Ep. 188: Discussing “Lysistrata” and Politics with Lucy and Emily (Part Two)

0:00 Mark: Well, I didn't want to spend all our time just making up or recalling facts about ancient Greeks. I want us to take advantage of our guests and think about, is there anything we can say about feminism, more that's projected out of this or about political advocacy? The initial question that you had suggested, Wes, was the connection between erotica and politics. Like, is there the erotic and politics?

0:28 Wes: The erotic and the political, not erotica.

0:30 Dylan: Those are two completely different things.

0:31 Wes: Mark, what's the relationship between porn and the state?

0:36 Emily: Conjures up some nasty images that I

0:39 Lucy: saw on CNN this morning.

0:41 Wes: Basically, Trump is that relationship, right? Yeah, he's that relationship incarnate.

0:45 Mark: Or you could say the relationship is metaphorical, that the government, they fuck you, that's what they do.

0:52 Lucy: That's right.

0:53 Wes: But yeah, the erotic and the political, or the ways in which one's individuality, one's individual passions, one's desires, and you could even say the pluralism that sort of stems from that, how that fits into the state. I think one of our authors speaks a little bit to that. But, yeah, I think Mark's right. It's a good thing for us to free associate on.

1:12 Dylan: You just mentioned it being whether it was feminist, Mark and I thought I mean, Emily, at the end of our discussion last time, she, I think, made the right point that it doesn't seem to be feminist at all. There's not a feminist resonance in the play.

1:28 Emily: Well, there's a temptation to think of it that way, because the personal is political. That's a feminist slogan. Right. And we definitely see that theme here. And it's very sex positive, which is a very trendy thing. Like, if you're a feminist now, you have to say you're sex positive. And there's that fight.

1:46 Lucy: Feistiness and.

1:47 Emily: Yeah. And they're not ashamed at all of their sexuality and using their sex to get power. So there are some feminist resonances, I think, but ultimately, no.

2:00 Lucy: Well.

2:01 Mark: And as was pointed out, that everybody is depicted as foolish except for Lysistrata. Well, that's slightly in the feminist column in that she is female and she's a representation of some sort of female virtues as put forward as that. At least that much.

2:18 Dylan: But she's also. She's trying to tame the sexual urges around her. She stands out in not being a slave to her sexual urges as a woman or as the men are.

2:30 Lucy: Right.

2:31 Emily: Yeah. But ultimately, her goal is just to get everybody hotter so they want to stay home and have sex all the time. So really, she's just kind of a tease.

2:44 Dylan: She's like a dominatrix of some sort.

2:46 Emily: She is, yeah. She's a dominatrix. Exactly. That's a costume she should wear.

2:52 Mark: So as part of the sex positivity, is that compatible? Is that part and parcel of having the libido be equally strong on both sides? Which is kind of what I mean. Yes. It's ultimately, the women are able to resist, and so they influence the men, but they make sure to have those scenes of all the women really not very much able to resist. And it's only Lysistrata that convinces them.

3:12 Emily: Mm. Yeah. Like now if you perform that play, I mean, people will think, well, that's awesome. That you're depicting women as sexual beings. Like that in itself is a transgressive thing, because we're still, like, in our particular historical, social context, we're still trying to combat the image of women as being not sexual or being, like, demure and not having a. Like a real libido the way that men do.

3:39 Wes: I'm thinking of now of our episode on 1984, in which sex of any kind was a threat to the state. Right. And any sort of intimate relationship. And so it was prohibited just because. Now I'm thinking of the larger question is the message of the play seems to be, well, sex is, in a way, and in the interests of the state. It's in the interests of the state because it's in the interests of the household. And it helps bring people home from war and preserve them from being killed. And in that sense, you know, if the husbands are at home, it promotes female fertility and reproduction and all that sort of stuff.

But you can imagine a countervailing point of view that 1984 is the most extreme example in which particular human desires, especially sexual desires, are seen as antithetical to the interests of the state. Or even love and intimacy producing little dyads within the polis who are will be more loyal to each other than they would ever be loyal to the community as a whole.

4:35 Emily: That's why it has to be so controlled. And here we have all these rituals governing sex and early introduction to sex and the way that desire is being educated very explicitly. I mean, I think it's also. It's educated just as much in our culture today, but then it was just more out in the open.

4:55 Mark: So this is before Plato's Republic, right?

4:58 Wes: Yeah.

4:59 Mark: This is like a hundred years. Okay. So we can't see. But clearly, I would bet that the 1984 spirit that is in Plato's Republic. Right. The exact fear that the families have too much power. We should actually, ideally, it would be nice to abolish the family and have everybody think that the state is their father and the earth is their mother and blah, blah, blah. So I think those two ideas are probably floating around. And we do know that Aristophanes at least made fun of Socrates. So if that is the kind of thing that Socrates was talking about, we don't really know if that was more Plato's angle as opposed to Socrates, but maybe we could see this as a historical reaction to that sentiment. Exactly. Against that.

5:38 Wes: Yeah. And the Republic. Right. I think it has lots of positive things to say about Sparta, which comes much closer. It's right. To this abolition of the family ideal.

5:48 Dylan: Yes.

5:49 Lucy: Works so well in North Korea.

5:52 Wes: Aristotle was very critical of Sparta and said they. Because they were trying to produce these great warriors, but he thought they were worse. You know, their militaristic society actually didn't produce better warriors. It just made them worse at everything.

6:04 Dylan: Sparta also deeply relied on a whole subclass called the Helots, which were basically an institutionalized. They were the slaves in their society. It's not that the Athenians didn't have slaves, but there was a whole subclass of their community that were fundamental for them to be able to concentrate on their militaristic portion of their society.

6:25 Lucy: What do you mean by that, Dylan? Do you mean they needed men to be tilling the fields and participating in the nuts and bolts of.

6:33 Dylan: Yeah, tilling the fields and doing all the work.

6:36 Wes: They were basically serfs. It was more like a serf system. And they were their own people. They had been Athenian Spartans and then many other subdivisions of Greek society. They had actually been their own people and they were just wholesale enslaved by the Spartans. And there are a lot of differences from the way the slavery worked elsewhere. The Helots basically kind of had their own mini society within Spartan society and could marry and have kids and generally were stayed together. But they are also. The Spartans were constantly worried about uprisings.

And there were uprisings. And so there are some reports of Spartans being extremely cruel and just conducting random executions. And they had a whole secret police force devoted to monitoring and randomly killing Helots who might be getting too powerful or big for their britches. But I'm not sure why today I ended up reading so much about that. On a tangent to the play, just the huge role that slavery played in those societies. It's hard to separate that from the question of the domestic sphere versus the state when you're thinking specifically about ancient Greece.

7:46 Mark: Sometimes reading this kind of stuff requires the same kind of patience that reading like Middle Ages religious philosophy that I so fundamentally disagree with the basic premises of the Middle Ages religious philosophers, like people would dismiss it as people arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Like, how completely uninterested could I be in anything in that whole area. But, you know, as time has gone on, I've gotten worn down and like, well, let's just entertain this. Like, I am not religious at all, but let's see whether the concepts make sense.

So I kind of feel the same. And then it becomes like a stretch. Well, can we then get anything out of it to sort of bring back that we're not just dealing in a fantasy world with their fantasy wrong premises and what follows from those, but we can take something back into the real world. And so I guess I'm seeing the same thing here. You've got a society that's tremendously messed up. Well, is what we take from it just that? But let's not be messed up in that way? Or is there something more subtle and detailed that we can take out of the dynamics of the way in which they were messed up to say something about whether it's relationship of the sexes or something about political power itself or anything like that.

8:57 Wes: I mean, I think sex is actually dangerous. Yeah, that's the psychoanalytic me speaking. I think people behave as if it's dangerous. And in fact, you can go into a movie theater, right? And you can any day of the week. You can engage in a fantasy of violence. You can watch as many people get killed as you like. But you know, you're not going to go into, you know, most theaters and be able to watch pornography in the same way. So I think it does bear thinking about this relationship between sex and the erotic and society. I think we could go on at length about it. And it is related also to misogyny and the subjugation of women. Those two things are very related. The sense in which female sexuality is felt as a threat.

9:43 Lucy: Sex also, okay. Having porn much of the time isn't victimless. You know that there is some. Not everybody's cool with it. Even working on a show like Spartacus, you're not actually having sex. You've got like bicycle seat in your pants between, you know, you and the other person.

10:01 Emily: You're.

10:03 Wes: That's good to know.

10:04 Emily: Apparently, you know, you've got so much

10:06 Lucy: padding, it's like a bicycle seat. It's ridiculous.

10:08 Wes: I'm not gonna watch Spartacus the same way again.

10:10 Lucy: But yeah, it's so hard to shoot those things. And it doesn't matter what age the actor and actress was. It was so confronting. People were not up to. When was it? 10 years ago. Not very sex positive, let me tell you, particularly Americans. So it was really distressing to all of us to have to shoot those things because we just. There's something. You have to be so vulnerable to shoot a thing like that in front of people. So that's as distinct from porn, which has many other issues.

10:51 Wes: What about the scenes of violence? I bet people were a lot less

10:56 Lucy: because it's all obviously fake blood. Yes. And the swords aren't real and we're all stunt people. Everybody understands the choreography of it, much less. Yeah, it's nothing. Nothing at all.

11:09 Mark: You didn't have stunt boobs. That's not the comparable.

11:13 Lucy: Oh, they might have been. I might have been, you know, pumped up in post or something. I don't know. But we certainly had stunt penises. And guys. Oh my God, the guys suffered worse than the women because penises don't want to play ball. You're shooting in this freezing cold.

11:30 Dylan: Yeah, there's shrinkage.

11:32 Lucy: Yeah, the little shy turtle, you know, because the guy, the actor will be like, oh, no. I said it's very important for the scenes. You've got to be genuine. You know, you've got to really go all method on it. And then on the day their willy's like, no, thank you, I'm staying home today. I'm staying in. And so we would have to get lessons from. Okay, slightly off topic now, but lessons from. There's this town in New Zealand which nobody knew, it happens to be the porn capital of New Zealand. And we would have to get all our background players from this town because I guess they have people who do it for fun and sick career or something.

Because regular extras or actors and actresses can't deal with shooting sex scenes. It's really confronting on a cellular level. Whereas people who are already in the business, it's remain. Drink to them. Evidently. And this guy taught us. He would just sit there, this big guy, and he taught you just sit there with a hot water bottle on your lap and a towel at the top and you just stroke it out.

12:37 Wes: Remain.

12:38 Lucy: Remain tumescent.

12:40 Emily: How about that?

12:42 Lucy: That's how you do it. So you don't ever. Don't let it get cold.

12:45 Dylan: So you're always prepared for the scene.

12:49 Mark: I have a relevant question for Emily related to her acting role. So I assume when you were in the miniseries for it, you guys read the book back then or did you read the whole book?

12:59 Emily: Yeah. Wow, that's an interesting story.

13:02 Mark: So you know what? I'm gonna ask about the sex scene. And it's left out of even the new movie. As transgressive as we can be now, but that it becomes like a sacred binding thing among the group of kids of 13 year olds.

13:15 Lucy: What do they do actually?

13:17 Emily: Like, I think they're 11.

13:19 Mark: Yes. That they're just. Yeah. Getting their first boners and period, you know, whatever that they all have. And this is so traumatic. They block it out so that the adult actors, like the adults in the story, are kind of remembering it in fits and starts. But. But it's an essential part of their binding to face the evil force that they actually all have sex with the one girl. It's like four or five guys.

13:43 Emily: Yeah.

13:44 Lucy: I found the book too scary to read. I didn't get that far. Oh my God.

13:49 Emily: Yeah. So I was like 13 when we filmed that. I hadn't read the book. I think my mom didn't think it was a good idea or something, but the boys had all read it. And so one day they called me into one of their Trailers. So we're all, like, in the trailer. And they're like, emily, we have to tell you something. And then they explained what happened in that chapter that they're like, yeah, so you have to sleep with all of us. And I was just like, what? I was very sweet and innocent. I. And so I felt, like, really embarrassed and just horrified. So I left. And then I went and I was like, mom, we have to get this book. I have to read it. So I did realize that what they said was true, but it was, like, very shocking for me.

14:45 Dylan: It's not clear to me in telling that story. Did you find that encounter, like, a bunch of pal child actors, that they were kind of teasing you? Like, oh, you know. Or was that threatening?

14:57 Lucy: Or were they being sensitive? They knew you didn't know and they wanted you.

15:00 Emily: I think they were really curious for what my reaction would be. Some of them were older, like Seth Green. I think he was, like, 16. And there was another kid that was actually 17. There was somebody that was 12. So I was, like, the second youngest one. And so they were teenagers, so they were a lot more worldly than I was. I don't think they were trying to warn me or anything. Like they were being sensitive. And I don't think they intended to be threatening either. I think it was just something that they knew about, and they wanted to know what I thought about it or if I knew. And I don't think they probably thought that the way they did it, like calling me into that small room with all of them sitting around. I don't think they really thought about it being threatening. I don't know.

15:44 Dylan: So it was earnest. You think it was earnest?

15:47 Emily: What do you mean?

15:48 Dylan: Oh, in sense of. Yeah, like, they genuinely wanted to know what you thought. Like, gosh, Emily, did you know about this? How are you thinking about this as an actress, you know?

15:57 Emily: Know. Well, I think kind of. But I think, of course, there had to be that element of mischief where it was.

16:04 Lucy: Yes.

16:06 Emily: They know that it's something that wasn't in the movie, it wasn't in the script, and it was something that no one was talking about, but they were going to still go ahead and talk about it. And there was something secret about it.

16:18 Lucy: It's sex, Right.

16:19 Emily: It's like something that, you know you're not supposed to bring up.

16:22 Lucy: It wasn't in the script at all? No, no. Oh, that was mischief.

16:27 Emily: That was, like, the first that I had heard of it.

16:30 Dylan: So this gets to Wes's point earlier, that sex is dangerous. Right?

16:34 Mark: Well, yeah. And so when King is including that in the book, is that him being a pervy old man? I don't know how old he was when he wrote the book, but, you know, being a dude and there's no way that a woman writing that would have ever put that in there. Or is he really getting at what Wes was talking about, the deeply dangerous character and how it sort of. The transcending of the taboo and the fact that they're all that young even kind of makes it more powerful in the context. You know, he's not thinking about little kid actors doing this. Is writing this as a symbolic evil versus civilization or something like that. What did you think of, like that as a narrative move?

17:13 Emily: Oh, yeah, for sure. I think that was the narrative intention, was that he was saying that this bond of friendship that these kids have is so. It's so deep. It's as intimate and deep as it's possible for human relations to be. And it does give them this power to stand up to the evils of society, like classism. In the case of my character, my character Bev was the poor girl, and, you know, there's the black kid. So racism is like, we're all losers in some way, we're all outsiders in some way, and yet we have this. This power to bond together and fight our own oppression.

17:50 Mark: So can we connect that to Lysistrata? So that wasn't just me being prurient to ask you this. Irrelevant.

17:59 Lucy: Sex is dangerous. Stephen King uses that because sex is dangerous. And he's going to step on your moral line. You know, he's going to find it in every book. So I think Wes is right. Sex is dangerous.

18:16 Wes: One of the reasons why you can't simply go into a theater and see, for the most part, into a typical theater and see pornographic sexual images, but you can see extremely graphic, violent images. Is that the violence, while it's gratifying, I think that's something we don't talk about a lot. But there's a reason why it's there and why you can, in the manner of a coliseum, you can go in and see bloodbaths any day of the week. But engaging in that fantasy, there's something less dangerous about that than if you were to go in and watch explicit pornographic images.

And I think part of that is that when you're looking at pornography that's an inherently sexual situation, you actually can be aroused and stimulated by that in a way that you have no control over, which we know can be traumatizing to people. I Think it's inherently invasive in that sense, in a way that the violent fantasy is not inherently invasive.

19:16 Lucy: When you combine sex and violence, it's the most invasive of all. And he, interestingly enough, Aristophanes keeps the two completely separate, otherwise one can't be the foil for the other. Right. There is no threat of sexual violence. Even though there's a horrible, lusty, creepy talk about what a nice ass she has or whatever, he does keep them as two separate things.

19:37 Wes: Yeah. Even to the point where. So the Greeks, the Athenians, will gladly wage these wars and die in droves over decades. And that's not really the terrifying thing. The terrifying thing are the women. They're so terrifying, they have to be highly, highly regulated and kept within this certain sphere and kept away from the political sphere.

20:00 Lucy: That's classic, though, isn't it? That women are intrinsically powerful, where men are extrinsically powerful, which is why women are feared for the way they bleed, the way they can give life. So they need to be kept in a certain place and need to think that all those things about them that are mysterious are gross and horrifying instead of life giving and power, because that would make women way too powerful.

20:26 Mark: Yeah. And so in the play, we do see these battle scenes, although I guess the women are. It's not like they're shooting and they're told, you know, don't pursue after the soldiers are defeated. So there's definite limits. And they try to diffuse. So they're pouring water on the men and then it turns, you know, the sexual banter, even though it's between these old women and old men that are both depicted as not really sexual beings or something, they're kind of making fun of each other's. Yeah, you're bushes. And can I get you growing? Like. No, I'll just remain limp.

You know what the. So the old men are impotent in the face of this. In the face of this challenge. And it's just interesting that the sex hovers on the edge of what little violence there is in the play. Like that is part of it. It's not just a matter of they come upon violent and then, like Helen revealing herself. And, you know, this is just one of the things they referred to early on as why the plan might work, that Menelaus, Helen's husband, when Helen was in Troy, she had gone to Troy of her own free will. There's battle in Troy, and Menelaus is going to go and kill Helen, but is just unmanned by her beauty, drops his sword and you know, love conquers all.

And that's not what happens with the old women. Men and the old women fighting. In fact, the old men, you know. And the same thing with the magistrate. He is unmanned, he's dressed as a woman. They do this weird burial ritual, but at no point are they conquered by love.

21:56 Wes: The male and female choruses do reconcile at the end. Right, but so it's really the final act, act four. It's the very beginning, setting the stage for all the other resolutions on 54 to 55, the men. It starts with. With the men's and women's choruses making up. And the female leader puts the male leader's shirt back on so he looks like a man again and not so comic. And then we get some of the further nice things the choruses say about give you money if you want it, come to our feast, blah, blah, blah.

22:27 Mark: There's that resolution. But it seems it's because they are beaten physically, right. Even though it's just water getting on them. There's also references to hitting them and things and that. We weren't exactly sure what was supposed to be going on in the battle scene. We just made a lot of noise. But it seems that, yes, once the violence is over, then the women use their womanly wiles, you know, such as they are tender, motherly wiles. Maybe it is to patch things up, but it's not that it removes the need for the violence in the first place, let's say.

22:59 Emily: Well, it kind of ends in violence too, because don't they carve up the body of the lovely young handmaid maiden Peace, the naked girl that comes out and is representing Greece? Don't they talk about cutting her up?

23:13 Dylan: They claim different sections. I don't think they actually.

23:16 Emily: No, no, no. I don't think they're cutting her up on stage.

23:18 Dylan: No, no, What I mean is I don't think they even articulate doing that. But they do lay claim to different portions.

23:24 Wes: Yeah, but metaphorically though, she is being metaphorically divided up between the partisan.

23:31 Mark: Well, and that's what you know. So some of these secondary sources we're talking about just the togetherness that they had at the end. And it's womanness represents the whole of the value of Greece that is there before being. Whereas just reading it straightforwardly like, no, it's this straight up objectification of the female form. And then as you're saying, yeah, I think a good interpretation of this for the stage is actually roll out a girl shaped cake and actually carve up the Damn cake. And have them eat it in a very violent manner like that would be completely within reasonable interpretation of the text that is written.

24:07 Emily: Yeah, it would be.

24:08 Mark: And then they whip the slaves.

24:09 Emily: Ah.

24:09 Mark: Because they're still. They're unrepentant. They're not. They're calmed down. They're made to be in peace by their own desires. But they're not any better people.

24:18 Emily: Right.

24:19 Wes: Well, I mean, that may be the best we can do, though. We rechannel those desires into something constructive. But the desires don't simply go away, including the objectifying element. Right. Looking at people's bodies and lusting after them. It's not simply something you eradicate from your psyche. And that this Dionysian festival is in part a celebration of that. That the play is part of the

24:42 Mark: script is also ambiguous as to whether the chorus sections at the end are still just the male chorus, which is the way we read it when we did it live, or whether, as is suggested by at least one of these sources, they're unified at the end. So it's the male and the female choruses are working together. So I'm actually going to.

25:01 Lucy: When we're.

25:01 Mark: Before we are. After we're done with the discussion here, have Emily reread a couple of the. Take one line from Dylan and one line from Wes. Because I like that interpretation better that the choruses toward the end are the men and women switching off, rather than it just being all men again, which is the way I just read the script straight up, that like, okay, now we're done with the horsing around and the women have had their say and Lysistrata is. Is being the mediator over this final peace talk. But it's still the men who are making the peace. In fact, the way it's written, like, we actually, on Bill's suggestion, gave Lucy the line. Gave Lysistrata the line of like, okay, now men, you've got your women again, everybody. But that's actually in the script. Again, this is Henderson's interpretation, not. Who knows what Aristophanes intended.

25:48 Emily: That.

25:48 Mark: That's just the Athenian ambassador saying that. That it's still. The men retain all the power. Very non feminist.

25:54 Wes: Well, the men, yes, do definitely retain all the political power at the end of the play.

25:59 Lucy: What would the effect have been on the audience? Would that be comforting, that status quo

26:05 Dylan: is restored of the play itself?

26:08 Lucy: Yeah, if it was meant to, well, amuse and upend things. In the end, it goes back to the status quo. So it's not really that revolutionary is

26:20 Dylan: it, Wes, in pointing out that the city at this moment is surrounded by Sparta. It makes me think of it as a kind of gallows humor actually that, you know, the whole idea of there being a Panhellenic peace in the shadow of your conquerors being around you would be absurd if that's the case.

26:43 Lucy: Yeah, I suppose it leaves it in their hands too, doesn't it? Now, over to you. You've got the ball. What are you going to do with it? Maybe that's the effect.

26:51 Dylan: Maybe a last gasp at what they should have done. Right. A kind of criticism of the current politicians who got them there. There should have been more Oikos in their polis, so to speak.

27:03 Lucy: Did Aristophanes survive the sacking or whatever you would call that?

27:09 Mark: Yes, yes. Because there are plays written after that that are not about the war anymore.

27:13 Lucy: So they didn't come in and just moid it everybody?

27:16 Wes: No, they didn't. Even though their allies wanted them to. Spartans didn't because of their. They remembered their alliance in the Persian wars.

27:26 Dylan: Yeah. And in fact, earlier on the Athenians had actually gone and totally destroyed island of Melos and had slaughtered all the men, enslaved all the women and salted

27:40 Wes: the ground, which was standard procedure.

27:43 Dylan: Well, but there was a big discussion about it. I mean, Thucydides renders that right.

27:48 Wes: Yeah.

27:49 Dylan: So I guess what you're saying is that the fact that the Spartans withheld was innovative.

27:56 Wes: I don't know. I'm going off of stuff I've read quickly. I just know that the Spartans by two allies were urged to do that to Athens and they didn't. And we're lucky they didn't.

28:07 Emily: Did I read in one of the articles that this was kind of the end of political comedy and then after that the genre didn't really thrive.

28:15 Wes: Yeah, this is the end of what they call the old comedy, which is this very bawdy, ridiculous stuff. And what comes after is what they call a new comedy. I guess they treat some of Aristophanes plays as what they call middle comedy. But anyway, like assembly women. But yeah, the new comedy is much more staid. It's not anything like this.

28:38 Mark: I want to just crank it right back to the modern day. I want to hear at least a little bit from everybody is all you need is love. Can we do. You know, there's just in fact a movie I'll put up the trailer for. Spike Lee did something about this Chirac about Chicago and the violence in Chicago and a character called Lysistrata you know, it's a musical with rapping instead of the rhyming that's here. Saying that this is very much, if not a realistic, at least a very compelling story when moved to the modern day. I have not seen the film. I don't know if it's good, but just the idea of.

We're saying that in olden times when women were systematically devalued. Still, in some of these olden times, they, through influencing the husband, they had their little place, but part of that place was actually indirectly having political power through the husband. Whereas now we still have de facto inequality, but we have in name equality and we have a culture of individuality. So that more. So I can see more men being like, my wife doesn't tell me what to do. You know, being kind of a little more. I don't know. How do you guys feel about just how this dynamic that's depicted in here?

Is it at all something that can be carried forward legitimately to tell us about potential ways to protest, to influence things, to do anything?

29:57 Lucy: Now I wish women would a little bit more band together and actively protest. And that might be something that the younger generation, we see it with Parkland and school shootings. You see a lot of young people getting up. You see young women entering politics, I suppose older women too. But I've always been really disappointed. Being a climate change activist. I hate to go on about it, but I cannot believe that mothers do not band together and protest loudly, riotously, because their children's lives, I mean, in our lifetimes, never mind our children's, in our lifetimes, there are going to be such catastrophes visited upon our children and grandchildren that mothers now ought to have risen up.

And I really predicted that that would happen, and it just didn't. I love this idea. Disappointed that it doesn't seem ever to have been realized. There was a little talk of it, I think, in the 70s, about some ban on sex, maybe the 80s.

31:01 Wes: A ban on what?

31:02 Lucy: A ban on sex. Like a bedroom strike or something.

31:05 Wes: Oh, okay.

31:06 Lucy: Remember, they made headlines only because it's never.

31:09 Mark: They were all on strike.

31:13 Lucy: They were acting locally.

31:16 Emily: Women's place has just changed so much in contemporary society. I mean, our women's place is no longer in the domestic sphere. I mean, most women are working full time and don't see their kids any more than the dads do. They see their kids mostly an hour before bed and on weekends. And most of the kids are in front of screens for that time. So motherhood has really changed. And I think maybe that's why they're too busy being good corporate citizens. Yeah.

31:48 Mark: There's still a multiplicity of different ethics and different ways of seeing male female relations that are kind of floating around, you know, so that you have these historical things that are still left over. So you, you have the, as you were saying, that there's no essential difference between men and women, but then I think it still is alive. It's not kind of what is the rationale for trying to get more women in politics, for one, like, because more women in leadership positions serve as models for young girls that might not have considered that an option. Like, that's a real thing. And then clearly it's not just any women. It's women wanting certain issues to be taken seriously. So having Sarah Palin, you know, or Ivanka Trump be the first female president would not do it.

32:30 Dylan: But wait, you got to be really careful about that. I guess it depends on whether or not you have this assessment, essentialism point of view. Right, but why does it matter if it was Sarah Palin or Ivanka Trump or whoever? Why does it have to be women who promote a feminist cause? I guess maybe that goes to the point Emily was bringing up earlier, that part of the question is the essentialism question.

32:50 Emily: Yeah, I think it's about, like, no matter how many women go into the. It's irrelevant how many women go into public life. It's about the feminine values, like valuing the traditionally feminine virtues and women's work, for example. So, like, if women are leaving the domestic sphere and if it's middle class white women going into the public sphere and bringing in women of color who are poorly paid to clean their house and take care of their kids and stuff, well, that's not progress. And we're still devaluing the feminine virtues, the nurturing and the compassion that it takes to raise children and the patience of taking care of a home. So, yeah, that's where the imbalance is. It's just that we don't respect the feminine.

33:37 Mark: But it still seems to be tied to having somebody actually of that gender as president, because I don't know that I found that Hillary Clinton embodied the feminine virtues as you were describing them, any more than Barack Obama did.

33:48 Lucy: Right?

33:48 Emily: Yeah, I think it's irrelevant in that way. Like, if it's a woman's body could be made to or could even choose to forward men's interests. Like, I'm trying not to essentialize. I'm trying to make, like the opposite point, that you could have any either of masculine or feminine Values in any body.

34:07 Lucy: So masculine, feminine values. That's a misnomer, isn't it? They're not masculine. You'd be better using Oikos and polis.

34:13 Emily: Right?

34:14 Lucy: You're saying it's not gender specific. It's not. I'm just using like identity specific.

34:20 Emily: Well, I'm just using the conventional language of feminism that's using masculine and feminine to indicate gender versus sex, which then you would say male and female. That's my understanding of the convention. Anyway, I don't really know, but we've

34:34 Lucy: gotten so much more complicated now that they need to rethink that.

34:42 Mark: So here's what might sound like an obnoxious question. Well, we feel like when there are people running for president or whatever, Barack Obama is just a objectively more handsome guy than Biden. So when you're thinking, like, who's gonna wanna vote for this person? Like, this is why people are like, oh, Tom Hanks should run, cause he's so. But with women, if you say, like, attractiveness should be a factor, then that's sexist. Right. But wouldn't you want to. Not because you think it's gonna be a more competent person, but because you think the more charismatic. Right. If Lucy runs for something, she's got it all, that she has appeal on many, many levels.

35:20 Lucy: So I don't know who this Lucy is we're talking about, but go. Go on with your story.

35:25 Mark: Yeah, it seems like there's kind of a catch 22 there. When you're marketing a candidate and you're thinking, not just who do I think is the best, but who will everybody else think is the best? You would just want the most charismatic person possible. And we're saying Lysistrata was in this story using not just her wisdom, but her charisma, her force of personality, her beauty, her Athenian beauty. So why would we not want to get. If we're trying to get a first woman president?

35:52 Lucy: You know what? Cause people are cringing about that. Like, we've got a new prime minister here. A good looking young woman, she's in her 30s, she's brilliant. But she was called My Little Pony by the former deputy prime minister, a woman who is also known as Crusher, which tells you everything you need to know. So seen as a way of devaluing women and yet of upping a man's value, is what you're saying.

36:15 Mark: Well, and maybe to answer my own question, I mean, as everybody knows that the standards by which male and female beauty are judged are so different anyway, that if you allow female beauty to become a factor, then like only the hottest, hottest supermodel would count. Whereas for men, like Clint Eastwood might even count. Like, there's such a wide variety, you know, that is allowed to be packed into male charisma, and then it's much more narrow. I don't know. Is that. Are you satisfied with that, Emily? That response?

36:44 Emily: Yeah.

36:45 Mark: Okay. Was that an obnoxious question? I don't know. I'm trying to relate it to Lysistrata.

36:49 Dylan: Well, the first thing I thought when you asked the question mark was that depending upon the characteristic that you're talking about, some of them are more potent than others, are more dangerous than others to talk about. Right. They're leveraged against individuals and against individuals as members of certain subjugated groups in different ways. So as we just were saying, one way in which you would demean a powerful woman is to talk about how she's beautiful but dumb. Right. That's one way you would do it. Whereas in our culture, it's just not as common that you would say, oh, he's really handsome, but he's dumb. The closest thing you would get to. To that, it would be like, he's a dumb jock.

37:31 Lucy: Right.

37:31 Dylan: That's the closest you would get to it.

37:34 Mark: George W. Bush was handsome but dumb.

37:36 Lucy: We said it all the time.

37:37 Dylan: Yeah, but I don't think it cuts as hard.

37:39 Emily: Yeah. Didn't stop Justin Trudeau in Canada. He was kind of constructed that way, I think by his opponents. He was somehow less mature because he's good looking.

37:51 Dylan: Yeah. So there it's playing to making him being a naive young man and undermine his credentials. You can't take him seriously. So I guess in that way they're all different ways of trying to figure out the characteristic to highlight, to undermine the seriousness of the candidate. And you end up picking stereotypical things about them and seeing which ones work. I just feel like the ones about looks for men, they get used in the case of Trudeau, but maybe it's just me. They just seem less potent.

38:19 Emily: They just seem less true to you.

38:22 Dylan: They seem to be less effective as a political weapon. And maybe that's just because that particular form of sexism against women just runs more powerfully, but you can tap into it more successfully.

38:36 Lucy: Hey, that's interesting because Jacinda Ardern, our new prime minister down here, she's such a rock star. Right. She might have seemed a little ambivalent about winning. There was a big negotiation with coalition partners because we had have proportional representation, blah, blah, a Few months later, she announces that she's pregnant.

38:55 Dylan: Yes, I heard about this.

38:56 Lucy: Everybody, including women in my area, because I live in a blue, a conservative area, was so down on her for not saying, I'm trying to get pregnant. I am pregnant. The second. Because she told. She only admitted it after three months, like most people. And they were like, she lied. They would lie. She lied. As if she had to tell them the state of her uterus because would you not have voted for her? This woman is brilliant. You know, she happens to be of childbearing age, but that's one of the ways that women are typically devalued is because you are a breeder. You don't get to go to work, you know, ever, until the children are raised or something. So anyway, people were really down on her for being pregnant, for not telling them before that she intended to get pregnant or the second she was.

39:48 Dylan: That's really, really interesting. Is it against the law in New Zealand for an employer to ask such a question? It is in the United States. You know, if you go for an interview, it's completely illegal for the interviewer to say, well, I see you're 28 years old. What are your childbearing plans? Right, that's. Now, I'm not saying that it doesn't happen, but it's actually illegal. It's not just unethical, it's illegal. And so I wonder if there would be a similar reaction in the United States, but that kind of thing. You should have told us. It's like going into an interview and saying, you should have told me you were going to have a baby before I hired you, because then I wouldn't have hired you.

40:25 Lucy: Yes, exactly. But their vitriol was what astounded me, even from, you know, like my good friends. I was really astonished at how. Because they just don't like your politics. Anyway, it was about using anything, even women against women.

40:43 Dylan: They hung their hat on that she lied about it. Or was it that she withheld something that they thought was salient? That was.

40:49 Lucy: I suppose so, but they're right to numbing. But do you ever know whether it's gonna happen? You don't know if she's had miscarriage or whatever. Anyway, there was. They were just hateful about it. And I was really like, oh, I didn't know people were like that.

41:01 Mark: It's surprising me that you're saying that even some of your friends, you know, in other words, people who would have been her supporters before, you're saying were upset by this.

41:08 Dylan: No, she said they weren't her supporters. They don't like her politics.

41:10 Mark: Well, so this is what I'm. There's always going to be something for the opposition to use against you. Well, the opposition is going to be opposed, like, so it's, it's not like I've just even lost faith in trying to appeal to the opposition. Like there's nothing being an extra charismatic person or whatever is going to do. It's being a charismatic enough person to get enough people to be excited to vote for you.

41:32 Lucy: You.

41:33 Mark: Right. I thought Hillary Clinton was a fine candidate, would have done a wonderful job, but did not ooze the charisma that Obama or, you know, frickin Julia Roberts ran. Like, imagine that she was, you know,

41:46 Lucy: as is what you're saying.

41:50 Mark: Well, could be a stately, could be Helen Mirren. There's a charisma that is related to beauty. Maybe not. Doesn't translate to. Exactly.

42:00 Dylan: Well, I mean, I think those two things are different, actually. I think charismatic and beautiful are different. I think charismatic probably is what gets you elected more than beauty. I think you could be beautiful, I could help your charisma. But there are lots of beautiful people who are just a total bore and uncharismatic. Right. And there are people who aren't very attractive in any kind of conventional way. And what you end up saying is that they're beautiful or you feel like they're very attractive because they're charismatic.

42:29 Lucy: Well, Trump is charismatic. People can't get enough of him on tv. Love or hate him, he's charismatic.

42:36 Mark: So is it sexist to say that Hillary was not any more charismatic than John Kerry and that's why she lost or that's why anybody who is not the more charismatic of the candidates. Often, of course, there were the exceptional circumstances in the popular vote and all that stuff, but one should try to get the most charismatic possible candidate among. I don't know.

42:56 Lucy: No, she had baggage. It wasn't.

42:59 Mark: Wasn't a matter of charisma and not very free.

43:02 Lucy: So she doesn't seem all that comfortable in her skin. I believe she is.

43:06 Mark: Right. That's part of what I'm thinking of is charisma is, you know, having a natural connection to people and being able to talk in a friendly way. I want to go out and have a beer with them. You're right. That doesn't translate directly to beauty, to fuckability. But it's a human relations issue.

43:20 Lucy: Yeah, that old thing.

43:22 Emily: Yeah. No, I don't think it's sexist.

43:26 Mark: Wes, you always have thoughts about Politics help us end this by saying something, even if it's Mark. That was a dumb thing to bring up. Why did you waste the last 20 minutes of our time? That would be fine.

43:38 Wes: Well, I think in the case. I don't know how to relate this back to Lysistrata. I think in the case of Hillary Clinton, there's a question also of authenticity and the extent to which people look like they believe what they're saying. So, for instance, Trump, even though he lives in a world where true and false are promiscuously interwoven, let's put it that way, that there is, it's just a big soup, that he himself doesn't really know how to make the distinctions. But if you look at one of his rallies, first of all, he doesn't use a teleprompter.

So he doesn't seem artificial, he doesn't seem rehearsed. You get the impression that he's actually talking to you as a person, to the audience, as people. Even if he's just full of shit and knows it or is lying or self deluded, whatever, it doesn't matter because there's that air of something authentic and connected going on. So I think charisma is a little bit misleading to actually think of this in terms of charisma. He's connected just in the sense that, right, he's cut off from reality, but he's grotesque. Also, it's a weird thing to talk about Trump's charm because he's actually a really grotesque person.

I have trouble even watching Alec Baldwin's send up of him on Saturday Night Live, just because it just captures the grotesqueness too much. It's no longer funny for me. But Trump himself, again, you'd have to look at one of these rallies. He just does a stand up comedy routine for an hour. He's completely off script and riffing. And that's why it's so easy to make fun of what he says, because it sounds so incoherent when it's written down. So my point is that beyond the charisma or beauty factor, there's something else. And it's a basic feature of the way that leaders and politicians can use rhetoric to sway people, which I think we sort of have lost the art of.

And it's not entirely a pejorative thing. When I say rhetoric, I mean sort of in the classical sense, a combination of being able to reason and appeal to his emotions, but also to have some sort of sense of authority in what you're saying, which really comes from this feeling that it's authentic and you can give that off even when you're off in La La land. And that's what Trump has, and it's dangerous. And that's. I think people underestimated him because they didn't understand that that's the way it works.

45:58 Mark: The connection to Lysistrata is that I think part of his appeal is his sort of charisma. He's playing off a certain trope of masculinity, this sort of toxic masculinity of the I'm the winner. Like, you know, he's a bully. And there's something to a lot of people that's kind of actually appealing about a bully, the bully that's the head of the frat or that's in charge in some way.

46:18 Dylan: If he's their bully, right?

46:19 Mark: Yes, he's their bully. And so the question is, if that is on the table for men, politicians can use that. And you could make an argument. I think Jordan Peterson kind of makes an argument something like whenever men are having a, a face to face conversation, there's always the borderline that things could get physical. And that kind of keeps things civilized, you know, that we're always drawing on whenever we're connecting to someone as men. There's some of this toxic masculinity, some of this aggression, some of this violence that's in there.

Well, Aristophanes is suggesting that Lysistrata could be a hero. Not by being a female intruder, not by, like Antigone and these other heroes of the tragedies who say, screw those female roles. I'm gonna walk into the male sphere. I'm gonna be just as assertive as all the men and I'm gonna change things. Not that that's a terrible thing to do, but that in this particular play, he's trying to give a picture of somebody who actually uses the cliche female tropes to get what she wants, that she's not ditzy, she's not drunk in the way that the other women are portrayed.

She's not foolish the way that the other characters are portrayed in the play. But she's definitely using. Using sex appeal as part of what she needs to get things done. And I'm surprised we haven't seen. Maybe there's somebody in the world stage that follows this, you know, a woman politician. Like, is that just off the table that they can't. Yeah, I'm just picturing a number of people very. Just whip smart and beautiful, like these

47:43 Wes: women in Can I give you a different theory?

47:45 Mark: Yes.

47:46 Wes: I think the dynamic with Trump is actually much more complicated. So, for instance, his grandiosities I don't think is well understood. His use of bluster for. And bravado and all that stuff, because it's interwoven with. This is part of the comic, part of it. Again, you should just watch one of these rallies in full. Lots of self deprecation, lots of, oh, I'm saying this to be a stupid buffoon. Lots of clowning. He's playing the fool very consciously and people are laughing. So I think of him as King Clown or King Jester for that reason. I think what he does is he actually connects the grandiose and the mundane in a way that's very exciting to people because their lives are mundane and his whole Persona is grandiose, but he's leavening himself with sort of the yeast of the mundane.

That's what he does to his personality. He did it in the Apprentice, by the way, as well. He has a whole shtick based on that. And similarly, I think you could see the authors we read don't think that Lysistrata is simply using her stereotypically feminine attributes to win the day. I think what she has going for her is this idea of some sort of connection between the way Trump connects the grandiose and the mundane, some really important fundamental connection between the Oikos and the political, that they're not simply these separate beasts which have their different functions and operate as different parts in the same car, let's say metaphorically, but they're so importantly connected that they can be out of balance, and the balance between them or the interconnection between them actually has to be restored.

And so there's an excitement. I think, also it's not just to the sexual element of it, but it's the idea that actually the sexual and the domestic and all that stuff actually is importantly connected to the political in some ways way.

49:44 Mark: Well, in the way you're describing, his charm is not just a matter of masculine dominance, but mixed with self deprecation and the sort of clowning that does make it clear why that sort of equivalent strategy might be off the table for a female politician.

49:58 Wes: Right.

49:58 Mark: Because as has often been said, you know, it was compared, like, how can somebody who looks like Bernie Sanders get as far as he is? Like, if there's a woman that looked like Bernie Sanders and kind of came across as your crazy aunt, like that just wouldn't fly publicly. Like, you have to be fricking perfect and have been Preparing for this since you were five years old and be absolutely phenomenal in order as a woman to be taken seriously. Whereas men have a lot more latitude for eccentricity.

50:24 Lucy: Well, I was just thinking, well, if Dr. Ruth in a younger day,

50:29 Emily: Gloria

50:30 Lucy: Steinem was pretty darn powerful, mind you, she was beautiful. But maybe it's not that. It's that women, if you are a authentic and you speak from your truth, then you're never quite flummoxed. Is it? Maybe they only think they can't get ahead by being less beautiful and charismatic and knowledgeable. You know, that trying to nail everything down and keep all plates in the air like Hilary tried to really diminish her because it kept her straight jacketed. Right in terms of her performance and her ease, because apparently she's very easy in the real world.

It was just on those stages, I guess she also thought that Trump was such a buffoon that he really couldn't mount a serious. And we all did. We underestimated the amount of help he'd be getting from Facebook and whatnot. I also think it's hard for beautiful women to stand up and be powerful. And, you know, they have to be courageous too. Whether you're. Maybe it's hard for anybody. I mean, women have a way. They could say, hate me because I'm beautiful, or they could go, don't hate me because I'm not beautiful. Well, we just have to eradicate that kind of thinking.

51:37 Mark: We need more women with delusions of grandeur in the way that men have that they're overly confident because they're too stupid and unreflective. Well, thank you so much for coming back. I'm so glad we had this mix. Seth was supposed to be here. He had a family emergency. I know he had a lot of interest things to say about this. Maybe we'll get to hear them in some other format. But it made it less lopsided in terms of the men versus women, insofar as that was relevant here. Next time we're going to be reading some articles on authorial intent.

When interpreting a work of art, do we have to consider explicitly the author's intentions? What the author thought that it meant? You can read along with us. The first essay is the Intentional Fallacy by Wimsatt and Beardsley. Then the Death of the Author by Roland Barthes, what is an Author by Michel Foucault and Against Theory by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels.

52:30 Lucy: Thanks, Mark. Thanks for getting us all together. Thanks for inviting me.

52:33 Emily: Thank you. It's so interesting all right, folks, tell

52:36 Mark: us what you think about some of this stuff. The both ancient and modern dilemmas here. Go to partiallyexaminedlife.com, you can comment on the blog post, you can get on our Facebook page and comment there. You can follow us on Twitter, you can comment there. There are so damn many ways to comment. You could send us emails directly. For our closing song, I had to go back to one of my favorite nakedly examined music guests, Jill Sobule. You can find my interview with her@nakedlyexaminedmusic.com it's episode 18 and this song is Women of Industry, from her 2014 album Dottie's Charms. So good night, everybody.

53:08 Wes: Good night.

53:09 Dylan: Good night.

53:09 Emily: Good night.

53:10 Lucy: Good night, John Boy.

53:20 Unknown speaker: Women of industry straighten your backs Pull off your skirts and buckle your slacks Women are purpose and women are means Women are major and kings we're here to do some yelling and this is the spelling A, A B W A V W A. Women a fit price, lot of our face captains of finance and not just the mates women of business come take a man's tie pull up and kiss him goodbye so cheer and raise a hand for whatever these letters stand for a b w a, a b w a b w a b w a gentility, civility, give us no more than a try ability, yes virility, yes a promise all makes if you wanna know why a b w a b w

54:56 Emily: a

55:00 Unknown speaker: b w, a b w everybody a b w, a a b w a b w a b w.