Neon Liberalism #43: The Future of Feminism

There's a lot of gender happening these days—and feminism, the political movement that ought to be at the forefront of responding to the MAGA backlash, is in its wilderness years. Join Samantha and guest Jude Doyle, author of the forthcoming book DILF, for a wide-ranging conversation about the history of the third wave, the meaning of patriarchy, and why a renewed focus on bodily autonomy and self-determination for all people needs to be the focus of feminism going forward.

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DILF book link: https://bookshop.org/a/115699/9781685892159

Full Transcript

Samantha Hancox-Li [0:03]
Hi and welcome back to Neon Liberalism. As we like to say on the podcast, there is a lot of gender going on these things, possibly too much gender. But however, I mean it just does seem like it shapes our politics in pretty profound ways, for better and for worse. And so I thought I would have on someone who has spent quite a while now thinking writing about gender in a particularly sharp and incisive way. So I'm very excited to welcome Jude Doyle, author of the forthcoming DILF. It's, it's, no, it's DILF, a train wreck, dead blondes, bad mothers. Numerous essays and articles on this and these and other subjects, and also some comic books, I believe. So yeah, multi talented character here. So, yeah. Jude, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Jude Doyle [1:05]
It's so lovely to be here. It's so lovely to talk to you.

Samantha Hancox-Li [1:16]
Okay, so I guess I mean the first question, tell me about DILF. What's that like?

Jude Doyle [1:22]
It is, it is a book that I entitled being like, I'm not going to take myself too seriously with this one, and I didn't realize that, like, not only I, but everyone else would have to say its name a lot for, like, a month. But anyway, it is a book DILF, in this case, as we know when there's a four letter acronym that ends in F, the F stands for feminism. So it stands for Did I leave feminism? And it's sort of a book attempting to explain how extremely awkward it was after about, I want to say 15 years as a public feminist under my dead name and my dead face and my dead gender identity, to have to come out and like, explain that I was a dude, and from there, this is just a really awkward moment to be both a trans person and a feminist right now, because there's this horrific scourge of people misappropriating like 2000s Jezebel blog feminism to be really sassy about wanting to put trans people in camps and it, you know it, it felt to me like younger trans people in particular were recoiling a bit from feminism, out of earned distrust, and thereby losing out on a really rich archive of ways to think about Gender and power and the ways they connect. And feminism kind of has always been missing trans people. There have always been trans people within feminism, you know, from like Pauli Murray to Susan Stryker, we've always been here, but mainstream feminism was not incorporating trans insights on gender in an interesting way, and it was losing out for that. And it was in some cases, being corroded into really horrific, hateful stuff that I don't think shulamith Firestone, for instance, would have ever intended or wanted, you know. So it felt like when you are in an awkward position when you're sort of wedged between two camps, which, for whatever reason, is a place I find myself a lot. You can either broaden that fracture or you can try to bring people together. And what I wanted to do was just explore the disjoint between trans and feminism as it exists today, and try to weave some connections over that divide.

Samantha Hancox-Li [3:43]
Yeah, I mean, like you, I have this feeling that feminism is in a bit of a it's in the wilderness, so to speak. You know that we've taken some pretty heavy hits in the political arena, and also, like internally, it seems like at a bit of a crossroads, which I definitely want to ask you about, but I kind of want to ask you how we got here first, and like, what it was like getting here. So I guess my first question for you is, like, how did you become a feminist?

Jude Doyle [4:16]
I mean, I became a feminist at what was a really good welcoming point, like the early third wave, I think, put a lot of emphasis on girls, on younger women, on punk ethos, on the idea that you didn't have to have, like, an advanced degree or know how to read Judith Butler in order to be a feminist like You needed to get involved and get in on the ground wherever you were, and make your own stuff. And that ethos really followed me into the blog movement that came up in the early 2000 10s. I was a very late blogger. I started my first feminist blog in like, 2008 but it. That was, you know, I think a really good moment for feminism, and it became pretty rapidly commodified, you know, it got to the point where feminism could mean basically anything anyone wanted it to mean, and it was being used to launch major brands. And I think that whenever something enters the mainstream culture in that way, it's easy to pick the broadest, dumbest, most commercial parts of it and say, Oh, that's the whole movement. That's all it's worth. And people turned on feminism basically because they thought it was corny. When I was a, you know, 15 year old feminist people thought I was trying to recreate the 70s, or burn my bra or whatever. And like to be clear, I would have loved that. I would have loved to set all of that on fire, but I was not able to at that time. But it, you know, and by the late 2000 10s, feminism was just seen as this very shiny corporate Melissa Meyer lean in as ethos that wasn't connected to radicalism, and wasn't in particular connected to gender radicalism. You know, like, I think that the, if you look at like, the work of like Andrea long Chu that came out in, you know, like what she was doing around 2016 through 2019 with females was like, definitely appropriating some of the really ragged edges of the second wave Solanus and Dworkin. But she was also like, she was referencing Paglia a lot. She was very like, doing a lot of post feminism in her work. And that was the sense that, like, feminism, had outlived its usefulness. It had become a tool of the ruling classes, and it wasn't connected to, like, real struggles for bodily autonomy. And you know, it wasn't connected to radical politics in any meaningful way. And you know, just it became really easy to lampoon it, to say that, like feminism was like whatever Taylor Swift was doing, and if you wanted to do anything that genuinely changed the world, you would have to do something else. And then Roe versus Wade got overturned because everybody was looking in the wrong fucking direction. And it turned out that bodily autonomy actually was really fucking important, and we were all going to lose it, but that is another story. I think I have taken you, like three miles away from your question.

Samantha Hancox-Li [7:20]
No. I mean, I think, I think that's a good perspective to start with. And I mean, it feels like you're, you're saying that there was this an inherent tension in the third wave, where, on the one hand, like you said, You didn't need a doctoral degree, like you could just get in and start doing stuff and like you had a vague sense of, like, what feminism meant, but it's also precisely that in coherence, you might say that made this stuff pretty easy to be co opted, right? That, oh, you can just like, being a boss, is feminism and the liberation of people from patriarchy? That's that's a totally different question, right? That it just the diffuse ideology made it possible for a lot of different people to project different things onto the movement for better and for worse. Is that kind of what you're getting at here?

Jude Doyle [8:25]
Well, here's what I'm saying. Is that, like, yeah, expertise is traditionally sort of a patriarchal thing, right? You're not smart until some, like ancient white man with 80,000 degrees decides that he wants to hear what you have to say, you know? And the ethos of the third wave was very much against that. It was about honoring your own lived experience. And this goes back to the second wave. It goes back to consciousness raising groups, right? The idea that if you got a bunch of women together in a room to talk about their experiences, patterns would show up, and you would be able to tell what was personal and what was political, and find out how connected they were. But when that hit the internet, when it became, you know, sort of no longer something that it was just about like, yes, you can be a feminist. You, wherever you are, are already engaged in gender politics, and you deserve to analyze the gender politics you're working within and see if they actually suit you or serve you or your values, right? That's basic. That's the basic third wave thing. And there was a lot of emphasis bitch magazine, for instance, was specifically a feminist response to pop culture, because pop songs and movies and TV, that's often where we encounter gender politics played out in the in the broader world. But when that became sort of a consumer good, when it became an esthetic, when it became a trend, it was easy to trivialize and it was easy to divorce it from its roots in a deeply egalitarian polity. Politics of giving everyone, no matter their class background, no matter their educational background, equal access to deciding the future of the feminist movement and to become just like you know, feminist is listening to top 40 pop because some of the singers are women. Feminist is having your own workspace that you pay, like $1,000 a month for that isn't very good to its female employees. Feminist is an ethos and a trend and an esthetic, but it's no longer really connected to a politic. It's just sort of anything a woman does if she does it with sufficient amount of sass. Yeah, exactly, you know, and that, I think, is that because third wave feminism focused so much on being easy and accessible and friendly and egalitarian, non hierarchical, at least in terms of who could claim expertise, that it was, it was ultimately really easy for it to be co opted, and I think I'm stealing a lot here from a really great feminist and the founder of bitch magazine, Andy zeisler, who wrote a book called We were feminists once, which is all about this, you know. But I think ultimately, when you to connect this back to trans politics, when you get to that place where it's just like feminist is anything a woman does if I'm a woman, does. If I'm a woman and I want to do it, then it's a feminist thing to do. You know, that leads to gender essentialism. It leads to sort of this idea that woman is this special protected category, that that's the only access of gender marginalization we're really interested in. And ultimately, it leads you to these really weird threads on mom's net where it's like, giving birth is a thing that a woman can do. I'm doing the thing women do, and other people are trying to take this away from me. Somehow, you know, like it leads to, ultimately, essentializing womanhood and bringing in grotesque misrepresentations of second wave thought and deeply alarming biological essentialism. And, you know, basically the ideal of woman as constructed by turfs, isn't, you know, like half the planet. It is a very specific Victorian conception of white femininity that needs to be protected by a strong man and is continually under assault by the rest of the world, up to and including any woman of a lower or more marginalized class, you know. So that's I think, that when you lose your roots and you lose your politics, and you lose your actual grounding in the theory, it's really easy for feminism to become a word we just fling around for anything and Everything, up to and including some really horrific bigotry.

Samantha Hancox-Li [12:49]
Yeah, I think there's a lot in that story I agree with. There are some things I might frame a little differently, so I'll tell you a story you tell me what you think about it, which is that, for me, the third wave was very much defined by its embrace of intersectionality, right? And I think, and like an explicit like this was supposed to be like the thing that was different from the second wave. The second wave wasn't intersectional. It was essentialist. We are going to be intersectional. We are going to recognize the way that all these other axes of oppression create different forms of misogyny, different women's experiences. We're not going to be essentialist. And I think in some ways that was very valuable. That's a very valuable corrective. I think like, intersectionality is just like, correct. Like, let's just start there. But I think also from the perspective of a movement, one of the things that intersectionality did like as a movement as a research program, is it let you not do theory right? Because we're not going to have a theory of what is patriarchy. We don't need a theory of what is patriarchy. We can I can just focus on my little piece of my own very specific intersectional oppression, and I can describe that in great detail, and it can be very illuminating, but that meant that I didn't actually have to fight with anybody else who might have different ideas about what the big theory is. And it kind of like let us all get along in a certain way without raising any differences we might have. And I think that worked for a while to sort of keep the peace among different people calling themselves feminists, but that ultimately it left a vacuum. Left a void where you do, in fact, need the theory, where these theoretical disputes do kind of matter, and it let like you say, you know, left space for this more essentialist, biological essentialist, you know, turfy version of feminism, to come back and say, Actually, we have a theory, right? We. We have answers to these questions that you have. You know we can tell you what is patriarchy, actually, And why should you fight against it? I think you

Jude Doyle [15:08]
Well, speaking of theory, like, first of all, I push back, actually, against the idea that the second wave was always essentialist. I don't know if you're talking about like biologically essentialist, but like shulamith, Firestone was very anti biological essentialism, like she essentially said that, like, she did not care how much of gender came from nature. She didn't care because she didn't care about nature. We cook our food, we poop in indoor toilets. We can change our genders if we want to. That's fine, you know. Or you know, like Pauli Murray laid the foundations for intersectionality, and Pauli Murray is very much a second wave feminist they, like, founded now for God's sakes, you know, and immediately got kicked out of now for, like, trying to redirect it toward the struggles of black and poor women, but whatever. But what I will say is that, yeah, I agree with you the theory on this, the theory on the third wave start where you are thing is one that I can sort of trace very pretentiously, from bell hooks up to Paulo Freire back to Gramsci. It's the idea of the organic intellectual, right? People don't need to be taught Freire, would tell you, and hooks would tell you, citing Freire, they need to be given the critical tools to analyze their actual conditions on the ground. They don't need to have knowledge dumped into their heads by an authority. They need to be taught how to think, and then they will be able to work on what they're working on. And that's true. I still believe that's true, but I also believe that if you individualize it and turn it into sort of like an internet role playing game where, like, I'm doing my feminism by proving I'm more feminist than this other person on the internet, you know, like, it's very easy to end up with a calculus that says feminist is what makes me comfortable and makes me happy, and unfeminist is what makes me uncomfortable and makes me unhappy, and you're not connected into any broader struggle by that. You're ultimately just a player in the role playing game. You're trying to arrange the conditions so that you win and like obviously, that makes it really easy. I don't think intersectionality is to blame for this. I think, you know, human nature and the fact of social competition and ingrained bias is responsible for this. It makes it really easy for somebody to concoct some kind of cracked second wave ish theory and market that is like, I understand what patriarchy is. It's when I have uterus and you don't, you know, like it's the, you know, the backwash that comes from framing everything around yourself and not having, as you say, a broader struggle and a broader framework talking about, like, the power structure of patriarchy, and the reason that patriarchy, you know, rests on denying people their bodily autonomy. Starting there with like, a core understanding of what feminism exists to oppose, which is patriarchy and gender marginalization gets you to a place that is a lot smarter than just Like feminism is when I get what I want.

Samantha Hancox-Li [18:23]
Yeah. I mean, I will, I will always go to bat for reading the great books. In this case, you know, if I happen to think one of those great books is the dialectic of sex, right? And that just comes from, you know, my own, like, personal life, you know, I can, I'm pretty smart. I can do critical thinking, but like, I would never understand the world as well, just like sitting in my own little cave and thinking really hard, as if I engaged with other people who have thought about this stuff and have, like, really put in the work to say something, to stand on the shoulders of giants in the old phrase, but that's kind of that's just me being a pedant. I guess. What I want to ask you is, in all the story that we've been telling about the third wave and like, where wrong and blah, blah, blah, where is me too, in all of this?

Jude Doyle [19:14]
I think me too, was the culmination of an incredible amount of work that have been done to change the culture. I mean, I can't say enough. Like when I started blogging about rape and rape culture in 2008 I would routinely, like, just routinely, on a regular basis, get guys who are really upset with the idea that an unconscious person couldn't give consent like they're like, Well, how am I supposed to be sexy and wake up my girlfriend by having sex with her unconscious body, like I would advise that you don't do that, sir. You know I would say no, like, but it was so endemic in the culture just even 10 years before. Me too, that you blamed rape victims. You talked about what they were wearing if a 12 year old girl got raped, it was okay to call her precocious and say how often she hung around with older boys. In the news, you know, in the newspaper, you didn't have a clear understanding that affirmative consent was, you know, the presence of a yes and not the absence of a no. And when you tried to talk about that, people would make weird SNL or Dave Chappelle skits about it, about like, Oh, you want me to sign a contract before sex, like it was weird and alien that you should be having sex with a person who looks and acts like they're enjoying themselves. You know, like me too came out of so much work that had been done. And this is where the third wave of, like, really media friendly feminism actually did pay off that, like there was so much work done to change our assumptions around sex. And then finally, finally, somebody figured out, you know this, one of those reporters has since gone on to be a turf but like, give the Harvey Weinstein story, it's due they figured out how you could actually correlate and come up with a responsible reporting standard for a sexual assault case in the absence of like, being there in the room when someone was sexually assaulted, and then after being told over and over and over and over and over and over, what you've been told is not normal. Is normal sex is not okay. What you've been told is normal sex is not safe. You should not be left feeling hurt and wounded and degraded and traumatized after a normal sexual encounter. Finally, everybody was able to say, Oh, that's right. Me too, right? And obviously, like, the culture cracked down on that really, really hard. Because what me too actually started doing was not just naming and shaming individual offenders, but actually questioning the framework of, like, what we've been doing as a culture and what we've been teaching, you know, normal heterosexual couples to inflict upon each other, you know, well, one one half tends To inflict more than the other, You know. But you

Samantha Hancox-Li [22:17]
Yeah. I mean, I think that's that's all right. And I think this gets to some of the ways that, I mean, I still think the third wave is very valuable. I mean, like, you look at what it was like in the 90s, right, and that it was an incredible job of kind of excavating the endurance of patriarchy, of sexism, of misogyny, like pointing out, like how pervasive rape culture and just rape were in our world in a way that we had kind of brushed under the table for too long, right? And like actually making a movement out of it, I think that was all incredibly valuable, and yet here we are. Yeah,

Jude Doyle [22:58]
Yeah, like, that's the thing, is that, like, the amount of progress, I think, when I was in college, like the erotic sensation that swept the nation was like Girls Gone Wild, which was really specifically, like, we've gotten these very young women incredibly wasted. We're going to film them doing things and sell it to you. Are they sober enough to sign a contract? No, but that's fine. And that was just like, it was completely normalized. And nobody, if you said you had a problem with it, people would look at you like you were Andrea Dworkin and you were like, coming at them with a machete, you know. But it for to get from there to me too, in like 10 years is incredible progress, but any progress that moves that fast gets cracked down on. And I think that's exactly what happened, that like people could sense that the norms on gender actually were shifting really rapidly, and the norms on gendered violence in particular were shifting very rapidly and no differently than, like the trans tipping point almost immediately leading to like JK Rowling, and you know, the reintroduction of bathroom bans and healthcare bans, and you know the terrible reign of Jesse single or whatever, like shifting the norms on gender violence and misogyny that fast brought out literally everyone whose sense of themselves and their masculinity and their power was based on being horrifically violent to women to renormalize it again. I think the day we're recording this, I really try not to, like, remember anything the President says, because I feel like having those words in my brain is like summoning a demon. But he just gave a speech going like, Oh, we've been calling the wrong things crime. Nowadays, if a husband and a wife have a fight, they say it's a crime. Like, you know, like we're really on, like, a very overt restoration of the patriarchy tip right now as a culture.

Samantha Hancox-Li [24:57]
Yeah, no, I mean, I think that's absolutely the mega problem. Act. Just no question about that. And I kind of want to come back to Maga, what this reaction that we're living through and fighting against, but I also want to ask you about you so, like you said at the outset, you spent a long time in, you know, the women's movement, you know, as a professional, you know, fighter for women's rights, and then after a certain point, you had to come out and be like, actually, sorry, guys, some mistakes are made. So I'm curious, like, what that was like, and I guess how it's changed your perspective on feminism and all these things We've been talking about with with the third wave.

Jude Doyle [25:46]
Yeah, like, there's this really, like, common meme of, like, the traditional trans mask pipeline, which is going from I'm not like other girls to, I'm not like other girls because I'm not a girl. To, I'm a man. To, I'm not like other men. Like it just you. You almost immediately need to separate yourself from whatever's going on there. But it's it is scary, and like when I realized that he pronouns were coming down the pike like that was, that was a a big thing, because I, like everyone else in the culture, had been taught to identify manhood pretty exclusively with holding a dominant position within patriarchy, with punching down, with exercising violent and coercive power over others. And, you know, I think a lot of people were confused because they tried to overlay that concept onto me, and it didn't necessarily, you know, like any guy who tries too hard to, like, tell you he's a feminist, like, right away, it doesn't sound like he's a great feminist. It sounds like he's like, probably like Neil Diamond or something, right? Like, it sounds like there's something going on there. But, you know, it was also hard for me to understand how I could be myself and have the values I held and still identify as a man. It was, it was hard, but what it did for me was to force me to really clarify a lot of concepts and words I had been using in sort of a half assed, lazy way, and to clarify, like, what exactly is my investment in the feminist project? Is it bodily autonomy? Sure. Is it the fact that I have experienced, like, frankly, given my position as a very public person whose like, job was to be a woman and have opinion about women things, I find it hard to say that what I faced was not misogyny, like when there's like, a, you know, whole blog post where a bunch of dudes are, like, rating your ability as compo as compared to all your other female peers in the field, you're like, I don't know, is this misunderstood? Is it man hatred happening to me right now? Like, I don't think it is, but it, and you know, it forced me to think about, like, does man necessarily always mean occupying the victor slot and patriarchy. And of course, it doesn't. It doesn't for a lot of cis men, you know, I don't think that gay cis men, who get read as gay really easily are given the exact same gendered treatment as like straight passing gay men, or, as you know, very burly traditionally mask cis men. You know, I don't think that masculinity means the same thing in a man of color, where it's going to be used to cast him as a threat and a monster that it does in a white man, where it's going to be cap used to cast him as a natural leader. It's, it's important to actually break down what we're saying and what our actual struggles are, what our actual investments in patriarchy are, and how we interact with it, rather than assuming that like man means one thing and woman means the other thing, and man is this, and therefore woman Is that, and there are complete opposites, and they always will be, and that will never change. Like that does not lead you back into an understanding of patriarchy. That just leads you back into the patriarchal gender binary, and it leads you back into essentialism, and it therefore leads you back into transphobia and sexism and all the other awful things in the world.

Samantha Hancox-Li [29:38]
No, I think that's, I think that's exactly right. There's a kind of feminism that I find very frustrating where it sort of assumes that misogyny is like this field, that like of oppression that goes from all men to all women in the same way and like we can spend all this time like arguing about, like, is this misogyny? Years this misandry, or is like, and we took it tied up in knots for kind of some of the reasons that you were you were talking about, but it's more useful for me, anyways, to see patriarchy as like, there's a structure to it, right? It is not as simple as all men against all women, but it's this bio political vision of the world as like, structured by reproduction and like that means like, there's a structure in the family, but there's also a structure like, between families and between people. So it's always kind of tied up with race and class in certain kinds of ways. Those are both like also core components of this bio political vision, right? There's a reason that the racists are all misogynists, right? There's a reason that the authoritarians are all racist. It's like there's this package of ideas that always goes together and isn't really separable, because it is just one vision of this hierarchical structure of society, that is, I don't know, based on biological reproduction and like a zero sum mindset to me. Sorry, that's now I'm just ranting, but I think that's

Jude Doyle [31:08]
To that, I would add to that, that patriarchy is also a set of values, right, like the reason it matters, the reason we have all of these exhausting arguments about, Like, whether capitalism matters more than patriarchy, or whether patriarchy predates capitalism and therefore couldn't have been constructed. But it gets really exhausting, and people hold on to their viewpoints really fiercely. But one reason it matters to point to the fact that patriarchy does predate capitalism is that patriarchy and the nuclear family is actually where we learn dominance politics, it's where we learn that all our most intimate relations are structured on one person on top and the other people beneath, and the one person has the power to inflict violence and coercive authority on the ones beneath them. And capitalism is not, you know, somehow not a problem because patriarchy is older. Capitalism is, in fact, a problem because it's built to work like patriarchy, right? It's built to work like somebody's on top and everybody else gets shit on and until we unravel the dominance politics in our most intimate and earliest relationships, we stand a very poor chance of being able to unravel and oppose dominance politics in the larger systems that surround us, Right?

Samantha Hancox-Li [32:20]
Yeah, so I am probably more of a capitalism defender than those people on the internet these days, but I do absolutely agree with the point about the I mean, The personal is political, right? That the family is the model for the state in the authoritarian mindset. And, like, we can see it, because they'll just tell you these days, right? You know Mel Gibson, like, what's Yeah, it's like, Daddy's home and he's taking off his belt, right? That is, like, his understanding of, Like, how running a nation works.

Jude Doyle [33:02]
I know, like, you could read all of Sylvia Federici, or you could just read that tweet about Daddy Trump taking off his belt, and you'd be like, Oh, I get it. I get it now. Like, it's, it's so disturbing. And it really is, like the idea that the nuclear white family is supposedly just, like transcends history, like, has always existed, like there were monkeys, and then one monkey picked up a stick and learned to use it as a tool, and the next day was the set of Father Knows Best. Like, that's the rate of human evolution, you know. So like that, gender schema and family schema has always been with us, and it's what authority looks like, and we have gone astray as a culture, because we've allowed ourselves to think that authority can be structured in different ways. We've allowed the kids to get the run of the house. We've allowed mom to get lazy and, you know, spend all their time reading instead of vacuuming and making us dinner. You know, it's really it's Disney. And until we like actually look at patriarchy in the face and realize how fucking foundational It is to this moment, we are not going to be able to move any of it, the white supremacy, the transphobia, any of it, until we recognize that it is based On a restoration of patriarchy and biological essentialism.

Samantha Hancox-Li [34:01]
So I kind of want to press you on this a little bit, because I so there's definitely, you know, there's this conservative strain that says, Okay, well, modernity, this all this gender equality stuff we've been trying, that's a deviation from what's natural. And what's natural is patriarchy. And back on the Savannah, you know, men were men and women were women, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And what's interesting to me is that at least some feminists have kind of accepted the premise of the argument in the sense to say, Okay, well, you say patriarchy is natural. I have to prove that it isn't natural. And to do that, I need to prove that back on the savannah we had primitive communism and gender equality, right? That, you know, I also have to get into all this stuff about history and pre history, even, and make these arguments about how, I mean this is kind of how people wind up with the view that patriarchy was invented by capitalism because they need patriarchy to be the modern deviation from the natural state of gender equality. I think Amy Srinivasan, in her book The right to sex basically just says this directly. You know that she wants to prove that patriarchy is a natural anyways. And I also find that very frustrating, because I think it leads people to, well, they know what they need out of history, and so it leads people to distort history a little bit, because I agree with you, right, the white Victorian ideal of the family that's very unique, that's very modern, but patriarchy isn't particularly modern, right? Family structures vary a lot over the world, over culture, over history, but there is a lot of patriarchy out there, right? It didn't all come on the boats with the Europeans, and so that's kind of a dismaying fact that I think we have to deal with, which is kind of why, again, to come back to Firestone. I always really liked the Firestone analysis, right? Which is that, yeah, you know, the world we live in, it is defined by these sex classes that are structured by their reproductive role, and that's bad. And who cares what happened in pre history? We want to change it. We want to do something different in the future, right? And the natural doesn't even like you were saying, the natural doesn't really matter to her. It's what we can do with it that that matters.

Jude Doyle [36:48]
Yeah, and I absolutely, like, I think that Firestones analysis is a really potent one, and it's kind of the final answer, which is like, who cares whether it's natural or not natural? We can do whatever we want. Now. We have vaccines, we have toilets, we have cooked food, we have feminism. But I do think, and this is a conversation I've been having a lot actually, talking about this book, because there are, there is sort of a section on it that's like, there have been different gender arrangements throughout history and in different places. I think that looking at the actual historical record and looking at the different ways gender has been understood in different places, I talk about the white, patriarchal Christian gender binary, not to be like trendy and not to be, quote, unquote woke, but just because that's the gender system I've been raised with, right? Like, that's the one I actually understand. But I think it is important to note that there is no one natural way of doing gender that all humans have always done everywhere, the very 70s project of, like, trying to find a universal goddess civilization where, like, it was a matriarchy and we were all happy and perfectly peaceful. And, like, the I cannot say yeah, and then the fire nation attacked, but yes, like, essentially, a lot of feminist theory was like gender avatar for a long time, you know. And that's not a useful analysis. It's not based on a lot of archeological reality, but neither is the idea that, like God, created man and gave unto him his wife to conquer, and she should submit to Him, right? Like that's also invented, and that's also not universal, and it's a code of behavior and ideology that has been adopted and taught and exported over history. It's important for us to know that we don't have a natural state. Is what I would say, like the last time we were in a natural state, we weren't people, we were monkeys, and we probably threw poop at each other to settle our arguments. And I don't plan on going back there anytime soon. I'd rather figure out what we can do right now.

Samantha Hancox-Li [39:00]
Yeah, no, I absolutely agree with that. I mean, yeah, it's just hard to look at history and like, honestly and not see this incredible diversity. I think some people are so desperate to look at history and like, they need to see their own politics reflected back at them, because they'd be afraid to just say, to stand on their own feet and say, like, this is what I believe in. This is the world that I'm fighting for. I don't care if it's natural, that's not the question, right? But some people are like, they can't bear the thought of that kind of moral responsibility, and so they feel the need to, like, imagine a past that comports with what they want the past to be.

Jude Doyle [39:57]
Right? Yeah. And like that's I understand that it's very like arguing from the natural is always such a seductive thing, because it means I can't help it. That's the way it's been. That's the way it's always going to be. I've been fooling myself. You know, we do that to ourselves with all sorts of narratives. But the reality is that we are people who have agency in the present day. We are part of the unfolding continuum of time, unfortunately. And, you know, yeah, it's, it's just arguing from the natural, I think, ultimately leads you back to kind of a bad, reductive place that is deeply fatalistic and says that what was is what will always be. And there is, you know, there's, there's no freedom To be found there.

Samantha Hancox-Li [40:46]
Yeah. I mean, I think you can see at least some turfs kind of taking that trajectory of, okay, well, I have to figure out what's natural. And it leads to this kind of bio pessimism, where it's like, oh, men are like this biologically, and women are like this biologically. And I'm, obviously, I'm on the side of women, but like, the best we can do is like, you know, you crank through it five times. It's like, oh, it's the patriarchal bargain, right? It's like, men are violent and dangerous, and we need to bargain with them to get the best kind of protection that we can for, like, our virtue as against those dangerous other men who are attacking our virtue and like, blah, blah, blah, that's That's what I was taught to believe as a child.

Jude Doyle [41:27]
Yeah, the only way to stop a bad guy with a penis is a good guy with a penis. Yeah, like that kind of, and it's, it's deeply, you know, just It's really depressing. And when I was reporting on turfs and their increasing links with the far right, like there are white articles in white supremacist magazines, at least one that's like, look, they already believe in one unfixable biological hierarchy, and they already agree that men are, by nature, violent brutes, and that the best they can do is get protection from one so that none of the others can get to them. And guess what we can convince them of now it's that the violent brutes are all people of color, and white men are on their side. And, like, it's just so easy to, like, move someone straight from patriarchy to white supremacy, and the Nazis know it, and the turf somehow don't know it, but we should all know it too, you know?

Samantha Hancox-Li [42:17]
No, I think that's, I think that's exactly right. I mean, we can just see this playing out with like, how readily like Trump and Maga are, like willing to adopt turf rhetoric in order to support their agenda when it comes to attacks on trans people, for instance, which I know, obviously it's very important, but I kind of don't want to talk about it, because it's too depressing. So I'm going to ask you a different question, which is, if this is what we're up against, if this is the kind of state that our feminism is in right now, how do we start putting feminism back together? Right What Should we be fighting for?

Jude Doyle [42:53]
I think what makes sense to me is a coalitional politics based on our actual experiences and needs, right? Every human being needs and deserves control of their own body. Second wave feminism gave us that, you know, crusty, rusty old second wave feminism gave us the concept of bodily autonomy and when we look at that, we can realize that, you know, and I mean, this is one of the weird insights I've gained from coming out, is that, like, No, I'm not a woman, but as long As women are treated like shit, I always will be, you know, like, as long as I'm even vaguely linked to that class, or somebody can find out that I was once linked to it, I'm always going to be vulnerable to that. And as much as I don't want to be like a kumbaya, you know, we're all in this together thing, I think if we get past posturing and labels, and, you know, performative feminism, towards looking at where our actual vulnerabilities are, what our actual needs are, and how the culture is working to deny them to us, you do begin to realize that I'm not safe until you are safe, and you're not safe until I'm safe, and therefore it is in my absolute best interest as and again, I'm not. I'm very much like a hyper fixator on gender. I'm a feminist, and my politics center on feminism, and that's always just what they do. But at least among gender marginalized people, I think that we are natural allies to each other, and that a tremendous amount of work is done to split us apart from each other, not just say, cis women and all trans people, but the endless like trans femme versus trans. Mask discourse that just pops up like a fucking weasel and a pop the weasel game every five minutes online, you know the endless discussion of like whether people who transition medically and non binary people who don't transition medically or any trans people who don't transition medically are really the same kind of trans and whether one person isn't actually more serious than another, and therefore more deserving of help and aid, you know, like there's so much work put into fracturing and breaking down any potential coalition between gender marginalized people. And I think that is because if you actually put us all together, we are the one group that touches every other group in existence, every income strata, every culture, has gender marginalized people within it, and we could potentially move the world if we could Just get that, you know, get that lever working.

Samantha Hancox-Li [45:58]
I mean, I think that's historically been one of the big strengths of, like, the queer movement, right, is that we're kind of everywhere, like just coming out, being like normal people, like, who aren't predators here to turn your kids into, you know, degenerates or whatever. Just has been a very, very effective strategy. But I kind of want to come back to what you said at the beginning here about how the fight should be for bodily autonomy, which I think is an interesting emphasis, right? Because again, you see, I hate to pick on her, but I just read her book, and so it's kind of still in my head. Amy Srinivasan the right to sex, where she says Radical Feminism is basically the belief that there's a sharp distinction between sex and gender, and gender is a pure social construct, and sex is biological, bodily yada yada, and that all the oppression that we're interested in is on the gender side. And to me, this seems like it has the implication that, like, well, we don't really need to change bodies. What we need to change is the perception of bodies, or we need to put change the values we put on bodies. But we don't actually need to change the bodies themselves. That's just, you know, the raw material for for the project. And I you know again, what do You think about that line of argument?

Jude Doyle [47:15]
That's like the the gender was always already, or sex was always already gender, sort of the reading of Judith Butler that, like, our body parts aren't our gender. They are just read as being a gender by patriarchy. And that's the thing, is that, like, there's such a diversity of trans experiences around, like, how you experience your body parts as gendered, that I just don't think it is ultimately in my best interest or anyone else's best interest to try to come up with some total formulation around, like, No, you must change your body parts, or you are not trans, or, you know, like, you must experience dysphoria with this, this and this, that was always such a hurdle for me, you know, coming out because, like, I don't know, you know, I don't spend any time in my body. How would I know what's uncomfortable in there? I spend all of my time ignoring it. I am just out of there most of the time, you know. So it just, I think, you know, for me, basic decency always pretty much requires taking people at their word and taking people at their word that like their experience of gender or their experience of their body is what they say it is. And that's why I think a politics of bodily autonomy and self determination that doesn't rest on like trying to say that you must relate to or live in your body or your gender in one specific way in order to be truly feminist, you know, or to be truly trans or to be truly queer or Whatever, that ultimately is going to leave people with the breathing room. They need to find their own paths and find what works for them. And you know, I don't need to know how you're trans. I don't need to know why you're trans. What I know is that an assigned gender that somebody laid on you at birth after looking at you for two seconds, should not determine your opportunities. Should not determine your entire future. Should not determine every relationship you ever had, and that you should be the one determining those things and determining how you choose to move through the world. I think according people's sovereignty over their own bodies and lives is ultimately the only respectful way to go about it is.

Samantha Hancox-Li [49:43]
I mean, I agree with that, right? I find these debates over like, which identity is the right identity, like, very tedious, like, again, on a personal level, like this, I had, like, when I was trying to figure out who I was, like, I kind of had, like, imbibed this. Mental model of like, to be trans, you need to have exactly this relationship to your body and your gender. And I didn't have it and like, it screwed me up for a long time. So I really reject that politics. I really like the idea that, like, you know, your gender is your business. To figure out what we should be caring about is like, do you have sovereignty over your own body, the ability to make that body and that life what you want it to be. I really believe in that, and I think, but I also want to play devil's advocate for a moment. Yeah, sorry, professional hazard, which is something you said earlier, right? That patriarchy, it's not just, you know, a material structure, but it's a set of values, right? And one of the big complaints that we were talking about with the third wave was this idea, well, anything I do is feminist because I'm a woman, right, right? And like the, you know, a lot of people have objected that say? Well, that's not that's not true. Like, you can be enacting patriarchy through your values, through your choices, like, you know, not every choice is a feminist choice. Like, how does that connect with the idea that we should kind of set aside those questions and just focus on bodily autonomy?

Jude Doyle [51:07]
I mean, I think that it's, as always, a question of, like, weights and balances, like, ultimately, the way I fuck in my own personal bedroom is not going to uphold or destroy the patriarchy. And something like the sex wars, where there was just like, endless, you know, sort of trying to form some sort of code of conduct for how feminists were allowed to have sex like it was such a blind alley, and it led us down such a bad path, and it was exhausting and it was useless. But you know, like I choose my choice, and I choose to be a wife and a homemaker, and moreover, I choose to have a YouTube channel where I talk about how being a Trad wife is what all women secretly want. Like that doesn't work either, right? You have your choices, but you also have impact on others around you. You have the ability to uphold or to resist the greater social structures. And I think that giving you freedom to decide whether you want body hair or a flat chest is not the same as giving you freedom to decide whether you want, you know, camps for people to go in when you don't like them, right? Like we have, we have a social contract, and we have an obligation to, as feminists, be public educators and make sure people understand the the nature of the patriarchy and the nature of the system they live within. And as actors, we have the obligation to not uphold the most regressive, you know, worst parts of patriarchy, just because they give us a temporary power advantage, or they suit us, or they feel nice, or whatever.

Samantha Hancox-Li [52:20]
Okay, I think that's plausible enough. Bodily autonomy is a good ideal in practice or in theory in the abstract. How would we implement that? Right? If you know, how would a blue state, Blue City, or maybe a future democratic, you know federal government, like, what kind of laws are we talking about here?

Jude Doyle [52:40]
Okay, I am admittedly weak on policy. Like every time I've tried to talk about electoral politics, people have beaten me into the ground because I don't know what I'm talking about, but it I think, would entail things like not passing laws that get in between people and their doctors on the private medical choices they're allowed to make. I think we can say that for a certainty. It would mean making resources on gender and sexual and reproductive health available so that people are not only making choices, they're making informed choices. It would entail teaching very basic things like consent from a very early age, because it starts at a very early age. He's touching you because he likes you, you know, like that, that that gets bread in the bone, and you have to do conscious work as a parent or an educator to oppose it, it would entail giving children respect as full human beings with bodily autonomy, with limited context and limited knowledge. But there are plenty of adults that have limited context and limited knowledge too, and that doesn't make them any less human, you know. So not treating children as property and not, in particular, treating their bodies as property that can be ultimately controlled by their parents. I think that's a very good place to start. I think, I think that's what I've got for you. Is that like when we start from respect for people's dignity and self determination, we learn not to touch them. Or or keep them from making decisions that affect their futures, you know.

Samantha Hancox-Li [55:06]
Yeah, so I think you know, on the on the adult side, you know, you know respect for bodily autonomy, you know, not like you said, access to health care, whether that's abortion care, transition care, right, on an informed consent model, that's one thing that I think is pretty straightforward. Obviously, kids are have become an extremely hot button issue, right? And I had, I had Talia leben on on the podcast earlier, and she talked about, like, the just a total disregard of children's rights that we have in this country, and possibly the need for children, like a movement for children's rights, but at the same time, right, children are adults. We don't give them all of the rights of an adult. Right? Children can't drink alcohol, they can't join the military. They can't, you know, sign certain kinds of contracts, right? There's a lot of stuff they can't vote. There's a lot of stuff that we don't at The moment allow children to do. So where?

Jude Doyle [56:25]
Right? Yes, right. Right, exactly like Children's Rights says the children are full humans, so there's no reason they can't be sent to work in my sweatshop like that's clearly not where we're heading with this right, like children have rights, which include protection from an adult who genuinely has their best interests in mind, hopefully more than one adult, Jesus Christ. But it, you know, and that's it's it's a balance I work with as a parent, you know, pretty thoughtfully that I try to give my daughter full context for her decisions, and I try to let her have as much agency as possible. But also, like, you know, she can't not get vaccines because she doesn't like to get shots right? Like, that's a case where I am capable of doing the risk benefit analysis, and I can't let her make that call, because I can't let her get sick and die, right? So, yeah, I mean, I don't think, I think a lot of people who argue for children as somehow small adults who should be given, like a full set of adult decisions to make right away. Either those people have never met children and they don't know how distressing and like, deeply upsetting and sad that would be for a kid to have to make all the same decisions an adult makes every day, or they're just like creeps, like they're just like, you know, you're five seconds away from like, hearing the Nambla pitch with that one. But it's, I think, that we can respect that children are literally like people whose brains are growing every day and are not done growing, and who have almost no context for the world, very little, you know, ability for emotional self management and who need to be treated with kindness and respect desperately. But you know that doesn't mean like the fact that my kid has a hard time calming down when she gets upset does not mean that, like, I am entitled to tell her who to be, or what her future is, or just like overall, like override everything about her personality, to try to turn her into like a pet or an accessory, you know? Again, I know that it sounds so wishy washy that my answers always come down to like, have a sense of proportion, you know. But I do think that when you try to, you know, write a perfect design for the universe with no sense of proportion, you end up with something that invariably overrides some crucial aspect of of the of the matter.

Samantha Hancox-Li [58:55]
Yeah, I mean, I'm I'm not a parent, so I'm going to take some lines from my own father here where, well, he said the thing about kids is that they grew up to be adults, right? You can't, right? And like, that's kind of the point, right? You don't want to raise a kid to belong to you forever, because they're not going to belong to you forever, right? They're going to become their own person. That's the idea. Is that they like, that's what you're trying to, like, make them into, is their own human being, with rights over their own life. And so you have to have, you know, respect for, you know, the fact that, yeah, they're good, they're going to get to choose their own life one day, right? You can't be imposing your idea of the good life, or what they ought to be, or what you think they ought to be, or like what your self conception of yourself requires them to be. You know, because they're just, you know, they're not your property. Fundamentally, they're they're their own property. That's

Jude Doyle [59:53]
Exactly. You are being given the privilege of helping someone at a really vulnerable moment in their life, and if you do it right, you might provide them with help that they will be using for the rest of their lives. And if you do it wrong, you could really screw up their life, and you should be operating that's kind of what I try to do, since I always write things about my family and make everybody mad because I wasn't supposed to, like, write that on the internet for people to see it like, that's what I try to do with my own kid, is just be like, there's a book coming, there's a tell all memoir about what I was like as a parent, and what do I want to be in this chapter? What do I What? What am I prepared to have recorded for history's eyes in this interaction with you right now? Right? Like, so, yeah, you just, you have to treat them with an eye to the adults they will one day become and the you know, and recognize that you're being given a really rare gift, a really rare opportunity to be with someone at a formative moment and to be the person they Trust, to hopefully earn that trust, You know,

Samantha Hancox-Li [1:00:31]
Yeah, I think that's a good note to wrap up on this, as you say, ambivalence, right? That, yeah, then some things, I think are pretty, pretty clear answers in some things, yeah, it's right to be a little bit ambivalent. Right to maybe not have all the bright lines in the world ready to go, but to sit with some of the harder problems. So yeah, thanks so much for coming on and wrestling with some of these hard problems of feminism that where we are and where we're going. Any last words.

Jude Doyle [1:01:41]
No, this was a lovely conversation, and I hope I actually managed to make a point at some point in the middle of it, I felt a point coming very close to me it may have evaded

Samantha Hancox-Li [1:01:51]
I think many points were made, many points. So, yeah. Jude Doyle, author of the forthcoming DILF, the train wreck that blondes, bad mothers, many other useful and exciting articles that you can read on the internet. So yeah, thanks for coming on and I will see you all around. Okay.