#1293 Amy McPhie Allebest: Breaking Down Patriarchy

00:00 Ricardo Lopes: Hello everyone. Welcome to a new episode of The Dissenter. I'm your host, as always, Ricardo Lops, and today I'm joined by Amy Elves. She's the host of the Breaking Down Patriarchy podcast and YouTube channel, and of course I will be linking it in the description. And today we're going to talk about Feminism, patriarchy, capitalism and colonialism, the manosphere, whether feminism includes boys and men and other related topics. So Amy, welcome to the show. It's a big pleasure to have everyone. I've been looking forward to this conversation, so.

00:36 Amy McPhie Allebest: Me too. Thanks for having me.

00:39 Ricardo Lopes: OK, so look, um, I would like to ask you first, what is feminism? I mean, not because, I mean, I also consider myself a feminist, but it's not that I consider this question to be extremely relevant also because as we're going to talk about here, there are different kinds of feminism, but because Particularly for people who do not, who are not very much into feminism, who are not very versed on feminism, or do not identify as feminists or even oppose it, uh, I mean, sometimes people demand that we, uh, give a definition of feminism. So how would you define it? And do you think that, uh, as I was alluding to, we really need the universal definition of feminism or not?

01:33 Amy McPhie Allebest: Yes, definitely we do. And in fact, I usually do start whenever I speak at a conference, or just have a conversation with someone where I sense that maybe we're not on the same page. I always do start with the definition, and I really recommend doing that, um, because I think sometimes having a conversation about topics that can be controversial or emotional. Um, SOMETIMES you end up having the frustrating feeling that you're just talking past each other, and establishing a common definition, a working definition, helps that a lot. So, um, yes, people can define feminism differently. Um, SO, I think, um, a really good strategy is to just go to the dictionary and say, like, let's just agree that it means what the dictionary says it means. And if you look at any, you know, standard English language dictionary, the, the definition of feminism, I I actually wrote it down. I went to, this is just the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, which is pretty standard in America. It says, feminism is belief in and advocacy for the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes, expressed especially through organized activity on behalf of women's rights and interests. So, I just think it's important to point out that feminism, and, and in any dictionary you look at, it will say essentially that, that feminism is the effort toward the equality of the genders. There's no definition you'll ever read anywhere, official definition that says that feminism, um, has the goal of women ruling over men. The goal is equality. And then implied in that is the understanding that the genders aren't equal now, and so feminism is the work required to to equalize opportunity for the genders.

03:17 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, there's, there's one thing that you mentioned there that's really important, I think, for people to keep in mind that feminism is really not about women ruling over men or women just acquiring all positions of power and then submitting them to them. Also because people have this idea that, OK, so even though nowadays, I mean after colonialism and all of that European colonial. COLONIALISM, there's barely any societies out there that we could label as matriarchal, but the few ones that we can still find out there, I mean, even those, they are not called matriarchal because women rule over men. They are called matriarchal just because women have more political power, even not necessarily even more political. Political power than men, but they have more of a say than in patriarchal societies, and they, it's easier for them to, for example, I'm remembering the, in the Musuo society in China, it's in the, in the society in India whose name I'm missing right now, uh, it's easier for women to just divorce men and women, and there's met. Liarity in some of those societies, so inheritance is passed through the maternal line instead of the paternal line and all and and different other sorts of practices and norms that people have in those societies, but it's really not about women reversing the roles and submitting men,

04:57 Amy McPhie Allebest: right? Correct, yeah, that's exactly right.

04:59 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, so, but I mean one thing that many times really confuses people, and I think it's also important for us to clarify here is that there's not one single kind of feminism. There are multiple types of feminism out there. There's, for example, liberal feminism within liberal feminism. There's specifically white feminism. There's red. Radical feminism within radical feminism you can find for example gender critical feminists. There's Marxist slash socialist feminism, intersectional feminism. I mean, what do you make of the different types of feminism out there? I mean, how do you think we should deal with that diversity within feminism?

05:46 Amy McPhie Allebest: Yeah, so I would say, um, backing up, maybe I'll kind of paint a picture, and then that will make the answer um clear. Patriarchy, as all social systems developed over a long period of time, um, in differently in different ways, but if you think of patriarchy as having developed kind of like, um, a city. So if you picture Long, long, long, long ago, when there's just open space, there's just an open field, humans haven't settled in a, in a place yet. You have infinite options of how you want to create a, a settlement, a city, right? At some point, somebody decides, OK, let's lay foundations of a building, and they put the foundations down, and they build a structure, and, and then that, it can grow and grow, and then you end up with, with a town, right? That has streets and, and buildings. And then typically what happens is, especially if you build foundations with stone, rather than digging up the foundations to, to, you know, create new places in your city, you're just gonna build on top of the foundations you've already laid, right? And so if you go to a, an old, old city, it, like in Portugal where you live, um, you have, uh, maybe like the medieval section of a city where the streets are really, really narrow, right? And maybe some of the buildings are not earthquake-safe, or they have, you know, trouble with the electrical or the plumbing because they're so old. If we were to build a city, Now, we would build it wider to accommodate for cars, and we could, we would build it, you know, with, with the most modern technology to serve the needs of the people, right? But what happens is those cities are just kind of like built on old, old, old ideas. You don't even remember who, who started it, and patriarchy is the same way, you know, at some point, somebody had the idea that men would men's role would be this, women's role would be this, they hand it down to their children, it gets handed down to their children, just taken for granted, and we, we find ourselves living in this narrow, restrictive ideology. And so, the question is, with each generation that we're like, oh, shoot, what did I inherit from like, generations past? What did I inherit? OK, what am I gonna do about it? And different people will have different ideas of what to do about it. And if you think about the word radical, so radical feminism, the word radical just means from the root, right? So, a radical feminist looks at the city plan that we've inherited and says, the whole thing's corrupt. It doesn't serve the needs of the people living in this structure. We need to bulldoze the city and route, like, dig up the foundations and start over. And so, that's really, technically, that's what radical feminism is. It means take out the foundations, take it out at the root. That's what radical feminism means. If you look at liberal feminism, another way of describing liberal feminism is just, it's reform of feminism. So, they, they would be more apt to say, we're not gonna undo the foundations, maybe it won't work, maybe just nobody will get on board to do this, it's just not practical, or maybe we don't even want to do that, because there are good things about the city. But what we're going to do instead is, let's just work with the structure we have. We'll retrofit for earthquakes, we'll repaint and recarpet the apartment we live in, to make it better. Like, we're, we'll make improvements within the system. So, a reform or or liberal feminism will say, like, OK, let's make sure that within our system, Women are paid equally for equal work. Let's make sure that women can vote, right? Let's make sure that women have reproductive rights, but we're working within the system we have. Um, AND then you mentioned intersectional feminism. Um, AND that is just like the definition of that is just acknowledging and recognizing that different women have different experiences. It's not just about gender, but it, but the, the way that a woman moves through her life in the world will, will be determined by race and class and ability and social status, all kinds of other factors, where I, as a white woman who um has had a lot of opportunity and financial stability in my life, I will be having a very different um life experience than a friend of mine even who even goes to the same university as I do and lives in the same place, but is black, or has a disability, or there's just a lot of different layers to human experience and um The intersectional feminism is really, really important, I think, in every conversation, because we have a history, unfortunately, in the, you know, I'll just speak in the United States because that's what I'm most familiar with, but of white feminists advocating for the rights of quote unquote, women, but being really blind to the needs of, of all women and thinking that their needs as elite. Um, WHITE women was speaking for all women when it wasn't, and, and white women being actually very racist and excluding women of color from the rights that they wanted for themselves. And so, I'm, I'm very glad that you brought up intersectionality at the very beginning of the episode, because that has to be a part of every conversation to make sure that we're advocating for the rights of all women and not just a few. Those are just a few any of the definitions that you wanted.

11:28 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, sure, and I mean, uh, when it comes to, for example, uh, having an intersectional attitude to things, I mean there are people who decide to not label themselves as feminists or not associate themselves with the feminist. MOVEMENT based on one critique that they have of it and that actually for the most part, or at least historically for the most part we have to take seriously there is the fact that for most of the history of the feminist movement. Very unfortunately, if people or women who are part of uh or have minority identities have been for the most part excluded, right? I mean that's a critique that we have to take seriously.

12:16 Amy McPhie Allebest: That's right, definitely. And um some of my, my black feminist, or, well, my black friends and colleagues would say they don't identify with the word feminist, they prefer the term womanist, which was coined by Alice Walker. People might know Alice Walker is the author of The Color Purple, and um she was writing, you know, in the, the 70s and 80s and seeing That at the time, the, the application of feminism was really, it was a white woman's project that was very exclusive, and so, and also the perception at that time also, and I think it's true, it was very white, but it was she, Alice Walker, perceived it as being anti-men. And her view of womanism was uh with love toward men, inclusion of black men in the project of egalitarianism, and so her term womanism was about lifting up everyone, not being anti-men, and also being, um, yeah, inclusive of all races, and so, I mean, womanism is definitely a term and a project that I can get behind. I, I think lately there has been more of an effort, instead of saying I'm not a feminist, instead to expand and ensure that our, our feminist work is inclusive, is not anti-men, is, you know, um, Universal in its, in its goals of elevating and ensuring the rights of everybody. But I can understand why a person wouldn't want to be associated with feminism because of those pain points historically, for sure.

13:57 Ricardo Lopes: Right, so, but I mean, how, how should people, particularly people who are not very familiar with feminist, er think about the fact that feminism has all of these different branches. I mean, also because there are particular questions where some of these branches disagree on and there are really big. WAYS of looking at society more generally where they are diametrically opposed. So for example, the liberal feminists tend to be, if not completely diametrically opposed, very close to that when it compared to Marxist or socialist feminists. I mean, liberal feminists tend to very much support the capitalist system and just say. That, OK, at a certain point in history we've removed the barriers for women, and now there's just a meritocracy out there. And as long as women are able and they focus a lot on choice, right, as long as people are women specifically are able to make the choices that they want, whatever outcomes we have, that's just, I mean. RESPONSIBILITY, their fault, whatever, because we've removed the obstacles and on the other end of the spectrum, Marxist or socialist feminists would say, yeah, that's not right because we have an oppressive economic system operating and there's and people come from different classes and so the opportunities from the get-go are. Some people are excluded from a lot of those opportunities that, for example, upper class rich people have. I mean, people at the bottom don't really have those opportunities. And then, for example, if we want to add intersectional feminism to that, we can also say, yeah, OK, so people with certain kinds of identities, I don't know, black women, trans women. Uh, LESBIAN women also are excluded for some of those opportunities and so they don't really start from the same point. Uh, AND for example, and just to give another example because there are many out there, of course, but, uh, radical feminists, uh, some of them, uh, I'm, I'm not sure if it's really all of them, but at least some of them stand in opposition. To sex work, but then there are feminists who defend the sex work as an activity and sex workers themselves, and I mean we could use labels here like sex negative and sex positive. Some people use those labels. So I mean, how should people make sense of all of these apparent contradictions within feminism?

16:51 Amy McPhie Allebest: I think the first step is to recognize that the enemy is not other feminists, but the enemy is the system, and um, I mean, I do like the analogy. I find, I do find it useful to, to return to that metaphor of the foundations that were laid so many thousands of years ago. I mean, prehistory is when patriarchy started, and we can talk about that a little later if you want to. PATRIARCHY started, but nobody alive right now is at fault for the systems that we inherited. Not men either, and not, and so, we, we all are looking around and saying, like, well, what a mess, you know, what a mess our ancestors handed to us. And so, having that, uh, remembering that, hopefully can give us compassion and kind of, like, Understanding of why different people would have different ideas about what to do about it, about how to deconstruct the things that are harming and what to build. Also, remembering that patriarchy hurts people deeply and in different ways. And my experience, for example, growing up in um a very conservative, high-demand patriarchal religion, my pain points will be acute, very acute for me. And, and very different from a person that grew up, you know, in a different, uh, a different context, a different cultural context. They might not have those religious wounds, but they might have, you know, financial wounds, or see that everybody will experience it differently. And so, I do think that it's important to remember. That we're all suffering from this, and we all, we all, you know, incur damage, but in different ways, so that we can be patient with each other, and my, um, strategy is to really listen if I, if I am encountering a feminist who sees it differently and thinks, like, you're wrong. I really want to, like, pause and say, tell me about what the pain points have been for you. What, what are the harms that you've experienced in your life, in your family, in your workplace, in your faith community, whatever it is, and try to understand where that person is coming from and see, like, oh, OK, I might still not agree. But I can at least see where the person is coming from and see their pain points, and then from there, I mean, getting a bunch of people to work together, we all know this, like trying to have a democracy, it's the only way, but it's messy, it's not easy, but if we can come together, really listen to each other, and then try to see, like, OK, now that we kind of understand where we're coming from, are there any common denominators here of, like, OK, we can all get behind. This certain cause, we could all work together on this, and that's, that's my strategy also is just like an incremental next step in what whatever you're doing, whether it's political, if you want to change a law, or whether it is in your faith community, if you want women to be able to be ordained, or whatever it is, or if you want trans people to have more rights than they have. Now? Like, what's the next increment? How can we get people on board? I think people are best brought on board through bridge building and heart to heart conversations of, of trying to understand and trying to move things forward in a way that benefits people. So, That's one of my, that's one of my answers. Uh, IT, it makes sense. People would see it differently. Let's try to talk to each other and understand each other, and then see if we can find. A couple of things that we can all agree to work toward. And then I, I'll say one more thing, and that is, um, this is kind of a personal thing too, where if there really is a difference, I, I, I'll, I'll, I'll give you an, uh, an example that I have a good friend right now, whose approach in the work that she's doing, I actually kind of disagree with it. I think it's in certain ways, Kind of backfires cause it, it's more anti antagonistic and aggressive. Um, I'd If I'm honest, I just think like, I wish you wouldn't do that, but at the end of the day, I know what my contribution is during my short lifetime on this earth. I'm very clear about what my contribution is, but I, I am, I have to trust also that she's being really thoughtful and intentional about what she wants her contribution to be. And we don't all need to be the same. Some people do, I, like I said, I'm a bridge builder, and I'm a person who wants to get people on board with their hearts. But there are people who need to be the battering ram up on the, the, the castle fortress, right? And, and use force to, to bang. Down a wall sometimes. That's not my strength. That's not what I'm called to do. I know what I'm called to do, but maybe my friend really is. That's her life purpose, and she's going to use her head to, to knock down a door, then I have to trust that, that, that all the voices are needed, and even if they're different from each other.

22:07 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, me personally, I mean, I don't even care much about, for example, labeling myself. I mean, apart from using the broader label of feminist, I mean, whether I'm a OK, so maybe if people asked me, I would say, OK, so I'm a sort of a socialist intersectional feminist. Something like that if people really forced me to to pick a label, but I mean apart from that, er I, I think that it's important also for feminists to be willing to criticize attitudes within the movement. So for example, for me, uh, I don't have much patience to be very honest for er things. Like excluding or exclusionary attitudes toward trans people, for example, or exclusionary attitudes toward sex workers, and I mean anything that's exclusionary or that tries to put all responsibility on individuals to improve their own condition or things like that. I mean, but But apart from that, I mean, I don't even care really that much about the labels. For me, it's more important to really talk about the ideas and what we want for society.

23:28 Amy McPhie Allebest: Yeah, thanks for saying that. And if I can add, because I, I, as I just spoke about like tolerance and building bridges and heart to heart, and I do believe that, but I do have to say too, Um, I agree with you. There are, that doesn't mean that I'm tolerant of a feminist who has racist attitudes or is cruel toward trans people. I have absolutely no tolerance for that. I would just say, if I encounter them, I find that they're more likely to be receptive. If I can have a conversation and say, like, where are you coming from? But my goal is not to, to say like, oh, I see. Like, you're a racist for this reason, so that's OK. We can have you, no, no, no, absolutely not. There's no tolerance for that. But if we can talk, sometimes that's a way to, to help a person change their heart and become more inclusive. So, I wanted to clarify that,

24:19 Ricardo Lopes: yeah. No, yeah, yeah, of course. So, another thing, uh, another basic term here is patriarchy, because sometimes people make it seem particularly critics of feminism that patriarchy is just a diffused term. It doesn't really mean anything concrete, and sometimes people start saying, oh yeah, you're talking about men being in power, and of course it's not really necessarily about men. Being in power, but we're going to talk about that. But yeah, but there's also tons of homeless men. There's also tons of poor men out there, also tons of men who suffer from addiction, mental illness, and all kinds of different issues, men who are underpaid as well because of the types of work they do and things like that. And, and nowadays we see more and more women in politics, in leadership roles, so. PATRIARCHY, I mean, what are you talking about? So, I mean, how, how does it, what is your definition if you have one, of course, of patriarchy, and in what ways would you say it manifests socially and politically?

25:36 Amy McPhie Allebest: Yeah, yeah, again, just going to the dictionary is useful. So patriarchy, the etymology, you can hear what it means in the word, right, patri, father, and archy is a governing system just like monarchy, monoarchy, one person ruling. Um, OR anarchy, no one ruling the, the ruling system, and so patriarchy, um, means father rule, and the way it's practiced is that men do have status, um, over women in society. And so there's, you know, if you look historically, I think Any reasonable person could look at the history of, especially the Western world, right, and see that it has historically been a patriarchy, where men had had status and privilege over women. Um, It's, it's easier to see in certain contexts, and again, because I came from a, a very conservative patriarchal religion, I, I come from the Mormon faith, and because in that religion, um, only men can be ordained to priesthood, and so all Women are presided over by men in the home, in the structure, only men can perform ordinances, and so, it's a very, very clear and overt patriarchy. Catholicism is the same, right? If you look at a picture of, um, of Catholic leaders, it's just 100% men, and those men do not allow women, um, into leadership positions, so women can't, don't have voting power, basically to make decisions for their own lives. Yeah, here,

27:19 Ricardo Lopes: here in Portugal we are a majority Catholic country and yeah, what you're saying there is 100% true. I mean we only have, it's all men, priests, men, bishops, the Pope is a man as well. I mean, no woman, at least for now, can hold. One of those positions.

27:42 Amy McPhie Allebest: Yeah, right. And so that those are great examples of, like, de jure patriarchy, like, it's encoded in the law of the of the system that women cannot be leaders. So, that's very easy. There's pros and cons, right? In one, in one sense, it's hard to combat that kind of patriarchy because it's so enshrined. But in, on, in another sense, it's, it's nice because you can see it. It's right out there where you, where you know exactly the battle that you have to fight, and nobody's pretending it's otherwise. A de facto patriarchy, where it's not encoded in law anymore, is a little trickier. And one example of that in the United States, if you, just like I just said, if you look at, like, literally a photograph of, like, all the popes, or, like, paintings, I guess, all the popes from, you know, the beginning till now, you just see it's all men. Um, IF you look at all of the presidents of the United States since our first president in the 18th century, It's literally all men, but you can go through, like, um, the historical timeline and see, like, well, this is de jure, women were not allowed to vote, they weren't allowed to hold office until, you know, a certain year, you can see like, oh, well, from that to that. Then it wasn't encoded in law anymore, and yet, there are still no women. We've literally never had a woman president. We just won't elect one. Americans just won't entrust women with leadership. So, you can say it's not a patriarchy anymore because there's no laws preventing women from becoming president. It's not in our laws anymore. It's in our culture, it's in our mental attitudes, it's in individual people's minds still, and that can last for hundreds of years longer, even after you change the laws, patriarchy in the culture takes a really, really, really long time, and sometimes it, I mean, It's, it's hard to know how to fight those battles because people can say, like, I don't know what you're talking about. We're not prejudiced against women, and yet, and yet they are. And so, that's, that's one way of thinking about it. Another thing is that, to your point, and this is really true, like we were talking about with intersectional. Um, FEMINISM, there are just so much, there's so much complexity that goes into people's lives, and just like I said earlier that I may encounter a lot of sexism as a woman, but I never encounter sexism plus racism, or sexism plus ableism or whatever. There are things I don't encounter. When I look at one of my very best friends is a black gay man. And so, it just depends what metric you're looking at about, like, which of, how, how do we move through the world and what barriers, what hurdles do we encounter. He's a man, I'm a woman. We both come from Mormonism, so he had status over me as a man. If he hadn't been gay and we had gotten married, he would have had status over me, and, and, um, presiding power over me in our marriage. But, in a lot of the pla in a lot of places that we go, because I'm white and he's black, I have status over him, or because I'm straight and he's gay. I have privilege that he doesn't have, and he encounters cruel cruelty that I never will, because of those, those things. And so, they don't cancel each other out, but it's just really, it is important to acknowledge. Men can have very, very hard lives. Men who, who experience poverty, Men who have disabilities, they will have on maybe on, on balance, a a more difficult time than I will. But with that said, women also have disabilities and encounter poverty, and have, you know, if they're women of color, they encounter racism, they experience all of those things, and also sexism. That men will never experience. And there are areas of life where, let's say in a, I come back to religion because it's so easy to see there. Let's say that it's, you know, uh, a man who is, you know, maybe impoverished and doesn't have very many opportunities in the world, and other men kind of rule over him in the world, he can still go home. And have status over his wife at home, and maybe beat his wife at home, and people will look the other way. So he does have status over the women in his life, even though he may, you know, go to out in the world, he may be oppressed, truly, and, and might be oppressed and might have a very difficult life, he does have status over women in certain areas because of patriarchy.

32:36 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, that's one of the areas why I also tend to include intersectional feminism in my view and not really just be. I mean constrained to, I, I don't even look at it as a constraint necessarily, but limited to a socialist view of things because very unfortunately many times people who are socialists, communists, Marxists tend to have Very class reductionist view of things and they are not very open to including social categories apart from a class and apart from the proletariat versus the bourgeoisie and things like that. So, you know, it's, it's very unfortunate, but sometimes that happens.

33:28 Amy McPhie Allebest: It does, and I will say that it is important. I would say like fewer Americans that I know, maybe this is just depends on where we live, but the people I know. I would say don't take a Marxist view of gender issues enough, and maybe that's because, like, Americans are, like, so anti-communist in general, so they're like, terrified of socialism. Um, I have found a lot of really valuable cri critique in Marxist feminism. Because class is such a huge part of it, and it is really important, I think, for feminists to remember, for especially women of means, women who do have financial ease in their life. To remember to take seriously the claims that men make when they say, like, I mean, for example, I'll hear women talking about, like, well, men have always been allowed to work outside the home, which has enabled them to, you know, achieve their potential, acquire financial independence and responsibility, or, and, um, and freedom, and that's true for a lot of men, some men, But not a man who's like trapped in a, in an exploitative, oppressive job or works in a factory, and so it's really, really important, I think, also to remember

34:45 Ricardo Lopes: that or or or even, sorry for interrupting, or even if we go further back in time and talk about feudalism, I mean men and women were working both in the fields, I mean, producing food that most of it would go to the nobles.

35:01 Amy McPhie Allebest: Exactly, exactly. That's so important to remember. And it's, and, and therefore, it's also important to remember that the way patriarchy has always worked, is not that every man has privileges and status in an easy life. It's that a few men have status and power over All the other men for various reasons, and they have status and power over all the women because they're women, right? But that, that not all men are able to have, yeah, easy lives in patriarchy. That's certainly true. So, yeah.

35:37 Ricardo Lopes: But, uh, I mean, do we know exactly how and when patriarchy originated and how it spread through the globe? I mean, At least from my conversations with some anthropologists, the understanding I have is that possibly the best theory out there is that patriarchy came with societies becoming more hierarchical, and that came from societies adopting a more sedentary lifestyle based on agriculture, and agriculture allowed for the accumulation of Resources and then people who basically took over certain social institutions held more power over those resources, and then a patriarchal system was created around that social structure so or within that social structure and then I mean the best understanding I have about how it spread through the globe was pretty much through those societies. Expanding through conquest and then even more so through European colonial colonialism, which basically encompassed almost the entire world, right? That is that, is that the same understanding you have of it or it

37:03 Amy McPhie Allebest: is, yeah, for sure, yeah, that's a really good summary. I don't know if you want me to go back and go into a little bit more detail.

37:09 Ricardo Lopes: Yes, please go ahead. Yes.

37:11 Amy McPhie Allebest: Yeah, but that was exactly the, that was the um. A really concise and accurate summary. Uh, YEAH, if you go back, I mean, obviously, anything that happened before we have written records, people are just guessing based on, you know, archaeological digs. They're making guesses based on, well, it looks like, you know, these sleeping areas seem to belong to women cause they're slightly smaller, and so it looks like, oh, these sleeping areas. It looks like the women stayed and slept their whole lives in the same place, but the men came to live with the women. Oh, that looks like they're matrilocal. Looks like this society, when you got married, you went and lived with the wife's family, and that privileges the women in that way. So, people making guesses like that, based on it's just an example of how an an archaeologist might look at a The remains of a of a human settlement and make some guesses about what was going on with gender, or you can see if men and women, you know, based on their, their bones, if they were eating equal nourishment, right? That that says a lot about a society. It says a lot about a society if you see a man buried with a lot of wealth, and many women that were sacrificed when he was, was, was buried, that tells you a lot, but if you don't have written records, Um, you're making guesses. In the earliest written records, we have, you know, some of the earliest laws, the Code of Hammurabi, the Middle Assyrian laws, things that were written down, and by the time humans were writing their laws, patriarchy was already very, very established, very encoded. Um, MALE violence against women was tolerated and even, like, um, required in certain circumstances. For example, if there was infidelity, if, uh, in, uh, I believe this is the Code of Hammurabi, that if there was infidelity, a man would be fined, a woman would be stoned to death, you know, so, just, you can tell that men have taken over, and they've made, they've created an oppressive system for women.

39:21 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, I mean, for, for example, the concept that is a very modern concept that we have, uh, a legal and moral concept of domestic violence is very recent, correct.

39:34 Amy McPhie Allebest: Correct. And we, and we take it for granted, and you just, it's just, um, it's kind of a hideous thing that humans have done. Um, BUT, but yes, but there is evidence before, before we have those written laws, there is evidence that when humans are hunter-gatherers, when they're nomadic, when they're following animals primarily, and they're not, as you said, but pre-agriculture, that lifestyle tends to be much more egalitarian. I think it's worth noting, I think it's interesting that hunter-gatherer, um, Groups of humans, it doesn't necessarily mean that there isn't a gendered division of labor. There often is a gendered division of labor, which, in my view, maybe this is controversial, but it makes sense if a woman is pregnant and breastfeeding and taking care of babies, there will be a period of her life where she has a, a different role, a different contribution to the community. Though, I will say, like, we have, like, I mean, there's it's kind of, like, a common understanding that, like, the men were the hunters and the women were the gatherers, and that's not necessarily true. A lot of, um, hunter-gatherer cultures, now, there's evidence that women would hunt for actually a lot of their lives. Um, BUT anyway, but even if there is gender division of labor, that doesn't mean that it's hierarchical, because if everybody agrees to it, and everybody has equal decision-making power, you can Make whatever laws you want for your group, and, and that's in my view, that's completely,

41:08 Ricardo Lopes: yeah, you can, you can have sort of a gender division of labor and even different gender roles, but that doesn't necessarily translate into gender inequality.

41:21 Amy McPhie Allebest: Exactly, exactly. If you have equal decision making power in your group, then whatever you decide is, in my view, then that's, that's fine as long as you have decision making power. So, anyway, yes, um, nomadic and, and, um, hunter-gatherer societies, very egalitarian. And then once agriculture started, um, as you said, with the accumulation of wealth, you see all kinds of hierarchy starting to form. That's when people started enslaving other people, and men started viewing women as a means of production. TO use a, a Marxist term, right? Like, that they are the means to more wealth. They can produce more heirs, and once you start acquiring wealth, then men started wanting to make sure that they were passing down that wealth to their own children, and to their own sons, and women became kind of, I mean, it's kind of a crass way to put it, but breeders, basically, to, to make more children, to, to accrue more wealth toward particular men. Um, AND so that happened, you see it happening all over the world at different times because people developed agriculture at different times, but when people develop agriculture, they start getting hierarchical, including, um, including gender. Um, I would say too, one thing, um, that's really, really important is that once men started having more wealth, well, once humans started having more wealth, the people in charge started having more free time, and once you see a group having more free time, they, they start writing, they start making up, or they, and they start writing their stories down. And this is where I'll bring back the metaphor of like the foundations, and then building on top of those foundations. This is really critical because once men started to become scribes and priests, then they started writing down what they thought was important about their culture, their historical record, their creation narrative, and then they were the ones who got to they got to tell the story about the genders, and then interpret that story about the genders. And, for example, if you look at the Hebrew Bible, It was written, I mean, they, they, it claims to be writing about, like, the creation of the world and the time of Abraham, but it wasn't written until a few 100 years, you know, before the common era, by an exclusively male group of different priests, and there is a lot of power in the person who gets to write down, and this, you know, this is how God, the Father, created. Adam, and then Adam had, you know, stewardship over Eve. Whoever writes that story has intent, amazing power, because then that's the foundation that everybody builds on forever after that. So that's, yeah, you get priests, you get kings, you get scribes, and they, they have the power to create the symbol systems that everyone believes in. And so then you have women who are taught from the time they're little girls. Because, you know, that's your holy text, and that's your creation narrative. Oh, my job is to be a support to the men. I'm supposed to have babies. I'm supposed to do what my dad tells me, and then do what my husband tells me. And if it's, if it's written, there's really, it makes it very, very hard to argue against that. And also, they're writing down the laws, the political laws, and, and granting or denying. Women, you know, suffrage, women's participation in the economy. So, I would say education, and, and men keeping women out of education was one of the most, um, effective oppressive tactics that men were able to inquire and keep a hold of for literally thousands of years. American women didn't get the right to vote until 1920. That's just, it's absurd. It's an absurdly long time that women had absolutely No, rights to, um, to change the laws because they, they didn't have the right to vote. And then, to your point, um, like you said, how did they spread? For example, where I live in North America, the indigenous, um, communities that lived in North, Central and South America, huge diversity. And some of them, People like to talk about, you know, the Americas as being purely matriarchal, and that's, that's not true. There's huge diversity. Some were on a, on a scale of patriarchal to matriarchal. They were everywhere along that continuum of, you know, egalitarian in the middle, but in general, much more egalitarian than the.

46:06 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, yeah, the idea here is not just saying that, oh, those societies. We just perfectly equal and none of them were patriarchal at all. It's just to say that basically European colonization uniformized or homogenized, let's say, uh, societies across the world in terms of bringing in terms of making them whole, all hierarchical and patriarchal.

46:35 Amy McPhie Allebest: Yeah, exactly, exactly. So wherever they were on the continuum, once, once the colonizers came. They brought Catholicism, they brought capitalism, they brought all of those systems that, that did oppress women. So, yes, exactly, that's, and that's how it spread. When Europe went everywhere, they brought all their systems with them.

46:53 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, just to comment on one of the things you mentioned there, yeah, I mean, funnily enough, it seems that as intelligent as many of those men who were the philosophers and the law writers and the politicians and the artists and the fiction writers and all of that, as intelligent as they might have been. I mean, if you are in a position of privilege in your society, you tend to write or to elaborate arguments, many of them post hoc rationalizations, even if you create an entire complex philosophical system around it to justify the social. Order, the position you have, the privileges you have, and all that comes with it.

47:42 Amy McPhie Allebest: Oh, exactly. And you can see that, like, really, it's really interesting to look at, like, early Christian church fathers, um, and how they had studied the Greeks, right? They had studied extremely misogynistic teachings of Aristotle and, and many of the Greek thinkers. And they had also inherited the Hebrew Bible. And so, all of the The thinking of the Hebrews and the Greeks, and then to your point exactly, kind of retroactively justifying why those made sense. They just take the foundations for granted, and then they build another layer on top of those foundations. So as the early Christian church is forming, It's not forming in a vacuum. They are inheriting all of those foundational teachings from the men before them who had written and, and come up with their ideas about what gender meant, and that gets encoded in our religious systems, and we still feel it today, from those very, its brilliant, um, scholarly men, and they're, you know, not a single woman in the room, not a single woman thinker, and I'll say this too, this is one of the, something that really resonated with my personal experience, and I think is very, very common. Um, I, I was very influenced by Gerda Lerner. She's a, uh, an American scholar who was writing in the 1980s, and she said that men have always benefited from, uh, because of, because of education, because of access to education, they always knew what the people before them had thought and taught, right? The, the, the knowledge that was discovered and created was passed down in writing. To the next generation, and men got to, to build upon and supersede. That which was discovered by their ancestors. So, that's what men had access to. Women, because they didn't have access to education, and specifically because they didn't have access to women's history, have been doomed generation after generation to reinvent the wheel. We didn't know, I did not know, as I was, like, feeling the pain points of patriarchy in my life, I would just feel like I was the first one. I, I didn't know anybody else had ever had ever struggled with that. I was made to feel in my specifically in my religious context that there was something wrong with me, that I was bad, that I was weird, like, why was I feeling that way? And when I finally started studying women's history, I saw that women had been Identifying these problems, coming up with brilliant critiques, and fighting against them, literally for hundreds of years. And I was having to reinvent the wheel, thinking I was the very first one, because I wasn't able to benefit from the knowledge that had been produced by my foremothers. So, that's, that's actually why I do the work that I do, cause I thought, I don't want this to keep happening. Women need to know about the systems we've inherited, and that This has all been thought of before, it's just not taught in schools, and if people don't know the history, they're just doomed to try to come up with. Um, WITH solutions on their own instead of benefiting from all of the stuff that's already been discovered and thought of. So anyway.

50:55 Ricardo Lopes: By, by the way, in terms of the spread of patriarchy across the world, and this is very interesting because as you said, since you were raised religious, do you look at religion generally as something that helped spread patriarchy across the world as well, or do you think that Perhaps that is more limited to maybe the Abrahamic religions which are the dominant ones nowadays, and with Christianity, for example, it was a vehicle also for European colonialism and things like that or I mean, I mean because I'm asking you this because I'm an atheist and I've been an atheist for a very long time. I mean up till I was 22, 23, I was one of those I I mean, very irritating militant atheists, but in the meanwhile I learned a lot of anthropology and left that bit behind and so on. Nowadays I understand more religion as more of a universal social phenomenon in human societies, but, but, but I mean I struggle to really condemn just religion in general because over history we've also had very important And movements with which religious people are associated and some of them spearheaded by religious people. In, for example, the 19th century, some abolitionists were religious, the Quakers, for example, in the 1960s we've had religious people associated, associated with the civic movements, people like Martin Luther King and Anti-colonialist people like Gandhi and all of that, so I mean, I find it really hard to just, I mean, just say, OK, religion as a blanket statement is bad and religion generally helps spread patriarchy and other bad things across the world. I think that, I mean, maybe it's more intellectually honest and also more fair for us to be more specific in. In terms of our criticisms of religion in those regards.

53:13 Amy McPhie Allebest: That's exactly how I feel about it. It, I don't, I agree completely that it isn't intellectually honest or mature to, to categorize something that's so complex and complicated with any black and white. Exactly to your point that even just taking the Bible, Um, that there are oppressive parts of the Bible and liberatory parts of the Bible. And exactly to your point, I, I was thinking of the exact two things that you mentioned in the United States, which, which is the abolitionist movement, wasn't just associated with the Bible, it came out of the liberatory doctrine of, of, of Christ, of the figure of Jesus Christ, and Um, and same thing for the civil rights movement, that was born out of, you know, the story of Exodus and, and the people leaving slavery, and that God would eventually come and help them, um, escape and, and, uh, from slavery, and that I think without that hope and without that spiritual anchor, I don't, I don't know if it would have been able to happen, and, and many of my black friends still are very, very involved in their Christian churches. And they, it, the, the Christian church was a vehicle for social justice, and, um, and, and a very liberating force in their lives, and still is, actually. So, I agree. I mean, the, the Bible itself contains it kind of anything you want to find in it, you can find in it and justify what you're going to do with it, but Well, I would say, I, and I'm still a very spiritual person and find a great deal of beauty in all the world's religions and, and danger there also, so we just have to be discerning and good critical thinkers as we're looking at any of those things.

54:56 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, AND what do you make of, uh, capitalism specifically? I mean, because I, I can't, uh, maybe I have a sort of bias here because I'm socialist, but at the same time, I think even putting the socialist bit aside, I think that it's pretty obvious or if not obvious, pretty well supported by the historical evidence that Capitalism has always been also very much associated with the spread of patriarchy and even if you want to also add a classist ingredient to it and even from a global perspective, you can include the fact that from the very inception capitalism was very much associated with slavery, with exploiting people. From the colonized areas, people from what nowadays we call the global South, which is still very much true even nowadays that those people are exploited in different ways to serve the interests or to facilitate the life of people who live in more developed industrialized countries and so I mean I can't avoid just looking. Can get capitalism is also one part of the equation here in terms of more broad exploitation of peoples across the world and also women specifically also because capitalism, at least at the very least up until the 19th century was also very much emphasizing gender roles if I, if I'm not mistaken about that.

56:48 Amy McPhie Allebest: Yeah, you're absolutely right, and this is one thing that I struggle with, um, just full disclosure, I, my husband is an entrepreneur. He started a company with You know, just having a, a college job and getting a little money, a little capital, and then started a company that he's just worked and worked and worked and grown and grown and grown, and it's gotten to be a really big company, and that has supported our family. I haven't, I didn't work outside the home while I was raising our children, and so, Um, we've benefited from the, the capitalist system where literally we used a little bit of capital and made it grow. And we, I mean, as a couple now, are, are really, um, Trying to reckon with unchecked capitalism and the fact that, that we've seen, as he's continued to be CEO of this company, that the way the system works is that just the disproportionate benefiting of him and the executives of the company. And it's, it is truly an exploitative system, but it is one that we've benefited from so much that it is something we, we actually talk about it daily and have cried tears about it, and also really done everything we can to just on our own redistribute things in a way that feels more fair to the employees at his company, and I'm really, really proud of what he's done personally. But there's no systemic requirement that anybody does that, that anybody does make it more fair. So, uh, that's, I just wanted to, you know, in full disclosure, kind of say that at the outset. I will say yes, I mean, capitalism has been intertwined with patriarchy from the very beginning. If we're talking about like capitalist oppression, like benefiting from people's work, That's like the nuclear patriarchal family, like the, the man is benefiting from women's invisible free labor. The whole, our whole society has been benefiting from women's invisible free labor, and so it makes a lot of sense that people would talk about almost like a, a direct parallel of like the man as the bourgeoisie, and he's benefiting from the labor of the woman who's just like, Simone de Beauvoir and the Second Sex talks about it and she uses the word imminence, that it's like the hamster wheel, having babies, caring for babies, making food, cleaning up the food, cleaning the house, and she's just running on that hamster wheel for free, while he gets to transcend and kind of achieve his, his potential. So, yes, there are definitely parallels, that are definitely tied together. Um, IF I can just share another kind of, uh, um, an anecdote of the way that this is happening ongoing in our culture, and it, it's a critique of the kind of the girl boss, um, and in kind of in, I would say even like the last I would say maybe 10 years ago, I really started to see this really clearly, where white women, specifically, um, were, you know, like, I'm going to be empowered, and I'm gonna start a company, and I can do it all, right? And I can be a mom, and I can have a company, and that's, that's actually great, but what would happen is that these, you know, these families, this white woman who wanted to be a girl boss and wanted to break the glass ceiling, would realize, well, in order for me to get this done and be a mom at the same time, I need help and so I need to bring in, you know, like somebody has to take care of the kids, somebody has to

1:00:39 Ricardo Lopes: they, they would be outsourcing the domestic labor to women that are usually not always but usually part of minorities in the US, for example, Hispanic women, black women.

1:00:51 Amy McPhie Allebest: Exactly. And, and, and paying them the least amount that they can get away with, not providing healthcare, not providing. So what's that woman who's coming in and helping you be a girl boss? What does she do when her kids are sick? Right? And so, you know, how is she going to get ahead? How is she going to be an entrepreneur and get ahead in this capitalist system? So, I do understand the critique that, like, capitalism has to be dismantled in order for all women to be able to achieve, um, equality. You, you can't. You can't exploit other women and call yourself, you know, a good feminist, and, and that continues to happen, and I'm just, just, I'm really discouraged to see people still not be awake to that. Um, IT, people just kind of are, are still charging ahead and not seeing the, the class critique that, that I think is so critical in order to lift up everybody.

1:01:51 Ricardo Lopes: But, uh, by the way, in regards to patriarchy, uh, many people have this, uh, erroneous idea that, uh, OK, so if we are feminists and we are critiquing or blaming the patriarchy for different societal issues, we're saying that it only affects women. But actually, that's not the case. It can also affect men, right? So, uh, in what ways, or could you give us perhaps some clear examples of how it affects men as well?

1:02:27 Amy McPhie Allebest: Yeah, 100%, yeah, if we're talking about kind of the traditional, um, the traditional gender division of labor in the home, where until recently, and in my community still ongoing, that men Um, were the, were the breadwinners and the ones who were working outside the home to bring in money, and women were at home, um, taking care of the children. That actually has a downside for everybody. If we look at, for example, like, I don't know if you're familiar with the Harvard study of happiness and human thriving, it's, it's a longitudinal study out of Harvard that's been going on for decades, just to see, like, what makes people happy on their deathbeds, what do they say? Um, THEIR regrets.

1:03:10 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, I, I, I, I think that I read some things about it, yeah. Yeah.

1:03:14 Amy McPhie Allebest: Well, what people say is, you would probably be able to guess, is the things that make people happy are relationships, healthy relationships with other people, and doing something that they feel mattered, like realizing their human potential and making a contribution, right? That makes people happy. It creates creates flourishing regardless of gender. So yeah,

1:03:38 Ricardo Lopes: but basically you will never find anyone on their deathbed saying, oh, I should have worked more, or I should have made more money.

1:03:47 Amy McPhie Allebest: Exactly, exactly, yes, and so people, that's the way I see it, and you think of, you know, Maslow's hierarchies of hierarchy of needs, same thing, like self-actualization, like, I achieved my human potential, my individual potential, and I had good relationships, right? I have healthy relationships. So what This, this gendered patriarchal division of labor does is it keeping women out of the workforce makes it so women. Um, ONE thing that that does is creates dependence on men, which isn't good, and it also has historically limited women's ability to achieve their potential, to make a contribution in the adult world, maybe as a doctor, or as a teacher, or as an artist or whatever, cause it keeps her in that hamster wheel. So it, that's one way that it's harmed women, but what we don't talk about as much, or we're just barely starting to talk about, is that it's kept men, historically, from having those deep relationships. One thing that women have been able to have in the home is relationship with their children, and the joy that comes from parenting, relationship with other people. You have groups of women friends that are able to share and support each other. And one thing that I see men have missed out on, and I have had men literally cry to me about this, that their kids grew up. And they were really kind of slaving away at the office, at trying to bring money home, and their kids grew up and they didn't spend time with their kids, or that they don't have friends, that they haven't been, they haven't been taught how to make friends, how to invest in relationships. And so, that's one way that I see these patriarchal gender roles having really harmed men is emotionally stunting them in some ways. And also, Precluding them just by their schedules, that they're working so hard, trying to be a good man, trying to support their family and provide for their family, that they're not, they have not been able to invest in those relationships that humans need for flourishing. That's one thing. And that, that emotional piece too, and this is getting better, but, you know, the, the whole thing about, like, boys don't cry, real men don't show. Don't show vulnerability, they don't show weakness, that's incredibly damaging to men's emotional health and, and to their ability to, to create relationships. Those are a couple of things that I think of.

1:06:13 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and, and I, uh, I want to link it now to, uh, the manosphere because that's a very, a very widespread phenomenon right now, particularly on the internet, and it has been so for the past, I don't know, 1015 years or so. So, uh, what do you make of it? Where do you think that it stems from? Are there particular, I don't know, factors that you see might have played the biggest role in the uh rise and spread of the manosphere?

1:06:47 Amy McPhie Allebest: I'm learning about it. I, I mean, I, you'll probably have a guest on, on your podcast that, that would know more about it than I do, but I would say just in general, the, the, um, It can be encapsulated in the phrase that for people accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression. And so, I think we're going through the growing pains of transition, where men are realizing that, you know, that women are, you know, as women, Do fill more spots in education and in leadership, if they have the assumption of, you know, that they have this birthright of a spot at the table, that they have this expectation that they're going to be the leaders for a woman to join and say, no, actually, I, I got that spot. I was qualified and I got it. That men will lose their minds because they have this expectation that, that that is their role, that that's their birthright. And so, it feels like oppression to them to have equality, and I guess I, I would just say like, yeah, that, that's hard, and you're going to have to grow up and figure that out, and also figure out that, that, um, Your life will be the most satisfying to you and the most, you know, the most flourishing life by achieving your individual potential, and that you have power to achieve the life you want. You don't need power over other people. Power equals you being the kind of person you want to be. It doesn't require power over others, but if you're taught that it does require power over others, then you're gonna be pretty disappointed, and then start to resent. The people that you see coming in and, and taking what you thought was yours. Um, BUT it's, it's really scary to me. I mean, as it is to all of us, I guess, just to see the rise of these Andrew Tits and these extremely influential people, um, telling young men that the way, yeah, the way to have power is to have power over others. It's just, it's a lie. It doesn't make men happier, and it's, it's terrifying for everybody.

1:09:02 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, I'm going to tell you about an idea. I won't even call it a hypothesis not to use because I don't want to use the scientific term here because it's not even a proper, I think, scientific hypothesis, but an idea I have about. What's behind the manosphere and at least I'm not focusing here on the influencers themselves because I think that those are pretty much exploiting the insecurities of men across the world and there are difficult circumstances, but I think that what really attracts many men out there, particularly young men, to the manosphere, has to do with the fact that we are now. Living and since the 2010s, which was around the time where social media started proliferating and then the manosphere also started proliferating, as very much to do with the fact that we live in times since the 2008 economic crisis where the labor market has become increasingly unstable. Economic conditions for people have become increasingly unstable, and I mean in the Particular case of men, adding to that the cultural aspect of imbuing them with the idea of traditional generals, and they have to be the breadwinner, they have to be the provider and all of that. I mean, since in the current economic circumstances for the vast majority of people, it's just not possible to do that for one single person in this case, one single man. To provide for a household, an entire family, or even just his partner alone. So I think that because of that, because of the economic circumstances and tied with the ideas that men have to to fulfill those particular roles, there, there's been for the past almost 20 years an increasing number of men that feel disenfranchised. THAT feel that they have no direction or purpose in life, that they look at the future and it seems hopeless because they don't have any economic prospects or relationship prospects and all of that. And then these figures come on the scene and they ride the wave of the spread of social media and people were getting more and more connected to the internet and then they present these simplistic. Narratives of scapegoating women, scapegoating minorities, scapegoating vulnerable people, and saying, OK, so if you're in this situation, it's it's these people's fault, it's the fault of the feminists, the fault of, I don't know, sometimes they even include leftist people in in that sort of narrative, and basically, OK, it's not. It's not a problem with the system itself. Actually they push for the system because, oh, you have to become more muscular. You have to work harder and longer hours, and I mean at the end of the day, in the current circumstances that just simply doesn't work and then men keep coming back to the manosphere for more and more answers and also, I mean, And this is a critique of my side as well. I mean, people on the left, very unfortunately, I think that sometimes people have not really paid enough attention to the struggles of men in. In society, I mean, and, and then these menosphere figures appear and at least they validate their struggles, their worries, their complaints, and all of the difficulties they're going through. So I don't know what you think about

1:13:11 Amy McPhie Allebest: that. I totally agree with that, and I do, I do think that's one of the reasons that, that is one of the reasons that I do think we need to take men's. Take men seriously, and, and like I was saying before, like, some of the, when I encounter feminists that I disagree with, it's often on this issue, that they have, they've been so hurt, I think, by men, and that's the reason, that they become really angry and really dismissive, and like, I don't care that men are struggling, men need to figure it out themselves. I can't be the one to figure that out for them. That's fine, that's, that's fair, maybe, that women feel exhausted of doing all the emotional labor of like, and now I have to not only, you know, figure things out and how I'm going to survive within patriarchy, but now I have to also figure out how to help men feel better. They are the ones that have already always benefited. I, I tend to, I guess I just, I have the bandwidth for it, and I have the heart for it, and I do think, um, I think the only way forward is to Listen and hear what they're actually saying and care. I do care. I have a son, I have a brother, I have male friends. I care very much that the future we're we're building is a, a fair and nurturing world for boys also, as well as girls. I care about the whole human family, and the fact that men are struggling and are in mental health crisis. I do think I do take it very seriously, and I care genuinely, and I, and, and also I do think strategically it is wise, because young men, especially who are, who do have hurt, and they, if they get the message, we don't care about you, of course, they're going to go find a community that they feel does care about them and does make them feel like they matter, and gives, and, and Then we're losing them to extremists. So

1:15:09 Ricardo Lopes: and also it's doubly dangerous because those men are also young, young disenfranchised men are the ones we typically see participating in school shootings, participating in other kinds of public. Violence because it's like, oh, I don't have anything to lose, so whatever, I'm just going to blow myself up and take some people with me because I'm just sick and tired of this society. Nobody cares about me, so whatever.

1:15:45 Amy McPhie Allebest: Yeah, I agree. I, I do care about them. I think as a society we do need to care about all the members of our society and, and try to come up with solutions together.

1:15:55 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, yeah, so I mean, let me ask you this, of course we've already, with all of this, we've already alluded to the ways that boys and men can also benefit from feminism, but can boys and men be feminists themselves? I mean, I'm asking you this for a very particular reason. It's because there was this one instance where I heard from a radical feminist and very specifically a gender critical feminist that I couldn't be a feminist because I'm a man and men generally can't be feminists, that at best they can be allies because I mean men don't have the kind of social experiences that women go through for because They are women and so they don't have the same understanding of women's struggles as they have and so I mean, which for me is just sounds very silly because actually I mean it's not that we are two different species, right? I mean, most of the experiences that women have, men also have psychologically and all of that, but also, I mean, we're not. Devoid of empathy and so we can understand that people who go through particular kinds of struggles, how they might feel and why it's a struggle for them and empathize with that. I mean, so it just seems silly to me, but what do you think about that?

1:17:32 Amy McPhie Allebest: Yeah, it seems silly to me too, and actually really unfortunate. I really disagree with that person. And I've actually never heard that before, and I know a lot of feminists, and I've never heard anyone say that, but I, I believe you, and there are, I mean, I've read things that I think, oh wow, I, yeah, very strongly disagree with that. I mean, if you, if we just go back, that's why I think dictionary definitions are useful. We can just agree on the definition that it's that feminism is the effort toward um gender equity. And we actually need men and boys on board in the mission toward gender equity. Men are, there are many, um, you know, positions of power that only men occupy. Like I said, in the United States, we've never had a female president yet, and the president has a lot of power. We need a feminist. President, even as a man, to have the influence and to have access to those, those levers, um, and so it's absolutely critical to have boys and men and people of all genders on board. Women actually can't do it all by ourselves. So,

1:18:38 Ricardo Lopes: yeah, yeah, so, uh, I, I'm seeing that we're reaching our time limit. So just one final question, and I mean, do you think that there's enough room in feminism. To perhaps push for um a view that is more reconciliatory in terms of trying to reconcile both genders. I mean, because we've been talking here about, for example, uh, patriarchy and how women for the vast majority of human history, at least in the more sedentary societies have been subjugated to men in different ways. And for the most part men were the ones who held the positions of power and all of that. So of course it's perfectly understandable that many women feminists really, I mean, really have this attitude of blaming men more generally for what women went through throughout most of our. History and all of that and then as we talked about just a couple of minutes ago about the men sphere and the current economic and political conditions, the struggles that men go through, and then when they hear that, I mean, it's they themselves alone as they hear for and very unfortunately for from certain feminists that have to work on themselves. I mean, and they have to do it alone, which I think is also very unfair. Fair because people shouldn't exist in society and to try to overcome their struggles alone. That's not the kind of species we are. We are a social species. That's not the kind of social circumstances we've evolved in. I mean, the kind of loneliness and atomization in society that we see nowadays is just historically unprecedented even in agricultural societies. It wasn't like that at all. And So, but I mean, I'm just mentioning that to say that of course it's also understandable, at least to some extent that some men out there would be, um, I mean, would resent feminism and people who label themselves as feminists, but do you think that there's space in feminism to try to reconcile the genders and not just try to push in one direction or the other?

1:21:13 Amy McPhie Allebest: Well, that's exactly the space I choose to occupy within feminism. Again, as an educator, as a bridge builder, as a person who believes that love is the power that heals people, that we have to heal in community with each other, as you just said, as human beings, that's just the way we work, and seeing Other, um, other areas where healing has happened after war, for example, from truth and reconciliation efforts, from real, um, kind of penitence, and then forgiveness, like we, we See this in a lot of areas where a group of humans has caused terrible harm to another group of humans, and you, and, you know, what do we do now? You, I think it's important to recognize how you got to the place you are, which is what I do as a historian, is like, here's how we got here. Here's what we inherited, and now, what do we want? What do we want to pass along to our children? If we want it to be something better than we inherited, then we have hard work to do. We have hard conversations to have in our, you know, individual lives with the people we know. We have hard work to do, you know, kind of more removed politically, and like I said, and if we have a religious community, in our workplaces, in our schools, in all these different areas, I just think the only way to do that is to be real about how we got here. I, I understand it's a hard ask of men, but I do think I've, I've seen real healing happen when men are able to sit with the harm. A lot of times men, um, do get, even really, really good men, even men I love a lot, they do tend to get defensive and say, like, well, I didn't do that. I would never do that. Um, IF men can do this work and say, and just, like, kind of calm their defensiveness down and just listen to the harm that has happened to probably all the women in their lives, and realize, like, maybe we're not saying you specifically are to blame, but make space for women to be able to, to express how it's felt to them. That can be extremely healing. And then I think Work that I encourage women to do is to, as much as we can, not blame the, you know, the men in our lives for things that they didn't do, because that does create more division and it does create more defensiveness. So, it requires a lot of skill in, in having these, um, repair conversations between the genders. It's very difficult, but I think if we can approach it with the genuine desire to understand. And then the genuine desire to, to do the hard work of forgiveness, um, and moving forward. I wish there were an easier answer, but I don't know that there is one. I just think it's gonna require people to kind of swallow their pride. And, and see if we can, see if we can, yeah, repair what our ancestors caused, so that we don't hand it on to our kids.

1:24:23 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, so let's end on that great note, Amy, and uh apart from your podcast and of course your YouTube channel, which, as I already said, will be linked in the description below, uh, where can people find you on the internet?

1:24:39 Amy McPhie Allebest: Yeah, thanks. Just at our Instagram is at Bown patriarchy, just because breaking down patriarchy was too long. So, yeah, if you just look up Breaking Down Patriarchy, as you said, the podcast and the YouTube channel and Instagram, I would also say, let me throw in one more thing, um, that's really useful about the podcast, is just the reading list alone, because this is one thing that really helps in the process of repair that we just talked about, for women to not have to have the conversations over and over and over and over again. People have written amazing, brilliant books, and my podcast goes through. Basically, it's like a free graduate school level, um, educational project, so you can, like, get the TLDR of, like, you don't have time to read The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvair, for, for example, cause it's this big. But you can get the TLDR and the discussion of it and benefit from all of the scholars who have done this work to educate yourself. So, listen to the podcast, watch the YouTube channel, but then also go to the website and just look at the reading list if you're interested in actually reading some of those books, or just listen to our conversations about those books. That's a really great way to, um, educate yourself and then make a difference.

1:25:56 Ricardo Lopes: OK, great. So look, it's been really awesome to have you on the show and to talk with you. I've been a very big fan of your podcast and your YouTube channel for a while now, and you're, I mean, in the YouTube space, you, together with Trizzly are my two favorite feminists there, so it's been really an honor, and I mean, if you're open to it, I would really love to have you back on the show somewhere in the future.

1:26:25 Amy McPhie Allebest: I would love to. This has been just a joy. Thank you so much, Ricardo.

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