The Marxist Slide from Liberalism | Naomi Wolf | EP 351

Should accept yourself just the way you are. What does that say about who I should become? Is that just now off the table because I'm already good enough in every way? So am I done or something?

Get the hell up! Get your act together! Adopt some responsibility. Put your life together. Develop a vision. Unfold all those manifold possibilities that lurk within. Be a force for good in the world and that'll be the adventure of your life.

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What happened in the 19th century? Not just with contagious diseases but with the typhus and cholera epidemics of the 1840s and early 1850s, which were devastating. Just wiped out! You know, people would be kind of sick on Sunday and dead on Wednesday.

That created a model in Western history that allowed later regimes to emulate the model of kind of narrating the danger of infectious diseases. Certainly using that element of disgust and contamination and existential threat as a pretext for what authoritarians always want to do, which is eradicate liberties and consolidate control.

So I think it is happening on two fronts, right? It happens organically on the psychological front, but then the state jumps in and says, "Well, we can save you from this existential threat—just hand over all your rights."

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Hello everyone! I'm pleased today to talk to a thinker on the Progressive front, for many decades, Dr. Naomi Wolf, an American author and journalist. Her first book, "The Beauty Myth," challenged notions of attraction, arguing that they are societally fabricated. This publication became an international bestseller and cemented Wolf as one of the leading spokeswomen for the so-called third-wave feminist movement.

In recent years, interestingly enough, she's come under fire, especially on the left, for becoming an anti-vaxxer and a conspiracy theorist—a strange destination for a progressive thinker, which led Wolf to write her most recent book: "The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19, and the War Against Human."

Looking forward very much to talking to Dr. Wolf today to delve into the position of the left—reprehensible position, in her estimation—by the Marxist doctrines that were popularized throughout the 20th century. To understand how that's come about and to analyze the role played by organizations such as the Chinese Communist Party.

I guess the first question I have for you, Dr. Wolf, is why did you agree to talk to me?

"Why wouldn't I?”

Oh, well lots of people don't. I've asked all sorts of people on the left for years to appear on my podcast and that standard answer is, “No.” I don’t know precisely, by the way, if you can be placed politically on the left. I know your views have changed somewhat dramatically over time, and we’re going to investigate that. But no, I've invited people, especially political figures on the left, to speak with me repeatedly, dozens of times, with no success, let’s say.

So it’s not a foregone conclusion. Most of the scientists and so forth that I ask to talk are, with very few exceptions, say yes, but that's definitely not true on the more social commentary political side, especially in the political realm.

"So, but it didn’t, it wasn't an issue as far as you were concerned?"

Well, I guess first I would say I’ll talk to anyone, especially about liberty and the Constitution and human rights and freedom. I think that's my job, and it would be a very boring world if we only spoke to people with whom we know already we're going to agree.

And more importantly, maybe talk to you because, well, for that reason, but also because I see that you describe yourself as a liberal. Well, from the outside, it may seem as if my views have changed over the last couple of years. I really feel that they’ve stayed exactly the same and that the world has changed.

And I also see myself as classical liberal, so even if I didn’t, I want to talk to you because I like learning things and I like talking to people with whom I may not agree. I might learn something.

But either way, you know, since you seem to be concerned about human freedom and I'm concerned about human freedom, additionally, it wouldn't occur to me not to talk to you.

That said, I recognize your experience. Sadly, I'm now in a situation in which I keep asking the left to counter the views that I'm publishing by other people on my news site. You know, I'm asking the left to engage with the issues that I'm bringing up and I literally cannot get anyone to talk to me.

I used to be, you know, until like two and a half years ago, firmly ensconced in the left as a cultural figure.

"Well, so I definitely want to delve into that because one of the things I really have observed, like I think I'm reasonably neutral as a psychological observer of political behavior, I believe, and certainly one of the things I have noticed is that proclivity to cancel is most fundamentally a left-wing phenomenon."

I've had very few people on the right refuse to talk to me, that's for sure, and I've had many, even my friends on the left, and I've seen this in a relatively shocking way, I would say fairly frequently, would refuse to talk to people that weren't in their bailiwick.

I think one of the punishments—actually this is odd though, one of the punishments for refusing to talk to people whose opinions differ from yours is you end up squabbling with the people who disagree with you on your side over smaller and smaller things, even equally intently. So it’s not like you rid yourself of the necessity of disagreement; you just find yourself—what did Freud call that? The narcissism of small differences. The battles, they rage more and more intently over smaller and smaller differences of opinion, which is sort of comical in a metaphysical way.

So let’s start with your childhood. So, tell me about, tell me a little bit about your parents and about what it was like for you growing up, and I’m interested in how your intellectual interests developed.

Sure! I will just note before I do that—that’s a change. I think Dr. Peterson on the left, it didn’t used to be the case just five years ago that it was canceling. We can talk about that later if you like—it's really important. I think that these are non-Western norms that have been kind of implanted in Western cultural discourse.

It would have been shameful to cancel an opponent rather than engage with him or her, you know, in very recent memory. So I was born in San Francisco.

I mean, I think I'm exactly the same age you are and I grew up in a, I guess, an academic household. My dad was a professor of English literature at San Francisco State University. My mom was a graduate student in anthropology when I was growing up. Jewish, middle-class household; very creative environment. My father is also a poet and a teacher of creative writing, so it was a very talky, ready, imagination-heavy environment.

And you know, I was surrounded by the cultural ferment of the 60s and 70s in San Francisco, so by the time I was a teenager, you know, the gay LGBTQ—right at that time it was called the gay and lesbian liberation movement, the women's movement, you know, immigrants' rights—it was all kind of a lot of social justice movements around me as I was growing up, and it seemed like the world was going to be fixed, really.

I mean it was very optimistic. It was a very beautiful place to grow up. And then I went to Yale, and that was a shock because I'd never—you know, I'm a California girl—so I'd never experienced East Coast elitism, hierarchies, and semitism, you know, before, the peculiar racism of the Northeast.

I mean if you grew up in California, it’s a very diverse culture. You know, it's not that we don't have racism in California, but it's different. It's a more inclusive society; it’s less class-bound. So that was a shock.

"When did you—and you did an undergraduate at Yale?"

I was an undergraduate at Yale in English literature.

"And what year?"

1980 to 1984.

"80 to 84."

Yeah, okay.

"Yeah, so we do overlap almost perfectly in terms of birth date, age, and education time. And so what exactly did you experience at Yale? Like how did that prejudicial environment make itself manifest to you as far as you were concerned? And was that something that other people were experiencing too, or was there something, do you think, about your background, apart from the semitic element of it, was there something about your background, do you think, that tilted your experience more in that direction? How much of that was situational and how much personal? In retrospect?"

Well, it was pretty—they had only recently allowed women in—I think in about 1976—and so still a super sexist place. And there was a lot of casual, kind of date rape and what we would today call sexual harassment that wasn't, I think, only recently codified or not yet fully codified at that time.

I’ll have to check, but you sort of felt—you know, I was not the only woman who felt beleaguered. I mean, you know, the parties at Yale in my time were described in Brett Kavanaugh's hearings and they were very familiar to me.

You know, people did get kind of raped and molested at parties; you know, very, very casually at Yale.

"And what do you think the attitude of the typical male undergraduate at that point?"

I don't know if we would talk about the typical male undergraduate or if we would talk about the more dangerous typical male undergraduate. What do you think the attitude towards women was at that time?

And I mean, I'm also interested in the sexual misbehavior problem from a variety of psychological viewpoints. I mean, a huge part of what fuels sexual misbehavior on campus is alcoholism, right?

Yeah, I mean your language, I think, is an interesting difference between us. I would call it criminal activity on campus.

"Oh, okay, okay, okay."

Well, I’m not trying to make the point that that’s not the case. I’ve thought a lot about how those sorts of activities might be addressed and regulated by universities, and they are alcohol-fueled to a degree that’s almost unimaginable.

So alcohol itself is responsible for about 50% of violent crimes and it’s the only drug we know that actually makes people violent. And so I'm wondering, the parties that you're describing, I mean, we know perfectly well that there’s a party culture at American universities and that that is alcohol-fueled.

And there’s an alcohol—a very disinhibiting drug. And so if you have a proclivity in a particular direction, the alcohol is going to take all the stops off that. So if there's an underlying misogyny or resentment, say towards women, then that's going to be amplified by an alcohol-fueled event.

I'm not trying to make a case for or against the presence of misogyny at Yale. I'm just wondering, in retrospect, when you look at that, what contributing factors do you see to what you experienced?

Yeah, so you're—I mean we’re diving right into an incredibly, you know, vexed and difficult subject, but I'm happy to address it.

So you know, I’m glad to be addressing it because that's one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you. I know about your interest in gender dynamics.

And you know, this is probably one of those areas on which we might have a lot of interesting disagreements. So I would say categorically, alcohol—you can’t blame the culture of accepted sexual violence and sexual harassment at Yale at that time on alcohol or drugs at all.

What you can blame it on is institutional toleration of sexual harassment and sexual violence. I mean, in other words, there was a culture of impunity. The people who knew that nothing would happen to them acted as if nothing would happen to them.

And I too have studied, you know, gender dynamics, sexual assault, sexual harassment on campus for many decades. And for sure when there’s a culture of impunity in any institution, rapists, rapers, molesters molest.

And when there’s a culture of consequences that restricts the tendencies that those people might have to rape or harass, you know, for sure.

But what the young men around us at Yale and the faculty around us at Yale knew is that nothing bad would happen to them if they raped or molested women. And categorically, if you look at the cases at that time, you know, to this day, to some extent, the institution colluded in covering up rapes on campus, protecting athletes especially who assaulted women on campus, protecting faculty.

So I personally was molested by a famous professor, Dr. Harold Bloom when I was a junior, and that was in a context in which he was completely not drinking alcohol. It was a context in which he had a lengthy reputation, which I didn't know until afterwards, of doing this to undergraduate women and actually graduate students.

And I tried to get accountability from the institution decades later and it was just covered up, covered up.

"How old were you when that happened?"

I was 19 years old.

"And what effect did that have on you metaphysically?"

Well, I think it had a lifelong effect on me metaphysically. It was quite terrifying at the time. Because it was in a—like in no way can this situation be, you know, blamed on anyone, not know exactly what she was doing.

It was a situation in which he was my advisor. He was my professor for an independent study course that my academic advisor had recommended, a close colleague of his, another famous academic, John Hollander.

It was a—I was writing poetry. I was a very talented poet. I was getting lots of awards and recognition for being a poet.

And you know, he encouraged me to take this independent study with him. He ignored and ignored and ignored my submissions all semester. I was looking at the end of the semester with no evaluation.

And I didn't come from a wealthy background; I had to get a scholarship to go into graduate school. I was going to apply for a Rhodes scholarship.

So for many reasons, including just, you know, I was a student, I needed an evaluation. Finally, he said, “I will come to your house where you live and I will talk about your manuscript of poetry at that time.”

And that seemed almost normal because he worked with my roommate's boyfriend in a project, an editorial project.

So we all had a dinner party at his recommendation, and then everyone left. And I thought he was going to evaluate my semester's work as he had promised to do.

And he assaulted me, basically. And we were alone in a house, and you know, there was no one I could—you know, I couldn't get away. He was huge; he was between me and the door. It was terrifying, you know?

I mean, he didn't get far. He put his hand on my thigh and I backed away from him and kind of got as far away from him as I could. And then he kind of got between me and the door.

And I mean, eventually, eventually he left. But that—I mean, first of all, I had been raped as a child 11 years before.

Which, you know, when I try to talk about assault on campus and you know, professors creating an environment of sexual assault on campus, a third of minor women have been raped or assaulted or abused by trusted male role models, by the, or parent figures or parents, by the time they're 18.

So, you know, I was already traumatized and I was already terrified. And so in a situation like that too, because I imagine that you're so—in a way, you’re a good poet at that point; undoubtedly, you're extremely excited about the fact that someone who's an eminent scholar is taking an interest in and is going to evaluate your work.

And so you’re looking forward to that on that front and then you find yourself in a situation where, well, exactly the opposite of what is supposed to happen is happening, to put it mildly.

And you said also that that was reminiscent of treatment that you had received at the hands of another man much earlier in your life. So this is kind of this important moment where we’re a little bit talking—not in the same experiential plane—because all of those considerations certainly, you know, would arise, you know, months or years later, right?

But what I was concerned about at that moment was survival because I did not know it would kill me. You know, because when women are raped or molested, especially very young women, you know, you don't know that this person is not going to kill you, right?

You don't know that you're going to get out of this situation alive. And I wish, you know, everyone who runs the university—I wish that they would understand that that is what is the experience of someone who is in a situation of being molested or raped—that they literally, you know, don't know if they're going to get out of it alive.

Because it is such a terrifying, surreal, shocking assault. It's an assault.

So, joke after the fact, you know, this is why judges and juries and administrators always misunderstand rape and sexual assault after the fact. It’s like, well, you know, he didn't get very far, well, you know, you didn't get hurt very much or, you know, whatever it is.

But at the time, it's literally like, am I going to die? You know, what—does he have a knife? Does he have a gun? I mean, it's absolutely a terror that I can't even describe to you and it probably would have been even if I hadn’t been raped as a child, right?

But you know, there's no way to minimize how existentially terrifying it is to be molested by anyone bigger than you are, who’s standing between you in an exit in a house that’s far away from any kind of help. No one would have heard me if I had screamed, so yeah.

Well, I wasn't trying—I wasn't trying to reduce what you had told me to the mere psychological consequence of betrayal. I was just attempting, I suppose, in some sense, to amplify it by pointing out that not only did this happen to you, but it happened to you at the hands of someone who was trusted and who was entrusted with fostering your development.

And it’s the gap part of what constitutes psychological trauma is the gap between expected behavior and actual behavior. And in a situation where you're at the hands of someone who has a stellar reputation and you’re at an institution that’s supposed to guide and develop you, then the depth of—I mean if someone attacks you in a dark alley in a rough part of town, that’s a terrible thing, but there isn’t that additional element of betrayal of an entire institution and an entire developmental pathway that goes along with it.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t awful, it just misses one dimension of awful, right?

"So thank you, Dr. Peterson. I so—you're quite right, I mean so sub—so the initial trauma was just the physical, you know definitely terror. The subsequent trauma, you know, goes to what we were saying, like what allows a rape culture on campus, and you know that was when I brought this up with people around me including my Dean and basically, the, you know, 360-degree response from the institution was he’s well known for this, don’t do anything about it, he’ll ruin your career."

So, you know, other women tried to bring it up, had their careers destroyed.

"Why didn’t you have your career destroyed?"

Well, I think I did have my career destroyed. I wanted to be okay, you know? I wanted to be an English professor, a professor in his same field. I wanted to teach Victorian literature, English literature. That’s all I wanted to do my whole life and be a poet.

And I had to take a complete detour for the next, you know, three decades because he was still alive and that wasn’t an option for me.

And even, you know, like all the way—so tell me, tell, tell me exactly why it wasn’t an option for you? Like what were the mechanics of the impositions that were put in front of you as a consequence of the sequence of events?

So, I mean, I know he was very influential and I can understand vaguely why that would have had a cascading consequence, but had you continued pursuing your education in the literature domain, why exactly would it have been that you wouldn't have been able to find the kind of academic job, for example, that your background might have otherwise provided for you?

Well, that’s a good question. I guess he casts such a gigantic shadow over the whole field. I mean he was the great authority in Victorian studies, you know, for decades after that.

You know, and it was just communicated to me that I couldn’t get a letter of recommendation. I couldn’t get—obviously I wasn’t going to even be in the same room with him to solicit a letter of recommendation, but it was communicated to me that the way into graduate school, like if I applied to any graduate school and they saw that he had been on my transcript, they would have said, “Why don’t you have a letter from Dr. Bloom?”

"Yeah, okay, okay, I see."

Yeah, and what’s funny, because that's a glaring omission.

Totally! And then that would have been up for questions and whatever he wants to say, he’ll say.

And that was also communicated to me clearly by people who cared about me, who were warning me. He, you know, he had done that before, right?

It didn’t even take women coming forward for him to ruin their careers if he had, you know, molested them or approached them and they'd rejected him, which I had done, I guess in his view.

He closed every door academically. So it was clear to me that I had no future in my chosen field as long as he was alive, so I had to do something that was not my plan.

I didn’t plan to be a feminist activist, non-fiction writer in a popular non-fiction genre for decades. I’m happy to have had eight international bestsellers, but that wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to be a university professor.

And then even, you know, as late as—I went back to school—I'm fast-forwarding a little bit. I thought it was safe because he was very elderly to go back to college.

So I became a Rhodes scholar in spite of him and I went to Oxford.

"And I’ll, you know, fast forward. So it was finally, I was like almost 50 and I thought, okay it’s safe to resume my education and become a professor of English literature."

Went back to Oxford in midlife. I finished my DPhil in Victorian studies.

"And when I submitted my DPhil and I succeeded, and I passed, my academic advisor at Oxford said, 'You need to submit this to a journal, you know, Victorian Studies Journal—and you've got to submit, and you know, it’s edited by Harold Bloom—you know, you’ve gotta submit this. This is, you know, really distinguished work.'

And I said, 'I can’t. I can’t submit it to that journal,' and I had to tell her why.

So that late, and she agreed. She agreed. You know, that was how many years later? That was like 30 years later.

"That can’t be 30."

Yeah, no, 30 years old.

"So as far as you're concerned this event sidelined you into an—my domain of academic pursuit that was very unlike—okay."

How much do you think—look, first of all I should say if I'm gonna push you into places that you really don’t want to talk about, you just tell me, okay, because I’ll back off.

"I'll talk about anything; I’ll tell you I’m a grown-up, go ahead and ask."

To what degree do you think the psychological consequences of what befell you, as well as the practical consequences, colored your writing and the aims towards which you directed your writing from then on forward?

Like what would you have written about do you think had this not happened? What would have been your natural inclination of interest?

I mean, all I ever wanted to do was teach. You know, I would have been writing about Ruskin!

So you would have stuck relatively firmly, you think, to something like classical literary criticism?

Yep!

So I should point out for everyone who’s watching and listening, because it isn’t exactly obvious what the point of literary criticism is if you’re not knowledgeable about the field and it’s easy to underestimate its significance in literary critics analyze productions of fiction, generally speaking; they analyze stories.

And that turns out to be of utmost importance, and we’ve become more clear about that on the psychological front in recent years because the structures through which we view the world, women described our stories and what literary critics do in the deepest sense is to analyze the maps that we use to orient ourselves in the world.

And there isn’t anything more important in your life than getting your story straight, and people who are astute literary critics don’t—sort of fry falls into this category, as far as I’m concerned—are extraordinarily helpful at helping people orient themselves in terms of where they devote their attention and their action.

And so it’s easy for people who aren’t intellectually oriented, let’s say, and who don’t have a deep educational history to not understand why literary criticism is so important, but it is very important.

And so you are going to devote yourself to classic literary scholarship, but you got derailed.

And okay, so now you went from Yale to, was it to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar?

Okay now, you said that your ambitions to pursue a professorship in English literature were derailed, but you did get a Rhodes scholarship.

And that’s not easy! So how do you reconcile the potentially competing claims that, well, perhaps a career in English literature would have still been open to you given that your academic background was positive enough so that you got a Rhodes scholarship?

That's not a simple thing!

Yeah, I can answer that easily. The Rhodes scholarship committee was looking for different things. They weren’t narrowly focused on, you know, the gateway to credentialing someone for graduate studies in English literature. They were looking for leadership and, you know, I mean, obviously my grades were good overall and I was considered, you know, a gifted undergraduate. I had lots of letters from my other professors, so it was different credentials.

So the lack of letter from Bloom didn’t—wasn't a stumbling block in relationship to the Rhodes scholarship.

"Well that’s a relief."

Well, I mean sure, but imagine, Dr. Peterson, if you had to succeed in an area that was entirely not your choice for your life.

"Yes, well, I could I can imagine that because that’s happened to me in the last seven years, so."

I am no longer a professor at the University of Toronto, which wasn’t exactly in my plans in that respect. We have had similar journeys.

I have something that happened now, I had many decades of pursuing pretty much precisely what I wanted to pursue, so that's a major difference, but I have some experience with being dislocated, let’s say, in a manner that wasn’t—oh well, you know, c'est la vie, things have worked out quite well for me, but it wasn’t what I had planned, you know?

And so, I suppose that's the definition of life: it isn’t what you’ve planned.

All right, so now you went off to pursue the Rhodes scholarship—what did you study as a Rhodes scholar? Now you’re at Oxford, and what was it like? What was it like being at Oxford compared to being at Yale?

Well, it was pretty exhilarating for me because it was pure academic, um—how can I put it?

Well, the Oxford experience, as you no doubt know, is completely different from an American university, in the sense that you have these tiny seminars, you have tutorials with your professor, your don, and you’re like two students or three students and the professor.

And you kind of dive deeply into the text in that moment, and it’s a very, very pure form of scholarship. So that made me very happy because I am a true nerd and again, you know, I was working on Victorian studies, 19th-century English literature.

I was working on an M.Phil at that time and I loved it. It was the 80s in Britain, so it was cold and gloomy and thatchery.

And the graduate students weren’t particularly central to the Oxford experience; it was a very undergraduate experience, but we were kind of exiles together, but it was exhilarating.

And the Rhodes scholarship, of course, what a privilege! You’re—you’re, you’re, you’re expenses are paid for two or three years, depending on what you choose to—just do it, you know, just study, just learn with a group of other really bright, of really bright people from all over the world.

So it was a very, you know, blissful intellectual experience.

The seed of my first book was my DPhil thesis there.

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The culture that you'd experienced at Yale, that we already walked through, how different or similar was your experience on that front at Oxford?

Now you're a little older and you're with a little older people, so in principle, the level of average reprehensible behavior has decreased somewhat just on those grounds alone.

But were there market differences in the social culture, let’s say, and in the attitudes of the authorities?

That’s interesting. Well, it was still you know, still, you know, I can’t stress enough that I, in part, became a famous feminist, you know, public intellectual because everywhere you went in the 80s, women were not safe, you know, physically.

I mean that’s just the case. So even at Oxford, you know, certainly, rape took place with impunity. There was one famous professor who was always trying to seduce his undergraduates.

But it was a lot—you know, Britain is a less violent culture in general, so it didn’t feel quite as systematically unsafe.

And I didn’t feel as—I’m saying partly because it’s a—you know, it’s just a less violent culture.

But I—you know, I’m not going to say that those issues didn’t warrant, felt still very alive on campus. They were.

And in fact, when I left Oxford and I went to Edinburgh to write my first book, I worked at a rape crisis center. And you know, that too was at that time—the whole city, all of that—all of that country was the culture of impunity.

Look, Dr. Peterson, to this day, you know, like six percent of rapes in Britain get prosecuted, and no one even keeps statistics on how many of those get convicted.

I mean it—you know, really, rapists have impunity. I can't stress that enough, even now, even with all the changes that have been there in society.

Young women are somewhat safer on college campuses because of hard work of people like, you know, me and my colleagues in the 80s and 90s and early odds, but it is not— you know, it is not that we still live in a culture in which most of the women I know have been, you know, raped or molested in some way, and vanishingly few of them have gotten any kind of justice at all, you know, from the perpetrator.

But moving along, I was very happy at Oxford. And you know, generally it was a less violent culture.

"And so what question were you trying to address or questions were you trying to address when you were doing your Master’s work at Oxford? What was paramount in your mind and why?"

So I was very interested in the image of women in 19th-century novels; this ideal that emerged in the 19th century in, well, in virtually all of the great novels. You know, certainly written by women, but also in Dickens and in George Eliot, of this kind of passive, childlike, doll-like, beautiful kind of inert figure.

And I was interested in that because this passive inner stereotype of femininity was emerging at just the time that there was, historically, the first wave of feminism in any Western society. In other words, women were organizing—they were organizing to defeat laws that were punitive in which women who looked like prostitutes could be taken off the street without due process.

And they were organizing to, you know, have access to education, to have access to owning their own property, so that there was a very vibrant—and they were mobilizing for access to primary education as well.

So right when women were being empowered and empowering themselves to change society, this inert kind of backlash figure got constructed as a cultural ideal. So I was writing about that.

"So let me ask you a question about that. I mean, the representation of women in Victorian era literature in other countries I think was broader than that. So the women in Tolstoy, for example—Tolstoy is a very good example. I mean the females in Dostoevsky novels are very complex psychologically; all his characters are.

But in Tolstoy’s novels in particular, you get the sense that in the Victorian period and earlier in Imperial Russia that the women were really running the society behind the scenes. Now, the men had the positions of formal nomenclature, but they were—in the Tolstoyan world they were really appendages to what was actually going on; the women were running society and gluing society together behind the scenes.

And I mean Tolstoy is more of a sociologist in that regard, but his female characters certainly aren’t playing a secondary role even though it’s a behind-the-scenes role in some ways. It’s not a secondary role at all. In fact, I would argue the opposite is the case in Tolstoy's world. And I have no idea to what degree that was actually education in Imperial Russia, but I suspect it was probably the case to quite a degree."

Yeah, well, I’m sure it was the case, you know, everywhere that women didn’t have full legal rights, but I think what you’re saying is exactly right. But it’s also respectfully, I think you’re proofing my thesis, which went on to kind of morph into the thesis of "The Beauty Myth," which was my first book, which is that Britain was the place in which women were above all European countries advocating for their rights, legally and socially and economically; therefore this backlash figure emerged.

Whereas in Imperial Russia, women had virtually no legal rights and so this backlash figure didn’t need to emerge. They could be portrayed in all of their complexity.

You described the Victorian English representation of women in the literary domain as a backlash and I guess I'm curious about which authors in particular you think that was characteristic of, and then why you think that there would be a backlash of that sort.

Like what's your literary critic interpretation of the fact that that phenomenon emerged?

Yeah, so I guess I focused most on Dickens’ doll-like characters, but also, if you look at Middlemarch, there’s a very common kind of pairing in fiction in the middle of the 19th century, especially written by women, in which there’s, you know, Dorothea Casabin who’s complex and has a rich inner life and is, you know, quite revolutionary in her own right trying to change society, and then her antagonist, her antagonist who’s this kind of pretty, usually blonde, passive, manipulative, superficial character.

And you see that kind of dialectic in other novels at that time, but also just in popular culture. I mean, it was the dawn of, um, the dawn of popular, uh, you know, pop culture in the sense of lithography and, um, pretty soon photography by the 1840s and 1850s.

And so you’re also getting these beauty ideals which were impossible, of, you know, 17-inch waists corsets in which women couldn’t breathe.

Literally, the fashion of the middle of the 19th century in contrast to just like the 1820s, 18 teens, where, you know, Jane Austen’s time, women could move around, right? They could breathe, they could walk, they could argue, they could, you know, express their full personalities even though they had no legal rights.

By the 1850s, with hoop skirts that were kind of five feet in diameter, posed a threat of, you know, setting you up in flames if you got too near the fire—layers of petticoats.

As I mentioned, Walden corsets that really didn’t let you take a deep breath of, you know, clothing that weighed several pounds; just, you know, in terms of the weight of what you had to wear changes of clothes multiple times a day if you’re middle class.

The fact that you’re dragging your skirts through kind of manure and mud—all of this, and interestingly, this kind of hampering fashion came about at just those decades in which women were asking—

"Let me ask you a question about that. A couple of questions about that. Um, so the first—I have two very different questions. The first is, is that syphilis really became a widespread public health concern amongst the Victorians, and it was a very dreadful disease and took a very large number of forms and also was transmissible from mother to child.

And interestingly enough, the Europeans, when they hit the Western Hemisphere brought a whole host of extremely serious transmissible diseases with them, measles and mumps and smallpox, and that devastated the native community, maybe up to 95 percent of the native community.

And the native community returned the favor in very minor ways, one of which apparently was syphilis.

And so there was a real twist in sexual mores that characterized the Victorian period in part because syphilis was such a terror.

I think the age scare was nothing compared to the syphilis scare.

And so it’s hard to know exactly what the emergent fact of syphilis did to the conceptualization of the relationships between men and women on the sexual front.

It certainly made prostitution, for example, a much greater public health danger.

And so, and so, that’s one question. Another question is, the Victorian era was characterized by the generation of a substantive amount of wealth, and one could argue that part of what was happening on the Victorian beauty front was the advertisement by aristocrats that they could tolerate this encumbrance in the name of beauty because they had the financial resources to sustain it.

You know, there’s an example of that biologically would be—in principle would be the peacock's tail, which is extraordinarily beautiful, but also quite the encumbrance and apparently part of what it signifies, especially if it’s perfectly symmetrical and well-formed and heavy, is that the male who sports that plumage has sufficient health and resources to pull that off without dying.

And so now, and it seems to me that some of those Victorian excesses are reasonably understood on the biological front as manifestations of that kind of, um, what would you say?

Well, it’s an exuberance of display on the sexual front.

Now, there might be all sorts of negative consequences of that in relationship to other elements of women's and men and women's lives, but—

"So, well, those are two parallel questions. How do you think the emergence of syphilis transformed the relationships between men and women politically and socially in Victorian England in particular, and what do you think about the excess resource hypothesis on the Victorian outfitting front? And people were getting quite rich at that point, and that was certainly one way of displaying it, right?"

Yeah, I understand your questions. So certainly you’re absolutely right about the spread of syphilis and gonorrhea as very fundamental to social concerns around sexuality in Britain in the 19th century—absolutely.

And that was, you know, the source of the contagious diseases acts was this argument by the state, and I think—I think it—I think it, my most recent book "Outrageous," which addresses this—the book before my last one is about how 19th-century viral epidemics, including contagious diseases like gonorrhea but also typhus and cholera, were used by the state as a kind of pretext for controlling people and subverting their civil liberties.

So definitely the argument of the state was, you know, these prostitutes or women who look like prostitutes or vectors of disease, they have to be managed and controlled, and it’s the state’s role to step into what had been very personal spaces and mediate this for the public good.

Right, we’ve seen that. There’s an emergent literature on the political biological front indicating that one of the best predictors of authoritarian political beliefs in any given geographical locale, so you can do this state by state or county by county or country by country, it scales, is the prevalence of infectious disease.

The higher the prevalence of infectious disease, the higher the probability of authoritarian political attitudes, and the correlation isn’t like point one or point two; the correlation is like 0.6—it’s an unbelievably powerful relationship.

And it seems like an extension of what’s called the behavioral immune system.

And it can really get going—well, we saw that during COVID, right? With instantaneous transformation into something approximating authoritarianism and the motivational justification.

What’s so interesting and horrible about this, by the way, is that that’s not a fear-based motivation; it’s a disgust-based motivation and disgust is a lot more aggressive than fear.

Because if you’re afraid of something, you tend to avoid it, whereas if you’re disgusted by something, your fundamental motivation is to eradicate it by any means necessary.

If you look, for example, at the language that Hitler and his minions used when they were ramping up their public health pathology prevention—pathology to extend out of the mental asylums and the hospitals into more broad ethnic cleansing, all the language they used was parasitism, disgust, contamination, all disease-associated, right?

Yeah! So it’s a very powerful motivational system when it gets activated—absolutely no question.

You know, it’s so interesting to take care of your analysis from a psychological point of view and I know there’s been important psychological work done on disgust.

I would actually say, from a geopolitical perspective, what happened in the 19th century, not just with contagious diseases but with the typhus and cholera epidemics of the 1840s and early 1850s—which were devastating—just wiped out, you know? People would be kind of sick on Sunday and dead on Wednesday.

That created a model in Western history that allowed later regimes to emulate the model of kind of narrating the danger of infectious diseases, certainly using that element of disgust and contamination.

And existential threat as a pretext for what authoritarians always want to do, which is eradicate liberties and consolidate control.

So I think it is happening on two fronts, right? It happens organically on the psychological front, but then the state jumps in and says, "Well, we can save you from this existential threat—just hand over all your rights."

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