TV Tuesdays 16: Free for All
I fought Bryan Caplan on a podcast
Welcome to the 16th TV Tuesday!
I was invited on the Free for All podcast to talk about Bryan Caplan’s latest book, Don’t Be a Feminist.
Instead of reading the book, I recommend Kat Murti’s review of it. And here’s my Twitter thread on this dumpster fire.
My favorite part of the panel discussion was at the end when we were supposed to very briefly summarize our positions and Bryan took longer than everyone else to basically say that sexism isn’t real but if it is than it hurts men more than women but actually it doesn’t exist. Well, does it or doesn’t it? Because there’s lots and lots of evidence it does, and whether it hurts men or women more really is less important than the fact that it hurts people.
My second favorite part was when I refuted Bryan’s claim that feminists don’t care about men’s issues by bringing up how avowed feminist Richard Reeves wrote a whole book about men’s woes and he brought up that Reeves said he got a lot of pushback from feminists for doing just that. “Good point,” I said. Because it was, at least rhetorically. In reality, getting pushback for talking about men’s woes in no way indicates no feminists aren’t doing it. Just that it’s stigmatized by some feminists.
And the pushback Reeves got, at least as he described it in his book, was less “It’s anti-feminist to write about men’s woes” and more “It’s not the best look to write about men’s woes.” It sounded more like a warning about possible pushback than pushback itself.
Because yeah, a few particularly loud, strident, anti-male feminists are going to push back when you talk about helping men. But they don’t represent feminism as a movement any more than the a few particularly loud, strident, anti-poor libertarians represent libertarianism.
In the book and panel discussion, Caplan evinces some profound epistemic closure when it comes to feminism and sexism that I find really odd and extremely off-putting. It’s okay, I guess, to be stunningly ignorant about sexism and feminism. No one can know everything about everything. But don’t, maybe, I don’t know, write a book about it?
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I definitely saw some criticism of the recommendations in Reeves book, but feminists often critique other feminists work too! And often in tones that are unnecessarily dickish! It's hard not to do sometimes!
Its also rich for Caplan to claim feminists don't care about the well being from men when so many anti-feminists, including Caplan here it would seem, cloak themselves in other men's pain to advocate against women. Notably, they don't recommend or fight for men or themselves to become the dependent sex, even though they think it's so great.