In this episode, we are delighted to have Megan Daum, a prolific author, journalist, and podcast host. The discussion dives into Megan's extensive work, including her podcasts 'The Unspeakable' and 'A Special Place in Hell,' as well as her new series of retreats called 'The Unspeakeasy.' These retreats, mostly for women, offer a unique space to discuss topics like gender issues, COVID-19 policies, and the impact of feminism across generations. We explore the motivations behind these retreats and the valuable conversations they foster. Additionally, Megan talks about her thoughts on anti-natalism and her book 'Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed,' which presents various perspectives on the decision not to have children.
Simone Collins: [00:00:00] Hello everyone. I am so excited today because we're joined by Megan Dom, someone who I admire on so many different fronts. She is a prolific author. She's written six books or written or edited six books. She is been also prolific journalist, very respected by many of our friends.
She now is on Substack. Plus she hosts a special place in hell with Sarah Hader, also a friend of the podcast. And before that she had the Unspeakeasy podcast, which I listened to with really great interviews with heterodox. She's kind of like the Alex Kishida of like a different sort of segment of the internet.
And more recently Megan has launched a series of retreats, which I kind of wanted to dig into now. They're it's called the unspeak easy, kind of inspired by one of her books, which is titled unspeakable. And it is a place they're mostly, sometimes they're mixed gender, but they're mostly. Female only retreats pretty small, like very, like, sort of, you, you can have a real conversation with everyone who goes, maybe 16 people or fewer negative, maybe sometimes 20, right?
Yeah. And behind closed doors, these, [00:01:00] you know, mostly all women finally get to sort of discuss what they. Want whatever that's what we want to get to is what do professional educated, you know, probably more affluent women in the United States think and say and worry about and discuss behind closed doors because I think there's this, this perception that the educated women of America are largely this progressive monolith.
They all kind of think the same thing. Like they're not very interesting. You know, then you have some like far right, you know, crazy women and like, you know, whatever, like cam girls and cat girls or whatever. Like, but then there's like just this. There's nothing, a big question mark. So we, we wanted to, you know, we might, we might get into a little bit of a, an anti natalist discussion at the end of this, but we wanted to get into what's going on behind closed doors with all these women.
Meghan Daum: Well, if I, I couldn't tell you, right. If it was really behind closed doors, I wouldn't be able to tell you. Well, first of all, thanks for having me. I love talking about all these. All these topics. And I will just say I, [00:02:00] I've got my hand in so many things that it gets confusing what I'm doing. So I still host the unspeakable podcast.
So I actually have two podcasts. I do a special place in hell with Sarah Hader. And I know you've, you've been on our podcast and she's been here. I, I do the unspeakable podcast, which is Sort of my flagship podcast. And that's an interview, it's a weekly interview show started it four years ago, summer of 2020 when all, when every podcast started and so, right.
So I've been doing that and yeah, so the speakeasy is it's an enterprise that has sort of, you know, arisen out of a lot of my work including. the podcast, my books, my teaching as well. I've been a teacher of writing for a really long time. So yeah, I guess, well, I guess the easiest way to kind of launch into what the unspeak easy is about is to tell you the origins of it.
And you know, that is, I've been, I've been journalists for a long time. I was Los Angeles times columnist for 12 years on the opinion page, written a bunch of books, written for every magazine, was like, you know, an [00:03:00] acceptable, celebrated arguably celebrated member of the literary community.
Simone Collins: I looked at the number of reviews your books have gotten.
Yeah. Yeah. And they used to be really
Meghan Daum: positive. Yeah.
And you know, I've always been allergic to bullshit. Like that's my thing. I've never been really particularly political. I mean, obviously as a journalist, you have to write about what's going on in the news and the culture, but I just never liked virtue signaling.
Even before there was a term for that, I just got it everywhere and I was very sensitive to it and I was very. interested in why it was happening. So that's always been a theme of my work. And I've always tried to sort of look at the places, you know, in the culture and politics where like what people saying, what people were saying about the world or themselves was not matching up with.
What was actually true about the world and themselves. So, so people, you know, knew that about my work and I started doing the podcast and I would have people like [00:04:00] Sam Harris and, you know, all the sort of the heterodox, you know, I've had hundreds and hundreds of guests by now, but people sort of trying to pick apart these issues, nuanced discussions, right?
So nuanced AF is is what the merch says, right? Here's the Yes, nuanced AF. Okay, so So people would listen to the podcast. I was talking about things like gender, you know, pretty early on Sasha Iod, who's, you know, wonderful is now the co host of gender wider lens was like my fifth guest. And you know, I had Peter Moskos on really early talking about policing.
I had now John McWhorter, all, you know, all, all these sorts of people. And also a lot of literary people. Cause that that's my world. And, But I also teach writing. So I just teach, you know, personal essay, memoir, opinion, writing, that kind of thing. And I've always, I've taught at Columbia and elsewhere, but I teach private workshops.
So, you know, around, you know, 2021 or so, I [00:05:00] started noticing that the people who were coming into my workshops, many of them, women, not, not all by any means, but a lot of the women in particular We're like, not necessarily wanting to write, like they didn't necessarily want their stuff workshopped. They just wanted a place to talk about things.
And they knew that I talked about this stuff on my podcast and I wrote about it. And I had a certain approach that wasn't like, particularly partisan and that appealed to them. And they, they just wanted a place to talk about this and they would come in and say, I can't talk about this with my friends.
I've gotten kicked out of my book club. I can't talk about this with. With my, you know, I have lost relationships, families are being torn apart over politics and over, you know, wokeness, Trumpism, whatever it is. And I feel like I'm losing my mind and I feel so lonely and they were silencing themselves in a way that was.
A little bit different from the way men were silencing themselves. I mean, obviously they were having a lot of the same problems at work. [00:06:00] Like everybody wants to protect their, you know, their paycheck and their situation at work. But women were really talking about relationships a lot more and talking about how they had a lot to say and they weren't speaking up because they didn't want to get excommunicated by the group and they didn't want to hurt people's feelings.
I, so I was seeing this on like this micro level. Like people were talking about how this played out in their personal lives, normal people out in the world. And these were all kinds of women. These were women with big careers. These were stay at home moms. These were women in their twenties into their sixties, seventies, eighties.
It was like so many all over the country, all over the world. Yeah. These were not like necessarily girl bosses. These were all kinds of women. And. I was seeing this and then I was also noticing that like in our sort of podcasting content creator space, a lot of the people who are speaking up about culture war issues are men, not all by any means, but it's a very male dominated [00:07:00] space.
And I started to think, well, why is that? And the listener communities were like all men, like, you know, I went to a persuasion hangout for instance. And there was one other woman there and we were like, Whoa, what is going on? And so I said, you know, I really, need to start a heterodox women's community.
Like somebody needs to do that. And it's hilarious because I'm the last person who ever would start a woman's anything. I hate it. But I thought, you know, something is really wrong here because women are, are, are left out of the conversation in the public arena and in their private lives. And they're, they're leaving themselves out.
And I want to try to fix that and so
Malcolm Collins: I want to dive into you said the women have these conversations that they are afraid to have in public or they've gotten in trouble. What are these conversations? Like, what are the topics that you see come up again and again in this environment?
Meghan Daum: Yeah. So, gender is a big one.
School lockdown, COVID policies is another big one. It's no accident that this started to [00:08:00] emerge around COVID. You had a lot of people who were nice, normal liberals and remain so, still identify as liberals. And they were suddenly like dealing With school closures that didn't make any sense in many cases.
And then the kids were at home and then they could hear what the kids were learning on the zoom school. Like all of a sudden they knew what was like, they didn't know what was going on in the classroom and all of a sudden they're hearing it, the huge mental health crisis among kids during these years.
And they're like, what is going on here? And a lot of the gender stuff started coming up. And these are a lot of people, a lot of parents, a lot of moms who were, you know, very liberal. If my kid is gay, fine. Fantastic. No problem. Even if my kid is trans, whatever that means. Well, that must just be like gay 2.
0. Okay, fine. Like let's, that's, we're, we're liberal in this house. We believe, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then they, you know, this whole movement started to, you know, kind of mushroom before our eyes and they're [00:09:00] like, what is going on here? And if they questioned, you know, something like gender affirmation or something like that, the neighbors would say, what are you a bigot?
What are you a transphobe? You know, you can't, you can't do that. And so, you know, they were, they were really feeling like they were losing their minds. And I'm really careful about the way I talk about this stuff. And I think they, they appreciated it. So, so those are two examples, but we talk about.
Everything in the unspeak easy, like everything.
Malcolm Collins: Well, no, are there others? I mean, so this is really interesting because I think one, you're sort of charting where Republicans can win white educated women. It is, that's, that's our
Meghan Daum: motto.
Malcolm Collins: That
Meghan Daum: is not our
Malcolm Collins: motto, but yes, you're right.
Meghan Daum: Yes. This is like,
Malcolm Collins: like, where did you win?
This, this, this demographic and what I'm peeling here is one I think is, is, is, is focus on. I think gender transition and children, very easy fight. And for some reason, the liberals always take it. And then two is bureaucratic overreach during [00:10:00] COVID. I think Republicans need to live in the past a little with this.
That was a good opportunity. Be like Dems will try this again. Dems will try this again. Very much the way Dems do it's like January 6th. keep going back to the COVID stuff. And, and what was happening at schools. And I also think school choice, it's like an also really easy thing, but what else are you seeing like personal life wise?
Like how did these, I guess here's the question I have, is there regret about Feminism and sort of the way it changed the expectations that were had of them. We talk about
Meghan Daum: that a lot. That's really complicated, right? Because what it's like, how are we defining feminism? What era of feminism are we talking about?
Second wave feminism, third wave, fourth wave, digital feminism, online feminism, me too. Like, what are we talking about? And again, like we have a range of ages. So we had women who were in their seventies or eighties and they came of age in the sixties and seventies and benefited enormously from, from second wave [00:11:00] feminism.
And then we have women who were in their twenties and thirties who were saying, Oh my God, like nobody told me that there's such a thing as a biological clock. And I, and I mean, you know, I'm a Gen Xer. So I grew up. You know, with every single women's magazine constantly being like, Tick tock, ladies, there's a biological clock.
So, you know, at some point along the way that, you know, being told that fertility was limited somehow became like a, you know, misogynist or something. So they stopped talking about it that way.
Simone Collins: That's so interesting. Yeah. It reminds me of like, I, when I, I grew up in like the, the, the period of feminism where we denied that there were like unspoken dating norms.
Like if, if if a guy invited you back to his hotel room that he probably expected something and literally did not believe that. So like, it's interesting to see like
Malcolm Collins: situations. Yeah.
Simone Collins: It's, it's worse than like biological clocks. Not even like being a warning sign. Maybe don't go down an alleyway at two in the morning.
The dangerous [00:12:00] neighborhood defense, you know,
Meghan Daum: right. Right. Yeah. I mean, I talk so much about this in my book, the problem with everything. I mean, this, it's like, you know, just because we wish something was true doesn't mean it is true. Yes. We wish you could get blackout drunk and pass out in an alley with your clothes half off and have nothing happen to you.
Yeah. We wish. We're true. It'd be so nice. And in a just world, it would be true, but we live in the real world. And if you're not equipping people with, with the facts about reality, then you're doing them a huge disservice. So these are the kinds of distinctions that we, that we talk about a lot. And, and yeah, but I mean, the thing with the unspeak easy is it's so, It's all about the nuanced discussions.
It's, it's not partisan. I mean, we have women who are like Bernie Sanders voters and we have women, you know, who are Trump voters. I don't think you actually
Simone Collins: show
Meghan Daum: up. What's that? Yeah, we do. But I mean, I would say it's, I mean, it's changing all the time, but I [00:13:00] mean, I would say it's mostly people who voted for Obama, people who are really excited about Obama, and then are sort of being like, wait a second, something is off here but, but having a really kind of existential crisis about it.
Malcolm Collins: One of the things that you mentioned that I'd love you to dig deeper into, because this is something we've noticed with our own fans of our podcast is. The generational change in terms of what's being hidden from people and the expectations people have. One example from our podcast is somebody was like, It's really weird to hear you guys talk about gays as a discriminated group when you were growing up.
Because in our school, like, they're the group that's not allowed to be punished. Like, there's a, they were talking about like a gay kid on their campus that like, sold weed and he wasn't punished because the school didn't want to be seen punishing a gay kid. And, and, and, and he's like, All the drug
Meghan Daum: dealers are gay now.
Malcolm Collins: I've heard this. Yeah, I've heard that this is because you just get away with it apparently. And I'm, and I'm interested in like other, like, what are the big, like, shocks to you in terms of generational change?
Meghan Daum: [00:14:00] Well, I mean, one of the things that really animated me to get, you know, much more overtly involved in culture war discourse was what I saw around like online feminism.
I mean, even before me too. So around 2012, 13, 14, there was all this stuff online that was, you know, You know, it's never been a worse time to be a woman, you know, toxic masculinity, like, you know, obsessing about being cat called on the street. You know, it's, it's so terrible. We live in a rape culture, like all, all these ideas and I was seeing it.
And in the meantime, like, it's like, actually women are doing better than. Ever before in the history of human civilization, it's never been a better time to be a woman, you know, in the West anyway. And I, it just wasn't making sense to me. And I was like, where's this coming from? Because I grew up in the seventies.
I just thought that was being a girl was great. And being a tomboy was great. Like being a girly girl was not cool. And so I really started to think a lot about [00:15:00] maybe why these changes occurred. And I actually, you know, I was I kind of had my nose outta joint, you know, I, I was rolling my eyes a lot at like, a lot of the, the, the, you know, the, the Jezebel stuff.
I mean, Jezebel used to be a man, hilarious. I remember Jezebel. Wow. It was so great. They would like, actually, you know, this was back, you know, they would like take him. Oh, magazine, yeah. JE lot. Yeah. Anna Holmes, the brilliant Anna Holmes started Jezebel and you know, sort of the early, the mid two thousands, it was like they would.
Do all these things where they showed the airbrushing and and magazine spreads and they would show like what actually happened and it was great and it was very snarky and sarcastic and very empowered and not victim y at all and just very funny. And somewhere along the lines, it really changed and it was like absolute preoccupation with, you know, male tears and it got
Simone Collins: angry.
Meghan Daum: It got, it got angry and it got just very just, just stripped of, of its agency somehow. Wow. Wow. And I used to roll my eyes at it a lot and I still do, but [00:16:00] I think that, you know, we cannot forget that the nineties came along, you know, there was still this like riot girl kind of grunge aesthetic for, for women, but then you get into like the late nineties, early 2000s.
First of all, you've got the Disney princess culture. You've got this hyper girliness that little girls are exposed to. Everybody's a princess, princess dress, glitter, fairy wings everywhere, which is fun and fine, but like very different from the seventies when everybody was really just like gender neutral.
And then you've got this ranch culture. You've got girls gone wild. You've got spring break bikini, you know, just absolute. Debauchery. And you've got, you know, pornography goes online. Pornhub comes along. We're just absolutely inundated with these hyper sexualized, very degrading images around sex and around womanhood.
It makes sense, doesn't it? That like women would resist that and be [00:17:00] very angry about it.
Simone Collins: And, and I never thought of like maybe a correlation being between honestly internet porn and, and women getting like feminism becoming angry, taking totally,
Meghan Daum: I mean, I, I wouldn't be. And I mean, cause I missed that stuff, right?
Like in my time, yeah, I don't, I, and also like. You know, the way that men think about sex and what they expect from a date or sexual encounter. I mean, you know, like women younger than me talk. I mean, Sarah and I talk about this all the time. People were obsessed. People say we're obsessed with like choking.
Okay. Like the, like the choking thing. And, you know,
Malcolm Collins: Okay. No, this is something where I have to go on a tangent. Cause we actually wanted to do like Mary Harrington also complains about this all the time. Yes. I wanted to do like Mary Harrington versus reality, because if you look at the statistics on choking.
The guys are choking the girls because all of the other girls are asking for it, right? Yeah, that's the problem. Choking is much prefer Yeah, but why are they asking for it? Girls are by being choked than guys [00:18:00] are by choking girls. Cause it's a big turn on, unfortunately. At a rate of like 2 to 1.
Meghan Daum: But is it a turn on or do they think I think it's supposed to be a turn on.
No, it's, it's, it's enough of
Simone Collins: a turn on where like auto asphyxiation is a really major, like a safety problem. Yeah. This came up in our sexuality research when we, when, when Malcolm wrote the pragmatist guide to sexuality and we had to put in all these warnings, we're like, okay, this is a big turn on for people.
Guys, don't do this. We
Malcolm Collins: need to get into our sexual theory because I think I know why you might find this weird. So we actually argue that there are the people act like the kinks and the things that turn somebody on are random. And I don't think that they are totally random. I think that there's specific polygenic sexual patterns that emerge based on the social environment.
Evolutionarily, our biology thinks that we're it. Now, if a woman In a historic context, with sleeping with tons of men. That historically basically only happened if [00:19:00] your tribe had been raided and you were a sex slave and you were doing everything you can to stay alive. I think that there is a correlation between women liking this incredibly demeaning sex and women who sleep around a ton.
I think that what's happening here is their bodies have shifted to a Oh, I'm a sex slave desperately trying to prevent my captors from killing me and I will like anything that keeps them from killing me. And so when I think a woman maybe like you or a woman who is more chaste or more like sexually reasonable engages with this, they're like, what?
I would never want that. And, and, and, or Mary Harrington or something like that. And I think that that's where there's this, this unintentional is we don't tell girls that sleeping with tons of people is going to change the type of things they find arousing.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Like in other words, Malcolm saying that he thinks that that our behaviors sexually, like especially number of different partners will trigger different like arousal pathways as a sort [00:20:00] of adaptive evolved mechanism.
I, I think there could be some truth to that. I mean, I don't, yeah,
Meghan Daum: I, I'm, no, I'm not going to, because otherwise it is
Simone Collins: really weird, especially, I mean, we don't know. I mean,
Meghan Daum: sexuality is so mysterious, right? We don't know like where these things come from. I mean, where does like autogynephilia come from? Like there's, you know, so many fetishes and, and I have a hypothesis where autogynephilia
Malcolm Collins: comes from.
I haven't gotten into the episode yet, so I'm going to drop it right here. Okay. And we'll do a full episode on it, but I actually think autogynephilia It comes from a misunderstanding of human sexuality. So in our book of human sexuality, we point out that sexuality should actually be thought of a spectrum of arousal to disgust and not stopping at zero.
A lot of people are like, sex is arousal or you're not aroused. And it's like, no it's, it's arousal to disgust anything, 10 to negative 10. If you when you're aroused, what happens? Your pupils dilate, you breathe in, you look at something longer. When you're disgusted, what do you do? You look away, your eyes contract, and you hold your nose.
They're likely using the same system and we even see evidence of this from the fact that anything that arouses a large portion of the [00:21:00] population is going to disgust a small portion. Anything that disgusts a small portion is going to arouse a portion. People can be like, well, no, that's just everything.
It's like, no, you don't see this random effect in everything else. So you can look at something like fire. Fire does not like randomly arouse a portion of the population. But like, insects do. Poo does. Like, why is that? Okay, it's a mis arousal to discuss system. Well, autogynephilia, I think it's actually a misinterpretation from a lot of men which is to say that a lot of men have a very strong, much stronger than women have to female genitalia Disgust response to primary male sex characteristics.
So, specifically other male penises, other male forms, etc. It causes, like, a visceral reaction in them. I'm one of these men. I, like, find this disgusting. But do you think that's socially constructed?
Meghan Daum: Or do you think that's, like, inherent? It's probably more of, I mean, we would think it's an
Simone Collins: evolved, like, Try to screw the thing that will produce kids.
Right. Exactly. No, it's an adaptive trait.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. You're a woman historically [00:22:00] you know, there were periods in history you look around the agricultural revolution for every 17 women having kids, only one male was having kids. So that means that you had long evolutionarily relevant periods where women were expected to be in relationships with lots of other women.
So it is not surprising to me that women tolerance of other female sexuality was something that was selected for. However, historically speaking, if a man let other men sleep with a woman who he was pair bonded with, or just any other woman in the community, that's a net loss to him because, you know, that's the other guy.
No, I get that. No, I get that. I get that a lot of pressures here. My guess is that what's happening with these guys is Is there like, Oh, well, when I like playing video games, I really like playing as female characters because any other male character or avatar causes this disgust reaction in them. When I like dressing up as other characters, I like always being a female and they don't realize what's driving.
This is not an arousal reaction, but a disgust reaction to other males. And then they begin to identify. They're like, well, if I always like, whenever I'm in a [00:23:00] role playing game or whenever I'm in a video game or whenever I'm a Furry playing a female character that must be because I secretly want to be a female, but it's not.
Anyway, that's my, okay,
Meghan Daum: no, I'm, I'm, I'm in no position to, to argue that getting back to the feminism and what the different, the generational differences. Yeah. I, I do think that I do think that people men and women have plenty of reason to be angry and frustrated these days. Thanks. I think that I think that women have reason and I think men have reason.
I mean, you know, I, a lot of the the, the, the ironic misandry of that digital age, you know, making fun of men you know, and I, I have a whole theory as to why that was sort of, you know, Sanction is an okay thing to do. Like, you know, all that sort of like, you know, men are toxic. What we now see with this like red pill, right wing misogyny online.
Like that is, that is a mimetic inversion, right? It is the same thing. I mean, it is absolutely mirroring it. So as much as I [00:24:00] hate to see that stuff online, it's like, well, guess what, fourth wave feminists, you created this, you made this. And now you're stuck with it or it's going to have to correct itself.
Correct. What's your, what's your
Malcolm Collins: theory?
Meghan Daum: Well, I mean, if you go around telling men that they're garbage. No, no,
Malcolm Collins: no, no, not that. But you said, I have a theory as to why this. Oh,
Meghan Daum: well. So, I mean, the thing is that around that time you started seeing this, you know, 2014 or so. Like they would, they would be horrible to men.
And I think the idea was that because men have power, you're punching up. It's okay to say terrible things to men, no matter, no matter what, no matter what like class level you are, or they are. No matter like any kind of power differential, it doesn't matter because by definition, by virtue of being men, it was assumed that they automatically have more power.
So it's okay to be terrible to them. And my thing was like, why are you assuming that? Like that is so unfeminist to just like you, you bite by assuming that you [00:25:00] are effectively handing men power that they don't necessarily have. You are putting them on a pedestal in order to punch them. Well, how about realizing that women are doing so much better than men chances are.
Any given man and any given woman, that woman is going to have a higher level of education, have more friends, better connections, just her wellbeing is going to be at a higher level across any number of metrics than any given man. So like, be careful who you're, you know, calling a piece of garbage, you know, it's, it's really lame.
And anyway, so this is what started this. And I, I was very outspoken about these things around, you know, my, my book, The Problem with Everything came out in 2019, which was all about this and, and it was really about, you know, being, it was, it was a self interrogation, like looking at the different generations, like, well, how come me, how come I, as a Gen X er, Felt empowered in a way that these millennials and Gen Zers apparently don't.
Like, what is this about? And why am I so frustrated? And why do I hate this stuff? And why am I rolling [00:26:00] my eyes and why are they mad at me and calling me an anti feminist? And you know, it's all this kind of vortex of stuff. And people got really mad at me for it. Like they just thought, Oh no, she's to the right.
She swung over to the right. Megan. And, and the funny thing is like, this is nothing different than I had said, I've been talking this way for my whole career. Yeah. The
Simone Collins: Overton window has shifted. Right. Yeah.
Meghan Daum: Suddenly it was not allowed. And so here we all are in the whatever I'll turn around, clown world, where we have be clowned ourselves.
Simone Collins: Okay. I'm dying to see how you approach this because this is something you mentioned in the origins of these retreats. And now. It's, it's kind of at the core of what I'm thinking about the, what we call like woke culture, progressive culture, we, we call it the urban monoculture. And we, we argue that its main value proposition is I will remove in the moment suffering or pain.
That's kind of like the big, like, you cannot break that rule. And it sort of connects to everything that can be [00:27:00] very damaging about the movement because, you know, it causes a lot of. Bad downturn, like downstream effects. You mentioned that many of the women who are joining on speakeasy retreats are doing it because they don't want to hurt their friends feelings.
And they're, they're, they're very much part of this. And I think it's, it's a very female on average, it skews female, that general desire to not cause conflict, to not hurt feelings. And yet I think. For a lot of these women to deal with the cognitive dissonance they're facing or to work through these problems.
Especially because you have so many differing opinions showing up at these retreats. You know, you've got the Trump voter, you've got the Bernie voter, you've got, you know, this, this varying range, there are going to be feelings that are hurt. How do you manage that? Especially among like groups of women, because I'm used to doing this and like retreats that are like primarily men.
But how do you manage it for women who. Are going there because they know it's a problem, but they also are of that culture of like, I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings.
Meghan Daum: I mean, I, I am always aware of it. And I mean, I think we've been pretty lucky so far. So I started [00:28:00] doing the retreats and it's 2022.
We've probably done 12 by now or something. I mean, we did so many, we have done eight this year. Wow. So I try to keep it very Ideas based and concept based. So it's like, we don't have it. So, so the way the structure of the retreats, it varies. I mean, most of them, you know, they're overnights, we go out to a beautiful place and spend like three nights overnight.
Sometimes they're just like for a weekend daytime only, but you know, we'll have like, I will make a schedule and we're going to talk, you know, for 90 minutes about like, you know, why can't we talk about gender without losing our minds? Like that will be the framing of the talk as opposed to these people are horrible and crazy.
It's more like, why do we feel crazy? How, why do I feel crazy? What led to it? And I'm going to talk about my experience. I mean, I cannot say that there haven't been hurt feelings. I'm sure that there have been. And [00:29:00] we also have an online community. I mean, you know, we have a really thriving private membership based online community.
That is, you know, very affordable and, and we have. All kinds of things Is there like book clubs and guest speakers and all kinds of things. And I know that there have been blowups, I mean there have been, there are little satellite groups and people are actually forming. They're also, they're also forming, no, not satellite groups like gang up people, you know, subgroups.
There's a politics discuss, you know, there's a sort of left-leaning politics discussion group and a more center right discussion. Oh, interesting. There's a snitch and bitch one that's over there, they knit and they talk about politics. The knitting world is very, very fraught. Oh my gosh. Yeah. And I've watched and reported and it's done
Simone Collins: some great, yeah, knitting world drama.
I can't control that,
Meghan Daum: but so I, you know, most of the conflict I have just stayed out of, but I think that They're really, really good, especially on the retreats. I think everybody knows we're out somewhere. We want to have a good time. [00:30:00] They've, you know, they have invested a certain amount of resources and time to come and do this.
They have, we have enough downtime that they form friendships. I mean, they have come to these places because they are lonely and they want connection. So the last thing you're going to do is, you know, deliberately get into a bad. a bad dynamic with somebody. It's, it's just not, it's not worth it. I'm not saying it never happens, but we've been really lucky.
And frankly, the fact that we're all women really makes it so that any kind of political differences that we have are just transcended by the fact that we all have this thing in common. Like it really is a, it's an incredibly effective container for all kinds of points of view. And, and, and walks of life and backgrounds and experiences.
I mean, it's, it's pretty magical actually.
Simone Collins: That sounds awesome. And I, I'm also sort of getting the impression that like going in with it being normative to disagree and like, it's okay to disagree, [00:31:00] Is just like the mere fact that that's a premise of the events probably helps. Is there's alcohol, the morning
Meghan Daum: or anything.
Sure. Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: But I, so I want to move to the second topic here. The the anti natalism. So why shouldn't women be obligated to have children?
Meghan Daum: Well, some people are terrible parents and make terrible parents. So if you're going to be a terrible parent, please do not force that person to to be, to become one.
Malcolm Collins: I mean, should they learn to be better? No, you can't learn that.
Meghan Daum: I mean, can you learn to be yes. I mean, the thing is, it is normative to try to learn to be a better parent. They're everything in the culture. I mean, maybe you see this differently, but again, this might be a generational thing. I mean, I.
grew up. I assumed I would have kids. It was assumed that everybody was going to have kids that everybody wanted them and that everybody would be a good parent, that it would just come naturally to you. Even if you thought you didn't want kids, the minute it's your own, it'll, everything will be different.
And the fact is that most people do want kids. I like [00:32:00] people who don't want them are outliers and I'm an outlier. But I just It's just never something that I, I wanted to do. Oh my God. I really love that. Her age of a baby. I have to say like, if I could just have that age, I know.
Malcolm Collins: Were you a single kid yourself?
No, I have a brother. He doesn't have
Meghan Daum: kids either. Okay. I mean, yeah, it's definitely, I mean, there's people, people choose not to have kids for all kinds of reasons.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, tell us about this book that you worked on about not having kids. Yeah.
Meghan Daum: Right. So the book is called Selfish, Shallow, and Self Absorbed, 16 Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids.
So I wanted to do this project for a long time because it's like a pro
Malcolm Collins: natalist book, by the way, it's ironic. Yeah,
Meghan Daum: he came out in 2015 back when irony was still alive. Yeah. Those are
Simone Collins: good days. Right,
Meghan Daum: right. Before everything, everything changed. But I always thought [00:33:00] that people, you know, the sort of childless by choice, child free crowd had really bad PR because.
Instead of just saying like, Oh, I just don't want to have kids. It's not for me. They would always be like, Oh, I don't have kids because I want to have a fabulous life and take expensive vacations. Or like my child has four legs and drinks out of a bowl on the floor. Ha ha ha. My fur baby. Or my child is that boat in my driveway.
And it's like so ridiculous because. Nobody decided not to have kids so they could have a boat or expensive shoes. Like if they, if, if any, if, if, if anybody is that, that way I, I don't wanna know that person. Like, that's, oh
Malcolm Collins: my God, I love it. Absurd.
Meghan Daum: That's absurd. I can think of several people. It was, it was always amazing to me that there was such a taboo, taboo against saying, this just isn't for me.
Mm. That people would like. present themselves as selfish assholes, because [00:34:00] this was somehow better as materialistic, shallow pleasure seekers, because it was just not okay to say, Hey, I think parenthood is really important and it should only be done by people who want to do it. I mean, my position is like people who think hard about this and choose not to have kids.
They are paying the ultimate respect to parents because they're saying that this job is really hard and it should only be done by people who really want to do it.
Simone Collins: That's it. I like that. Oh, well, I, this is, it's so confusing to me though. The, the bad PR and maybe this is, it's a generational thing. I'm not sure.
I never plan on having kids. And I would tell people that. And they'd always gonna be like, F for you. And I don't know if that's like, Me personally, like, They're just like, yeah, she'd be a terrible mother. Like, my mom was definitely in that camp. I thought she was saying that about me. No, no, no, she'd look at you and she'd be like, Oh, you're gonna be such a great dad.
And then she'd look at me and she'd be like, F it. And then she kind of looked back at Malcolm. But yeah, I, I, I don't know. [00:35:00] I know that some people really feel that, and I'm so intrigued by this that like a lot of people feel that shame and feel like it's you know, whereas I, I grew up in like, you know, with the environment you know, it was the, the, the proper decision to not have kids.
And
Meghan Daum: yeah, that, you
Simone Collins: know, a lot of people were gonna be shitty parents like me, of course. Whoops. And then rat, Simone, rat Row. Oh no. What have I done? And yeah, I, I'm, I'm curious if you, if you've have come across people who celebrated or support it more normatively, or if, or maybe it's just like, if you don't want to have kids, well, where did you grow
Meghan Daum: up?
Yeah. Like, I don't know. I mean, I grew up, I grew up like, you know, my family's a little bit unusual, but I mean, I grew up in, in, you know, outside of New York city, mostly we kind of moved around a lot. I grew up in Texas and in New Jersey, but more traditional then. But yeah, I mean, I mean, look, I grew up in, I was a teenager in the eighties.
And, you know, families were way more normative than, yeah, they were normal. And then, you know, but you were also like, if you were kind of educated classes, then that the whole sort of like [00:36:00] yuppie baby boom, like women is going to go, you know, put her power suit and her running shoes on and go to the office and achieve and then like marry her equal.
And then they were going to, you know, then they would have kids and like, do it all, do it all. Like, that was the fantasy. Yeah. And I definitely thought. That was what I would do. I didn't really question it, but I always was sort of like, well, I don't really want kids, but I will want them. I'm sure like something will happen.
One day I'll wake up and you know, the biological alarm clock will have gone off and, and it just really could never get there and in an authentic way. But no, I think you're right. Because I think that You know, for the millennials, the climate stuff did affect people. I mean, I used to say that anybody who said, I mean, I probably said this like 20 years ago, that anybody who says that they didn't have kids because of, because of the environment, as they used to call it is, is lying because they're just using that as an excuse
Malcolm Collins: to say, but I
Meghan Daum: don't know now, but that was [00:37:00] before this like absolute hysteria and.
Fear of God was put into a whole generation. So, so
Malcolm Collins: I don't know. I mean, it's, it's a religious thing at this point to me, to me, when I look at some people, I mean, they do seem to be a little cult like in regards to like, they don't seem to logically be thinking about the environment in any way that I would, I guess, think about the environment.
Meghan Daum: Look, people run on emotion. decouple. Their personal experience from data, really hard for people to, to decouple their, their feelings from, from facts, sorry, facts versus feelings. And you know, it takes a certain kind of person to do that. And, you know, you guys are like that and I'm like that and Sarah's like that, but like, we're kind of abnormal, you know,
Simone Collins: were there any arguments in the essays?
In the book that surprised you, like, you know, that this, you know, that's an argument that makes me feel really good about being child free.
Meghan Daum: I mean, [00:38:00] it really ranged. I mean, a lot of people spoke about their, you know, sort of trauma in their families growing up and how they didn't want to repeat that. But, you know, I have to say that.
You know, one response to traumatic upbringing is to not want to have kids, not repeated, but an even more common response is to have kids and so that you can correct it. Like, because of what happened, I want to do this, I want to, I want to do over, right? So I don't think we can, we can generalize and say like, you know, this particular kind of household causes people to feel one way or the other.
I mean, everybody's wired so differently, you know, there was a lot of, so the book came out in 2015 and. One of the criticisms, I mean, it did people were, it did so well. That's a hilarious thing. It was like, I had been pitching this idea for years and everyone in publishing was like, that's a terrible idea.
Nobody will buy that. There's no five
Simone Collins: stars, 794 reviews on Amazon
Meghan Daum: bestseller list in the, in the child care and parenting category. Cause I kept [00:39:00] saying like, no, parents are going to be fascinated by this. This isn't just like childless. People are going to buy this. Yeah. Because it's really about, it's, it's about the way we live our lives.
It's not even about like this particular decision. Like ultimately it's just sort of about what you want your, your life to be.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Meghan Daum: But there was one of the criticisms of the book and I think it's a fair one was that a lot of the writers were kind of apologizing for the way they felt. There was a lot of, well, I love kids.
But I don't hate children or anything. Oh. But wrong
Simone Collins: approach. And however, I hated kids before I had kids. Yeah.
Meghan Daum: Well, I kind of hate kids now, to be honest with you. You kids are, they're gross. I, I dunno what to say. Yeah. I hate being a kid. And I, yeah, so, so there was a lot of that. I will say, however, that in 2015 that throat clearing was probably necessary in order to make the book palatable.
I don't think we would need it now, obviously, but, I think that for whatever reason, people needed to hear [00:40:00] that because there was still a lot of like, Oh, you must, you must just hate children. If you have made the decision. I think a lot of people were like, no, I really like kids. And in fact, you know, there were people who talked about working with children and they talked about feeling really important as like an aunt or an uncle.
There were three men in the book. There were, it was 13 women and three men, because I really wanted to include some male perspectives. Cause I think men get overlooked in this discussion a lot.
Malcolm Collins: Totally. Totally. Well, that's really cool. Anyway, I, I've had a great time talking to you. You know, come on your podcast again sometime.
I you think you guys work is fantastic. And yeah.
Simone Collins: And everyone please, you can learn more about everything that Megan does at megan dom.com. That's M-E-G-H-A-M-D-A-U-M com. Yeah. And
Meghan Daum: actually a better place to go is to the outspeak easy.com or my substack. Yeah. Actually I haven't, I'm, I'm one of those people with too many websites and megan dom do.com has so much not been updated.
You go to my substack?
Simone Collins: Yeah. Megan dom.substack.com.
Meghan Daum: Yes. [00:41:00] Yeah. Or the unspeakable with, megan and Dom, you can look that up.
Malcolm Collins: I will say you are one of the only guests that we've had where I actually recreationally watch your content. Not all of it, but some of it. Oh, the show with Sarah? A lot of the time I don't.
You know, I'll have on guests where I'm like I know we're ideologically aligned but I don't actually watch their stuff.
Simone Collins: Malcolm's a fan. Malcolm's a fan. Thank you. Of both of us. But yeah. It's the usual for Malcolm. If the audience is
Malcolm Collins: wondering what to think, it's very good like urban monoculture looking at itself.
I think it's, it's, it's a good thing. No, I mean, it's like, what do you know, educated you know, successful women think of their own culture?
Meghan Daum: Yeah. Well, and we have a big age difference. I mean, we're 20 years apart. So I guess you get those different perspectives. Yeah.
Simone Collins: I love it. Oh, it's so fun. Yeah.
Especially when you want like a, like a conversational chatty show, like a lot of podcasts, like just don't have that charisma. You've got, you guys have the, as the kids say, you have the Riz,
Meghan Daum: the Riz, the Riz. The Riz is the Riz. I I am too old
Simone Collins: for
Meghan Daum: this. [00:42:00] I know. I love it. I've heard of the Riz. Yeah. Well, thank you so much.
Thanks for having me. Have a spectacular day.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. We hope to have you back soon. All right. Bye
Simone Collins: Megan. Bye. All right. Ending recording.
Speaker: And that's how Rubik's Cubes work? Yeah. Okay, so, what are you going to do with your Rubik's Cube once it's solved? Are you going to break it again? No. No? Well, I mean No, I'm just going to solve it. You're just going to solve it? Okay, well Hi, Toasty! You just want what, buddy? You want a Mickey Mouse bicycle?
It's not the bicycle we have, alright? You want one that has Mickey Mouse on it? You want some Mickey Mouse bicycles? We need new bikes for the kids when they're taking dogs. Oh. We just want to give them our bikes. Cause right [00:43:00] now they have two bikes, so two of them can ride down the hill. And they were doing that for an hour, but Octavian got worried, and of course he got a new dog.
Oh, that's, that's fair.
Speaker 2: So, either more fancy, because right now they're using cheap bikes at their house, so we can get them either more cheap bikes or fancy bikes. Okay, fried rice is almost done, buddy. I think we're good to go. Okay. Okay, okay.
The Things Women Aren't Allowed to Talk About in Public (With Meghan Daum)