big tech. So much of this is predicated on this algorithmically entrenched division of gender, gender-based hate, whipping up of gender-based resentment, which is really good for the algorithm, which keeps people on the platform, which whips up rage, pornography. So I think there is something fundamental about the ownership structures of big tech. And obviously we're not going to get rid of the internet now, we're not going to get rid of even dating apps like they're here. They are so powerful in a way that I think nobody, but that we didn't quite realise until we're kind of seeing some of these effects playing out. We could think collectively about what kind of tech world do we want? What do we want dating apps to look like? So Dr Julie Kaye, I just want to say thank you very much for you're going to stick around, answer some questions in which I'm no doubt there'll be more solutions in there, but for now, Dr Julie Kaye. Thank you so much. So that was a fascinating conversation. In many respects, one of the things that I really appreciated was the nuance that Dr Julie bought to the conversation, the way in which obviously this is her era of expertise and research, the nuance in which she tried to unpick the various corners of the hemisphere. And obviously we spend a lot of time talking about the sort of radical new feminist wing. And what's fascinating, I think, is the echoes that you can see between modern feminism and those from the 1980s, from the 1970s. I think there is a clear constant thread, but I also think there's a real distinction when it comes to tech and how tech is fueling the flames, if you like, of this new radical feminism. And when people spend six hours a day on their phone, watching this kind of content and consuming these kinds of ideas, that does discolor their view of reality. And sometimes it compliments and sometimes it contradicts. And I think one of my overriding sort of conclusions having listened to what Dr Julie has been talking about is the need for all of us to get off our phones and go deeper into real life. I was also intrigued, I think, by where this will end and where this is going. There is undoubtedly a deeper divide between the genders online and in real life. And I think what's the consequence of all this? This is just a phase that people go through in their 20s and then they sort of settle down and have kids and live a certain very different midlife. Is it that AI accelerates this divide even more? Is it that economics and the breakdown as Dr Julie talked about of the sort of social contract around education, work and capitalism will further divide the genders? Or will it bring them closer together because one of the things that is very clear and a person who's in a Jew-income household in her forties. No, intimately, is that the genders need each other more than ever to manage the chaos that is contemporary life. So in all, I feel sort of more informed. I think also strangely optimistic that I think in many ways, what you're seeing amongst young people is a real rejection of the algorithm dominating their life and their outlook and their opinions and a recognition that there's a need to live and operate in the real world.