Transcription
Women acting like men. They're always swearing right in the face of men.
Speaking to me is a privilege. You do not have privileges.
A man behaving like that in corporate, they would be fired. You just don't.
Imagine you're a girl born in 1990. At 5 years old, Disney tells you being confident means being defiant. When you're eight, you're in school, your teachers tell you constantly to speak up, speak, assert yourself. Then at 14, you see a Dove campaign and it tells you love yourself exactly as you are. Then fast forward, you're 20, you're on social media and it tells you not to care what other people think. Then at 25 now you're on TikTok and it tells you no is a complete sentence. Then you go to therapy and you're told that compromising means that you are pathologically people-pleasing. And any one of these alone may seem harmless. But the question is what happens when girls are immersed in this their entire lifetime in all different areas of their life. So that's what we're going to look at today. What happens?
Cuz at some point we decided extraversion, speaking up, knowing your mind, being self-promoting, that is a net gain. This was because early feminist theorists in the 1970s even before they equated assertiveness with women's liberation. One of them even wrote that assertiveness training will make sure all people have equal rights regardless of social status. And then you had self-help books declaring that assertiveness is a basic human right. You had feminist projects. They invoked phrases like "learn to fight, we will not submit." They regarded female agreeableness as a psychological problem as a cause of social conditioning. And so increasing assertiveness, which is in the trait extraversion, was treated as a net benefit for every girl regardless of her personality.
As if I don't care if people dislike me. Deep down, I secretly enjoy it. So that's what I'm going to examine in this episode because it's easy to dismiss any one of these influences as just one thing. But I have identified three big areas. We're going to go through that.
The first area is of course TV and movies. The timeline starts at the 1970s, 1980s. Before that, female independence was still tied to warmth and being good to others, being polite. Then by the late 80s, you start seeing tougher women. They show up in, uh, Murphy Brown and Working Girl.
How did you come up with the idea for Tras to buy up Metro?
How did I uh Tess McGill who's fighting to get credit for an idea her boss stole? So even here, uh, you don't see it in their language so much, but their ambition still has to be justified. So the point is women, the women deserve access to male-dominated spaces. From there, the next step was making women harsh and emotionally detached on screen and equating that to being a powerful female. And so, you see this onslaught of just rude language from women on screen.
You should take that cap off if you didn't serve. And I know you didn't.
So, now you're going to stay here. Be humble. The only thing small around here is the amount of mansplaining we deal with each day.
I'll need to hire my own team.
The point was to start equating that with women being taken seriously. So over the '90s, 2000s, you had we saw Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Not going to hurt you.
Oh, it's not me I'm worried about.
That was linking physical power. So, girl power to physical power and strength, you know. She could beat up all the guys 'cause she's tough. You had Daria. She, she makes emotional distance and sarcasm a sign of intelligence.
Here alone. But now you've arrived and our lives can truly begin.
That you see still today. Sarcasm, eye-rolling, humiliating men. That means you're intell, you're an intelligent woman and nobody can mess with you. You have Ally McBeal of course was big and Sex and the City and they normalized women who were successful but also very self-focused and disregarded other people. And then by the time we got to The Devil Wears Prada, female authority aestheticized through control, intimidation, contempt, you know, Miranda Priestly. She isn't just powerful, she's cold, and that's cool. That her coldness is a big part of what makes her powerful.
Where are the belts, Felista? Why is no one ready?
Who's there? Who are you dealing with?
I'm sorry. What's your name? Oh, Liz. Oh, it's Liz.
No, no, get away from her. She's useless.
Then in the 2010s, you shows like the, the girl boss is coming. You're already here. You've Scandal, Unreal. They make domination and manipulation and emotional invulnerability. That's a big one, right?
To get you something to eat. What would you like?
You figure that out. Why am I coming up with solutions for you? That's your job, right? That's not my job. Sorry, ma'am.
I'm socially detached. Um, so that's my, my liberation lies in that. That's almost expected at this point from female leads. They're constantly swearing. It annoys me so much when I'm watching anything. It doesn't make you look smarter. It doesn't make you look more confident. Most annoying thing is that when they portray women in corporate, women acting like men, they're always swearing right in the face of men. A man behaving like that in corporate, they would be fired. You just don't. But anyway, that's what they think that means.
Then you have Selena Meyer humiliates people.
Gary.
Oh, ma'am, Gary doesn't work here.
I know. Why are you telling me things that I already know constantly?
You have Olivia Pope controls entire political rooms.
Speaking to me is a privilege. You do not have privileges.
And Rachel Goldberg, she's written exactly like a male anti-hero. Fleabag then come Killing Eve. They turn sarcasm and moral ambiguity and transgression into charisma. Here you start seeing the glorification of the antisocial traits. So, not only aren't they pro-social anymore, it's this deliberately antisocial traits in women means they're strong and independent. And then you start seeing the dialogues. It's like, "Move." "No, you're pathetic." "Oh, I don't care what you think."
Trying to justify your action.
Not listening. I don't need to justify anything. You all are so convinced that you are the rightful owner of all of the power that it doesn't even occur to you that someone else could be in the driver's seat.
Powerful women. And so dismissal and refusal become signals of confidence.
You want to choose the asset, then you choose another case officer. But let me spare you the search. I'm the only one. I'm it. I choose the asset. I choose the cover. I build the [ __ ] plan. And I run it. Me.
And then I think the one that annoys me the most is Wednesday. That came just recently. Here you see this pushing of the glamorizing emotional detachment, deadpan cruelty, social refusal. It's even aesthetic. And I don't think we even have to mention children's animation. We've all followed what Disney has done. Gone are the days of Cinderella, Snow White, and Aurora. No, no, no, no. You have Ariel's determined and independent, Mulan and Merida, and they talk back to authority. They're all proving that they can refuse only caring about themselves and that being a virtue. Detaching from everyone around them, not caring, going their own way. That's what you want to do. Feel good about yourself. This is all you know that to to to have self-esteem to feel good about yourself. That's what you need to do. You need to encourage extraversion in girls because you cannot possibly feel good about yourself. If you care about what people think, if you want to please people around you, then you will be tied down forever, destined to be exploited by men.
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Then you have the next big block, which is campaigns, advertisements. Starting in the 1970s, the language still mainly about liberation, but it already began to shift. You had Ms. Magazine puts Wonder Woman on the first cover. "The future is female." "Well-behaved women rarely make history." That's a great one. Then you have L'Oréal's "Because You're Worth It," of course. Self-worth, something a woman claims for herself. Then, *Love Story* gives culture this disastrous idea. I cannot stress this enough. "Love means never having to say you're sorry." Imagine your husband says that to you. "Love means I never have to say I'm sorry." How do you think that would go down? By the '80s, this is already psychological language. You know, "Women Who Love Too Much" and "Codependent No More." Then you had media campaigns like Always "Like a Girl" that's 2014, 2015, of course, Dove's Self-Esteem Project, the 2004, and "Confident Me," emphasizing positive body image. And then came slogans like "Girl Power" that originated with the Spice Girls. All of this explicitly encouraging assertiveness and leadership trait extraversion. Social media just added on to that. So you're constantly seeing things like "You're enough." "Never change for anyone." Oh, this is also my favorite. "If he can't handle you at your worst, he doesn't deserve you at your best." I mean, what nonsense. "Take me as I am." "The only job is to be yourself." "Stop shrinking yourself." Uh, "You don't owe anyone anything." I can go on and on. This is all terrible advice. Notice the underlying message. It's not confidence. It is that the adapt, the burden of adaptation lies on everyone else. Main character energy and bad [ __ ].
The parenting philosophy also didn't help, you know, with the whole permissive parenting, the framework of emotional validation. Any discomfort itself signals mistreatment. The confident expression of that discomfort will be the solution. "Women should be free" becomes "women should know their worth," which becomes "women should remain authentic," which becomes "women should protect themselves from anything that threatens the self." Perhaps people can say, well, it's, you know, it's only a part of culture and it's avoidable and it's only some places, but it's not. That's what I'm trying to show. It was a full immersion because they also got this at school starting in the '80s and '90s. You had they started with social-emotional learning. They started with assertiveness training and building self-esteem. Teachers were encouraged to praise effort and not criticize. Avoid negative labels, emphasize every child's uniqueness, treating self-worth as something education should actively produce. California even created a state task force based on the belief that raising self-esteem could improve everything from academic performance to crime. Of course, they weren't able to show positive outcomes from the self-esteem movement, but still, it continued. So, girls in particular, they were encouraged to find their voice through assertiveness workshops, refusal training, role-playing, positive self-talk, classroom strategies designed to make them speak up.
I see this today with my daughter. I've talked about it before. She's eight. In every single note we got, she is the kindest girl you'll ever meet. She's so, she's so agreeable. She has so much love to give. She has this light inside. And that's, you know, they write that in in the notes she takes home in the end-of-year notes, but it's always with big letters: "She needs to learn to stand up for herself." What does that do to a girl like her who is really agreeable, inherently agreeable? It makes her feel worse. It makes her feel like there's this ideal, there's this extroverted ideal she can't live up to because it's forced. They cannot make her less agreeable. So, she ends up suffering because this is what they say girls should behave like. And so, they claim that this social-emotional learning, these programs have had good effects on pro-sociality, good effects on self-esteem. But of course, what they measure is not whether kids at the end of it are more willing to compromise or accommodate others, whether they care more about others. What they end up measuring equates more to social dominance. Are they participating? Are they actively helping others? And girls can do that and still be relationally aggressive. So they say that overall we've had positive outcomes of these programs they've been running in school. What they're measuring in terms of aggression has been direct aggression. So physical fighting. They say themselves that indirect aggression is not something they're able to measure, which is why we see increased bullying among girls with social media, with texting, that has gone up. And at the same time as they're claiming that these social-emotional learning programs have worked, I call cap.
I think it comes from a basic misunderstanding of empathy. It's, uh, what we saw during COVID. You see that what they really mean when they say empathic and compassion has more to do with, uh, social dominance because you can understand how other people feel and in fact, you have to be able to understand and identify. So what they're measuring when they say we have positive outcome is really kids who are learning to understand how to identify feelings in others. They're not measuring that they care about those feelings. And to become a good manipulator, to increase social dominance, you have to understand the feelings of others and you actually have to start caring less about them in order to establish your social dominance. So that's how we can get to this paradox of we're all seeing increased bullying stats, uh, but they're supposed to be learning all this so-called pro-social behavior in these programs at school. And then from that, they're coming home to parents who are practicing permissive parenting, endless emotional validation and training extraversion to speak those discomforts out loud, to stand up for what they're feeling, saying out loud what they need. So, schools have spent now decades measuring whether girls speak more, participate more, report higher self-esteem, feel more capable of asserting themselves, but they've paid far less attention to actual pro-social traits. Are they able to compromise? Are they able to accommodate? Do they care about the feelings of others? Because when you put extraversion and agreeableness next to each other, you have to decide, should I now speak up for my own needs or should I ask what other people need first? At the end of the day, there will be a competition between these two. Should I be self-sacrificing or should I fight for my own needs? We have continuously through media, TV, advertising campaigns, social media, parenting, and schools. We are saying prioritize extraversion over agreeableness. And that is because through feminism, we have this default attitude of men are evil and women have to become tougher to avoid being exploited by men because that is ultimately what they seek to do, to have power over women, when in fact, men are geared to protect women. That is their default setting. And why do they think that extraversion is a pure gain? Because what they're after is corporate success, your success in business. And yes, there you see that extroverted people are successful, but they are also intelligent and conscientious. You're not going to get anywhere with only extraversion. What you're looking at then is a histrionic personality disorder.
And so what we've been doing is that girls increasingly grow up hearing that accommodation is being weak, compromise is suspicious, concern for other people's approval is unhealthy, and changing, changing for the sake of a relationship. Now, that is a form of self-betrayal. And so over decades, that environment gradually weakens. One of the personality traits that is most responsible for regulating narcissism, entitlement, and antisocial behavior, trait agreeableness, stands as a shield against that. The irony is that a culture who supposedly is attempting to protect girls from exploitation, they are discouraging the very trait that is necessary to make them cooperative, make them capable of living successfully with other people. And teaching girls that approaching relationships as though softness, warmth, thou predictably invite exploitation, that does not prepare them for intimacy. It prepares them for a lifetime of negotiating with the enemy. That is what it does. How are you going to give your husband the respect and adoration that he needs if you are constantly told that being tough and independent means humiliating and swearing in men's faces?