This week on Blocked and Reported, Katie is joined by Sunday Times columnist Hadley Freeman to discuss her departure from The Guardian; her controversial interviews with Judy Blume, Margaret Atwood, and Woody Allen; the parallels between anorexia and gender dysphoria; and a young eating disorder influencer.
Judy Blume: ‘I’m behind JK Rowling 100 per cent’
'Do I really care?' Woody Allen comes out fighting | The Guardian
Actors are lining up to condemn Woody Allen. Why now? | The Guardian
It’s shocking to me that so many women in their thirties and forties lived through ED and cutting in their youth but will not countenance the possibility that social contagion and mental health comorbidities could have anything to do with the gender issues in girls today.
Right, I wonder this often. I'm in this age group and cutting was *the* thing. Yet, there were zero kids saying they were trans. Don't they think it's strange that so many kids are now saying they identify that way...?
I have a lovely set of neighbours, kind people. They have a 16 year old daughter who is desperately thin, wears the biggest and baggiest clothes possible, tries to disappear into the background whenever you even say hi to her, and in the last year started identifying as non binary. Her parents very pointedly call her "they" whenever they can (which makes conversations extremely confusing if I'm watching the house for parties (as if she would!) when they're away). I feel so sorry for her as she just seems so unhappy.
I know that's only one anecdote but my couple of teacher friends have lots of similar stories.
The kids who cut are also the trans kids now.
Same same same as my small world. It drives me mad to be able to say nothing. But it is so obvious. They moms will see the picky food, eating, and recognize other signs but are perplexed it seems or enthusiastic about the gender or NB stuff.
But, you see, the rise in trans identification is 100% explained by greater societal acceptance, so we need not even ask about the sudden surge.
Amazing how quickly people can slot that answer in and stop thinking.
But they wont “be kind” anymore if they admit it.
Full agreement. I forced myself to accept gender nonsense for years, because I thought that's what I had to do to be a good person. Being gay, I felt doubly obligated to go along; after all, did I want to be a traitor to the community?
I now realize that I have no moral duty to accept untruths, but it was a long road getting there.
I deal with school age kids who are too unwell to attend school. It mostly used to be physical but increasingly is mental health. Every single girl in the past year on my caseload has been autistic with huge levels of anxiety and social phobia and all but one identified as a boy. Ages 12 to 14. It's really alarming. Many also self harm or have disordered eating. But they're just being their authentic selves, right.
The last time I brought up mental health comorbidities as a possible caution to someone on the left IRL, they were like "of course and all those mental health issues are caused by their GD and that is why they need help right away!". There seemed zero willingness to consider that perhaps the causation might be going the other way.
My relative was clinically depressed and also an alcoholic. Therapists told him he had to control his alcoholism before they treated his depression as alcoholism can cause depression. Why don’t activist even consider that treatment of other mental health issues should come before affirming care?
Alcoholism can cause depression, but also people drink to cope with mental health problems. If someone is drinking as a coping mechanism and you take that away without treating the other thing, they will either relapse or find another (often worse) coping mechanism. I think it's hard to determine in each case which problem came first or which one to treat first. And I think the same is true with gender dysphoria.
We see this all the time in the addiction world. People come in with a ton of psychiatric diagnoses but it turns out to be just (and this is a diagnosis in the DSM) "Substance-induced mood disorder". Or "substance-induced psychosis". Take away the substance and the problem goes away. But we also see the other side, where someone comes in with no history of mental health treatment at all and they break down crying immediately because of something they've been holding in for years.
Because activists want as many people to transition as possible. Because they aren't activists for human health and happiness, they're activists for transitioning.
As a sufferer of both those afflictions, those therapists sound horrible and cruel. It's not either or.
Certainly one affliction may limit the extent to which treatment for the other can be successful but we don't start giving diabetics medicine only when they get their diet under control.
There are a lot of people in eating disorder subreddits who also identify as trans/NB. Many of them claim that it is the root of their ED. It very well could just be their stress manifesting in two particularly fashionable ways.
I spent a year at a coed “therapeutic boarding school” in north GA—which ended up being shut down and having its assets seized and various other things because it turns out these people were not on the level; they were fleecing families and mistreating their children, but that’s a story for another day! Lol—and there were a lot of girls (maybe 30% of the girls there, or maybe even slightly more than that) who were there for EDs, cutting, or both. It was my first and still only firsthand, up-close experience of knowing people living through those things. And my God was it an awful, soul-crushing thing to witness. Those were some of the most deluded and broken people I’ve ever seen, and I have *seen some shit*. Most of them were very pretty, very sweet and good-natured, but they were convinced they were fat cows who wouldn’t/couldn’t ever be loved by anyone; they wouldn’t eat even when they were sat down with a plate of plain pasta or chicken soup or whatever and told not to leave the dining hall until they’d at least eaten SOME of it—and they still wouldn’t eat it (or they’d eat it and then immediately go throw it up).
Most—though sadly not all—of the women I knew back then are pretty ok now as far as I can tell, but man I bet they’ve got some fucking scars deep inside. Because frankly, *I* was left scarred just from witnessing it up-close for a whole year like that—some of these girls were friends of mine, after all, so yeah it was impossible not to get psychologically invested in them. I’m not trying to defend their denial about social contagion etc., but maybe I *am* trying to explain it: I think the wounds from that stuff are still pretty raw for some of the women I know, so I’d imagine coming out and “judging” other women for their modern social contagion stuff would cut awfully close to the bone; it’d be like judging their younger selves by proxy, almost, which I would imagine might bring those feelings back. And based on what I saw, one would NOT want those feelings coming back even for a millisecond.
I dunno, that’s my somewhat informed armchair diagnosis of that situation. But I’m a guy, so there’s only so much I can know about female psychology (which is to say: I can “know” what women are willing to tell me about their psychology). Anyway, I’m jabbering on too long now, but yeah, that’s my best guess on that. Curious if other people think I’m full of hot air on that.
This is why the gaslighting around the affirmation model was so important. The people involved in pushing youth gender medicine to the forefront understood that making trans an identity tied to gays and lesbians as well as making transition a necessary treatment to prevent suicide would be crucial.
Otherwise, many people would have made the obvious connections right off the bat.
I think it’s down to the changing social conditioning women and girls are put under. In the 90’s and 00’s eating disorders and cutting were framed as ‘bad’ because they were visibly unbeautiful in a space where the worst thing you could be was unbeautiful. They made you look ill, they made people sad and girls were never ever supposed to do that. Trans ideology is framed as the opposite- to mutilate yourself now means you’re Happy and Joyful, you’ve gone from being a problematic and depressed teen girl to a literal female eunuch. It’s been framed as a sure fire way to ‘cure’ yourself. All your scars are hidden, just smile in public and don’t break the spell
This is a bit of a side note but there was a dude in the mid to late 1990s who wrote a book about the increased incidence of childhood obesity and obesity in adults in the US. It was/is historically unprecedented.
He was doing the rounds promoting the book and he had at least two interview incidents where he responded, I'm not here to talk about anorexia, which impacts a very small percentage of the population, particularly compared to childhood obesity. He would ask why the media was so obsessed with anorexia.
Because ED/cutting weren't social contagion for them, they all just decided to do those things because that's who they really were and how they really felt, haven't you heard?
I didn’t cut or have an eating disorder either, but I knew girls who did. It’s hard to imagine that many women who came of age in the nineties and early 2ks didn’t know someone.
Hearing a child say "like and subscribe" is so creepy and dystopian.
Meh. To me, that’s just like school shootings. Too many to care!
The phrase "8-year-old eating disorder influencer" makes me hope that a large asteroid is headed straight for our planet
We’ve had long enough. It’s been a good run.
I feel like we jumped the shark a few years ago.
I just read that Bennifer might be back ON again? Somebody pull the plug!
They need to just make up their fucking minds! C'mon, guys!
Someone should give the Trisolarans our location. (Excuse the nerdy reference).
Huzzah, new episode! Watching that video of the mom in the show notes made me think. I recently visited a friend with a son who's about 12 and got to meet a bunch of his friends' parents etc. I was really surprised at how common the "picky eater"/"texture issues" complaint comes up. This could be biased/faulty memory, but I don't remember having any friends who were "picky eaters" and if my memory of youth is accurate, saying something like "I can't eat peanut butter I have textural and sensory issues" would have gotten you roundly mocked. It seems like the majority of parents I know have at least one "texture issues" kid.
Can't help but wonder how much of it is permissive/overly deferential parents who tell the kid that that's what they're experiencing when in fact little Jimmy just doesn't want to eat his spinach because it does not taste like candy. People can't have just spontaneously developed an aversion to perfectly edible food en masse in the past 20 years, right?
To add to what you said, it seems very odd that glamorizing this for the views made the child feel more comfortable. What is it teaching her? It's so odd that this "affirming" model is taking hold. The more this little girl listens to how she has this problem, the more it solidifies in her tiny head that she does. I understand it's probably tough but this is doing no favor to this child.
I think it’s relevant that she has an older sibling with autism (and food issues) who no doubt monopolizes much of the mother’s time and attention. The little girl’s food rejection may have originally been genuine or just mimicry of the sibling, but “now I’m special too and have so much of mommy’s attention” is a hard feedback loop to break.
I thought this the whole time watching the video. She’s glowing from the attention. This is common for kids, they want to be the centre of attention. Hadley’s comment about this really made me realise how important this is in anorexia
Kids also get these ideaes from each other. I had one that claimed "texture issues" at some point (middle school?) after an entire childhood of being a normal eater. I felt like kind of a jerk at the time, basically ignoring it because I'm harsh about people cultivating neuroses. I may have even rolled my eyes. At 21, she's a perfectly normal eater. I just don't get the draw. I mean, I hate the texture of bananas. Does it mean I have texture issues? I've never thought about it that way. I'd be embarrassed to say such a thing. I just don't eat bananas.
It’s so funny that you put it this way.
I have realized, after 57 years, that I’m actually a picky eater. I never thought about it before! I announced this to my mom, who laughed. “We’ve always known that!” She told me. She never told me, and I just didn’t eat stuff I didn’t want. More for everyone else!
Maybe it comes from being descended from Irish famine survivors, or living with my grandpa who went hungry during the depression, but complaining about the food put in front of you was a big no no. You’re grateful, you eat it, and you move on.
This was my family totally. Contrast with the way my stepsister was raised; she is 20 years younger. I remember we were driving to a steakhouse for my dad's birthday once and my stepmother announced that her kid needed to get White Castle because steakhouse no good for her; my dad managed to seethe with rage in a manner only detectable by his snappy retort "well there's a dumpster, why don't we just stop there." I don't remember if my stepsister ate anything that night, all I know is that we didn't go anywhere but the steakhouse.
Right, I don't like cherry/grape tomatoes..I guess it's a "texture issue" but I feel like that terminology elevates a matter of taste into some sort of disorder that must be accommodated.
I have found myself using the phrase "texture issues" more often in recent years to justify my dislike of bananas. As soon as I say those words, I feel like people are much more likely to think "OH, it's a real THING." Same with ARFID vs picky eater.
Yes. If you didn’t like what was for dinner you just didn’t eat. No one is going to starve themselves to death.
I'm just going to push back a little bit on that, Molly. Here in Denver we've had a huge influx of Venezuelan migrants, including little kids. The families have had to rely on food banks, which tend to carry wholesome but awful food, like canned green beans. Some subset of the little kids have wound up in the hospital because they just won't eat what's put in front of them, no matter how hungry they are. The food is so different, and so unpalatable, that they really don't eat.
But I'm mostly with you on otherwise healthy kids who are not undergoing the traumatic transition to a new country that doesn't have arepas but does have canned green beans.
This anecdote does not pass the smell test. I can't believe that that's happening without some kind of variable not mentioned here.
I found it credible purely because I sympathize entirely with little Venezuelan kids who dislike canned green beans. Canned green beans are awful.
I absolutely love canned green beans. But I don't believe any truly, genuinely starving-to-death child would not eat them.
I'm a granola crunchy gardener/pickler-type, but there's something about canned green beans that are just delicious. I don't know why.
The way to solve the problem: smother them in butter. It's how my dad got us to eat our veggies when we were kids, haha.
Well, it's probably fair to surmise that having been dragged across seven countries and the Darien Gap and pulled away from everything that's familiar may have been traumatizing and may have contributed to their difficulties with food.
That is exactly the kind variable I meant. There's a bit more to it than "green beans so white."
I have a friend who runs a food bank. Clients are recent immigrants from a variety of countries. My friend surveyed them to find out what they thought of the food and what they preferred. The overwhelming response was that don't eat canned food and preferred fresh. Unfortunately, canned food is what is donated and is of course non perishable. Anyway, my friend worked hard to get some semblance of what they wanted.
This story reminds me a little of the "resignation syndrome" phenomenon in Sweden.
`awful food, like canned green beans'
When did a staple like canned green beans become awful? A little olive oil, salt and pepper, with or without heating them, and you've got a tasty and nutritious side. I mean, if you boil them for more than a minute they start to taste bad but that's an issue with preparation.
Shout out to everyone who had zero sympathy for the kids who ended up in the hospital because they would rather starve than eat green beans.
You're assuming this is a true story.
It's also the abundance culture in the US. If you grew up in a culture where food was scarce or you had to grow it to eat or it was rationed, this just didn't happen. When I first moved to the US and people were saying, oh I hate mushrooms because of the texture, I was shocked, but then I understood it's a privilege culture thing.
As the parent to “picky eaters” I endorse this. We (as a community) give our kids so many snacks that they can afford to be picky. It makes me crazy. Then I’m made to feel crazy when my husband is like “they need a snack”
Well? They just had breakfast 2 hours ago and I want them to eat the nutritious lunch I have prepared so can you not give them the protein bar that happens to have a pile of sugar in it? And on school days, I send them a small snack and good lunch but school serves muffins for breakfast* and other kids give them cookies from their snacks so my kids don’t eat their lunch.
*in California, every child gets a free breakfast at school.
Yes, I could do things differently to make my kids less able to be picky, but I only have so much control over my children’s diets and it’s not the fight I’m willing to tackle most days.
This is actually part of the diagnostic process for this condition though. Lots of children with Autism who have it have to have feeding tubes and stuff. It can be incredibly intense. My little boy is really really restrictive in what he eats and for a year I just gave him what everyone else was having for dinner and didn’t make a fuss either way. The little fucker didn’t crack once and actually reduced his list of foods. We lost pasta due to me giving him some with too much going on. I discussed it with a friend who works with young people with eating disorders and she told me to just give him what he feels comfortable eating and his growth is back up on track. He is only little but listening to him talk about why he doesn’t like things is really interesting. The other day he asked me if the ham in the sandwich I was making him was noisy ham. Wasn’t sure how to answer that one!
Yes! There are absolutely kids who will starve themselves, the idea that you can just send the kid to bed without dinner one night and they’ll become perfect eaters is insane. Kids with legit mental conditions can have insanely high resistance and parents have to balance making sure the kid gets adequate nutrition (we always made sure to have either kasha or quinoa at every meal since we knew our kid would eat it).
The key with this anxiety stuff is that the kid needs to be firmly but compassionately pushed into trying new things. If every meal turns into a screaming match with their parents it’s only going to make things worse. The kid needs to be brought onboard with the program and to have good therapeutic help. It’s definitely true that there are parents who are way too accommodating of their kids anxiety but the armchair diagnosticians who declare “in my day we just spanked our picky eaters until they ate properly” drive me nuts.
My older son absolutely would starve himself- his food aversions were that strong. He lived on a very limited diet for many years. We figured out how to expand his diet over years but I just laugh when people say kids won’t let themselves starve. Most kids will not. Some definitely will.
A lot of parents threaten this, but from personal experience (as an exceptionally picky eater and undiagnosed autistic), they'll mostly crack if you really do just refuse to eat things you don't like, commit to it, and follow through. It's brinksmanship.
Yeah, I was very picky as a kid, and while I was sometimes made to eat things I didn't like, my parents mostly left me alone. My mother said I would just refuse to eat if she didn't let me have something I liked, so she decided not to worry about it too much. There were usually some leftovers in the fridge I could have if I didn't like what was served.
I hated things like deli cold cuts, wonder bread, hot dogs, and peanut butter and jelly, so basically all the standard kid lunch foods. My school lunches tended to look like a charcuterie plate— a little salami or summer sausage with brie or gouda, olives, and a piece of fruit.
Wow! Sounds like you just had really good taste!
Do you have a bad sense of smell? I have always preferred really strong flavors like that - stinky cheese, garlic, onions, don't care for overly sweet things like caramel - and as an adult I discovered that my sense of smell is sub-par. I assume the two are related.
My daughter is going through the diagnosis process now and she is very very "picky". Loves Red Leicester cheese but not cheddar. Will eat pasta with Bolognese but not consider any other sauce. She started eating burritos this year (but only if made with beef chili and rice) and it was a total breakthrough. She will eat raw carrots but not any fruit except raspberries and blueberries. Yet she loves olives of any kind but won't even consider broccoli or cauliflower. She used to eat curry but had it too often so it's off the menu now.
She eats a lot of boiled eggs basically
Yeah, it's so weird. My son will eat octopus, but not a peanut.
My daughter would only eat beans as long as she believed they were nuts. Once she found out, she never had one again (though she will still eat green beans). Infuriating.
This is really interesting, and makes me feel a bit jerk-ish for assuming my friend's son was just being dramatic and excessively picky. Is there any rhyme or reason to the choices?
This is a bit of a tangent, but my friend's kid is also really into abominable YouTube channels about fancy rich people that are basically just videos of 20 year olds getting into sports cars, eating at fancy restaurant, and buying expensive clothes and watches. I noticed that the kid seemed to like foods that were coded "fancy" like filet mignon, lobster, Thai food (which is definitely perceived as "cool"), etc., and the things he didn't like to eat all seemed declassé, poor-coded, or mainstream.
I'm probably overthinking this. But seriously watching 20 minutes of that kid's YouTube consumption made me fear for the future and be curious about all kinds of strange youth culture I know nothing about since I don't have kids yet.
I mean, being dramatic and excessively picky can certainly be part of it! But there are foods that will just make him throw up.
I really don't know what the connecting factor is. He loves tuna, salmon, octopus (Spanish ones from a tin), chicken nuggets (but only the ones from McDonalds), grilled cheese (how Dad makes it), fried shrimp (only from Culver's), PB&J, Doritos, and Cheetos. Won't eat pizza with cheese on it (again, has to be Dad's). Everything has an asterisk.
Yep, one of my exes was like this. He liked certain Chinese dishes, but only from the restaurant that his family went to when he was a kid. (It was a pretty good restaurant, but not the ONLY good restaurant.) There were other dishes he loved, but only if his dad made them. It made finding restaurants quite difficult.
Do you think this has to do with the little bits of peanut residue that linger in the mouth after eating them? I like nuts (and peanuts) but I can imagine that the residue could be an issue.
I guess if you need paint stripped, boiled egg farts will do the job!
That's why you have to not break, which is hard with autistic kids because their myopia gives them crazy unnatural willpower for a child.
It's not myopia-- it's that for us, the unpleasantness of eating (or in some cases smelling, touching or just being near) the food in question outweighs the unpleasantness of being hungry.
It's just utilitarianism with an unusual landscape of utility weights (which are, after all, completely arbitrary).
Or you could be like me and then stay up late and raid the pantry of cereal.
I would also like to push back on that. We all know that there actually are children who would starve themselves to death, children who need to be hospitalized and force fed because they have anorexia. If we can accept that children would starve themselves over body issues why would we refuse to believe that they can do it for other reasons?
Yeah exactly. People get super judgy when it comes to parents. I have two kids, one of them would literally throw up if given something that had the wrong texture until age 2 and yet is not at all a picky eater at age 5. The other ate everything we put in front of him until the age of 3 and then became incredibly difficult to feed. We keep trying different things and over the years we’ve significantly expanded his palate but this idea of “oh you just didn’t scream at your kid enough when he was little” is just not healthy.
The difference between “a picky eater” and an actual mental health condition is pretty huge. The older kid will literally track what you’ve touched and then scream at you to wash your hands if you touch one of the “bad” foods, similar to what you’d do if you saw someone touching raw chicken. That isn’t just being a picky eater, it’s basically a variant of OCD and the kid needs to be a willing participant in the treatment so having an antagonistic relationship with food and parents is not going to help.
FWIW I share the objections to this dumb social media account but I am 100% on board with this kids treatment, it sounds like the therapists know exactly what they’re doing.
Your last point is where I land and it disappointed me that Hadley (who I thought was a pretty good guest host overall) basically copped to thinking that the kid’s condition may have been a phase that the mom exacerbated or indulged despite the pretty detailed account Katie gave of what led to the diagnosis.
Would I be surprised to hear a B&R story where a mom turns her kid’s picky eating into social media fodder and lies about a rare diagnosis to lend the story mystique? Not at all. But that’s not what this seems to be and so there should be more benefit of the doubt to the parent, at least on the diagnosis/treatment front.
This was my parents rule too. If you didn't eat what mum or dad put on the table, you could go hungry! So, none of us four kids were picky eaters.
How did this work on you guys? I was/am very picky but we have 3 meals a day and I am not going to not like everything all three meals.... If I was so picky as to miss a meal, I can make it up in other places.
It worked fine on us as kids...I mean, we were never literally forced to eat anything we really didn't like for reasons of taste and were gagging over, but there were six of us in my immediate family and not a lot of money around, so food waste was a big no no. You absolutely had to eat your vegetables though, or no dessert. If you'd complained about texture I think mum would have laughed you out the room. We do all eat a lot of veg as adults!
I would have no problem not getting dessert to not eat my vegetables.
I have the same thoughts. One of my brothers is “on the spectrum” and another had sensory issues as a kid in the 90s (tags cut out of shirts, sweatpants only, no Halloween costumes, etc.) However we grew up on food stamps so there was no picky eating allowed in our house. You ate what was on the plate—canned spinach, canned beets, generic govt meat crumbles, etc. I remember a few basic childhood disagreements about food but never these meltdowns and outright avoidance that ARFID parents describe.
One theory I have heard is that it could be due to early childhood allergies or intolerances or even foodborne illnesses putting kids off of certain foods at young ages. But again, what has changed since 1993 that is functionally preventing kids from eating?
Also, very noticeable that ARFID folks seem perfectly capable of eating, essentially, junk food.
One of the most amazing statements I heard was a parent claiming that their son was an "extreme supertaster" and therefore couldn't eat chocolate. But he loves extremely spicy Thai food. But eggs are a no-go.
I was just thinking "oh my god the dog has trained you"
My BIL’s mom was a “super taster”. She worked for General Mills for a long time. Her whole job was to taste things!
Dogs are super smellers. It doesn’t make them not want to smell intense things. What a weird idea that mom has.
That sounds like a dream job!
I learned from her that Cheerios have that “almost something” taste for a reason. It creates something called “chasing flavor”, where you keep eating it, trying to intensify the flavor. You never get there, but you eat more than you would have if it had a strong taste.
😮 This explains why the proper mouthful of grape nuts is like 3/4 of a cup in volume....
My mom only bought grape nuts, bran flakes, or plain Cheerios. And we only got to eat them occasionally. At Christmas we’d get the cool flavored oatmeal packets, and we wouldn’t have to add plain oats to dilute the sugar. I became obsessed with grape nuts soaked in warm vanilla soy milk at one point (my parents went through a no animal foods phase). I also love bran flakes and plain oatmeal, which I’ve actually thanked my parents for. I have a weird love for stale chips because we only got to eat them with taco “stuff” (refried beans, rice, corn, choice between cheese or sour cream, and lettuce) so they’d end up stale by the next time. Drives my husband insane 😁
In high school, I'd eat much more grapenuts than that with some sugar and milk. I'd then have to poo somewhere around 2 hours later I school. We thought I was lactose interlerant but upon further reflection, eating several servings of grape nuts will make you shit.
I always think about that when I hear some of these stories - the people whose dog will only eat if they put the food in a certain dish, or at the table etc. not saying there aren’t kids with neurologic or mental health disorders who have genuine issues with food avoidance or rejection, but a lot of times it sounds like the way the issue is handled maybe reinforces instead of reducing it.
Being a supertaster is specifically about being extremely sensitive to bitter and sulphurous tastes. It doesn't really have anything to do with spice tolerance. So having issues with chocolate and eggs, but not with Thai food, actually seems pretty consistent.
I don't know if I'm a supertaster -- I love dark chocolate, so probably not a full one -- but eggs have always smelled like sulphur to me, even when fresh and no matter how well they're cooked. As an otherwise vegetable-loving kid, I hated cruciferous vegetables (broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage) for the same reason. I'm otherwise an adventurous eater and have learned to enjoy those as an adult, but eggs still set off my gag reflex as if trying to make myself eat something rotten.
It's honestly a bit embarrassing -- brunch gets inconvenient -- and not something I like to draw attention to, but the aversive response is so intense and visceral that it's not something I've been able to train myself out of despite occasionally trying.
I think your idea about allergies or intolerances may be part of the explanation. Not all food allergies are life threatening or even severe. Food allergies have risen in the US since 2000 thanks to the biggest pediatrician's group in the US telling parents they should delay introduction of foods like peanuts until 18-24 months. Women were even told to avoid these foods while pregnant. The animal and epidemiological evidence showed the opposite at the time, so I'm not sure why they made that recommendation aside from lingering sympathy for Puritanism. Not being exposed to soil bacteria and parasites also probably raises the risk of food allergies (and autoimmune disorders) and that may have played a role now that kids are spending more time in structured activities and less in unstructured activities.
What I find a little off putting is that, typically, eating disorders at their root aren’t *about* food. Being a picky eater is dramatically different than anorexia, and I worry that people are inclined to conflate ARFID (which actually does seem to be food-driven) with other conditions that have deeper causes. Maybe I’m thinking about this wrong though.
But think about the similarities: this child’s ARFID keeps the whole family focused on her. She obtains an illness identity, and everyone is dancing to her tune. That sounds precisely like an eating disorder.
Honestly, that doesn’t sound at all like my experience, though admittedly my experience is entirely subjective and based on unique and non-replicable circumstances. Personally as an anorexia patient I just wanted to be left alone, and that was a common thread among the women I was in inpatient and outpatient treatment with. But that was a long-ago era and different locale so again might not be representative.
It’s probably multi factorial, like most things.
I
I really remember going on a school camping trip and two of the children having a list of foods they ate including which type of crisps etc. and that was 30 years ago. I think we just have a name for it now and we are all just aware of the minutiae of each other lives because of social media. Of course that’s making it worse probably but I’m sure in 1993 parents were quietly buying safe foods for their children and not making a fuss about it. The autistic children I know who have this condition are both non verbal and their families are very offline. It’s just another thing they deal with.
My father was a picky eater well into adulthood.
He agreed to eat his first pizza in middle age when we were actually in Italy on holiday.
He was born in 1951. As a child he refused cheese, most veggies, baked beans… and loads more I can’t remember.
He doesn’t have any diagnoses. My nephew (his grandson) is autistic, though, so there may be something genetic going on.
Haven’t listened yet but I do think kids were always picky eaters. My own mom said I once said ‘I’ll eat it if you don’t make it again’. Kids have different taste bud receptors so don’t enjoy bitter tastes the way adults do. This is said to be why kids (generally) hate vegetables. I know I’ve also never liked the texture of raw tomatoes even tho I love the taste. Eating a tomato in a salad causes me to wretch. Whether that’s a gag reflex from some associative disorder (like the way the smell of oysters can make some people feel sick) or something else I don’t know.
I think now people are just prone to put labels on things whereas before it was ‘I don’t like it’.
I think your last sentence nails what bothers me about this - "I don't like it" is a me problem, "I have a texture issue" is a you problem that implies that you must provide me with something that does not agitate my serious texture based condition.
Mate, my ma was never providing me with anything other than the 10-12 recipes she knew. 😂 That woman had a full time job dealing with the very worst in society, her kids were getting what was on the plate and that was it.
Good point for my fave ‘it’s a you problem’ food story. University (london), going to Brussels for an EU institutions trip. All day travelling, arrive at this big city centre / conference hotel. About 80 students. Students had declared ‘regular diets / vegetarian / vegan’ (that was it - no nut allergy / halal / I don’t like corn options available. I’m sitting with a girl who is vegan. The waiters come out and serve the normal diet folk first - a slice of cold beef, a piece of lettuce and a slice of cheese. Shitty but the hotel is t going to care. Then they serve the vegetarians - they get the lettuce leaf and cheese. The vegan beside me gets the same, she starts complaining in bad French that she is vegan, can’t eat the cheese. The waiter looks at her, looks at the plate… just lifts off the cheese and walks away. Gal had a single slice of unseasoned lettuce for her dinner.
Yeah the idea that picky eating is some kind of new phenomenon is... bizarre. Nonsensical, really.
It's exactly the same phenomenon as people who want to gatekeep the definition of autism. "Back in my day, autism meant you were beating your head bloody daily! None of this social anxiety crap!" That kind of thing. The reason there are more people diagnosed now is that we're actually looking for it and have recognized that there's a spectrum of developmental issues here.
Don’t mention the A word…. It’s like beetlejuice to some round here.
Oh no-- I already did it!
Your last sentence is the answer. Everyone has a few foods they don't like and texture is a very common reason not to like something. It's just that now we have this quasi-medical label for it that's permeated our culture. Same thing with diagnosing people as narcissists rather than just calling them self-involved assholes. Language has shifted towards describing everything in medical and therapy terms.
As a child I couldn't eat anything with a jelly texture or fat, especially on a meat, there was always fat on it. Or anything like a pulled pork texture, meat strings. And I am 45 and grew up in Soviet Union where they weren't all that permissive. My mom once managed to buy a crab I think and it was a huge deal, but I couldn't eat it. There was some screaming and crying, she was literally trying to push that crab meat into my mouth, didn't succeed though.
But I did get over it, eventually, so now I am a vegan and never ever tried any seafood other than fish, so all good lol
I have a very strong aversion to bananas, as does my sister. As in we will vomit if we eat it. When we were growing up in the '80's and '90's this was a bit extreme, but we were allowed to pass up bananas because it if the kid is vomiting it's not worth making them eat it. Aside from that, we were basically told that if we didn't like what was served, we didn't have to eat it but we weren't going to get anything else. Some of this may be that people are more comfortable talking about food aversion. I also wonder if some of it is that parents didn't get the helpful tips about getting kids to try new foods and overcome aversion.
The other thing that may be going on is a change in the types of stress. Right now a lot of kids whose early years were in the pandemic (in the West Coast we didn't go back to normal until early 2023) and it simply wasn't possible for the parents to protect their kids from all of the social dysfunction in that time. There also seems to be a trend toward talking to kids about threats that are existential or far away rather than immediate and that may be driving it.
I have a similar policy with my kids: I try to serve several different items at family meals, and hopefully the kids will like some or all of them, but if they ask for food that isn't on the table, I say, "That's not on the menu." I do wonder if this approach--old-school and borrowed from my own mom!--might eradicate a large amount of the "picky eating" in the culture.
I say this with humility because there are other possibilities. My moody kid used to have huge tantrums around food that vanished after we finally got the mood disorder adequately treated. So I don't think pickiness is always the parents' fault.
100% right on that last point. I was a somewhat picky eater, but part of it was an extreme reluctance and resistance to one of my parents and refusing to eat new foods and having strong reactions to them was a way of fighting back and having some control. It’s not always about the food.
All of my kids have mild sensory preferences around clothes, which I accommodate because it's no big deal and I'd rather fight other battles. For their cousin who's an extremely picky eater (as in, the kid eats about 6-8 foods), I think both that the kid really does have sensory issues and that those issues can be accommodated and magnified much more easily in our modern American culture than they could have been even in my parents' childhoods, when groceries were a much larger proportion of a family's household expenses.
I did know kids (mostly adolescent girls) who were picky eaters when I was growing up, which is perhaps unsurprising, since I grew up in the heyday of eating disorders.
Culture can really exacerbate underlying tendencies.
I think that’s fair enough, but I have to admit that I grew up in one of those households where I hated eating meat, but had to eat it every night and eat it all. And if I didn’t like it, my stepfather would give me something to cry about, which is also a whole bullshit belief that I’m glad has gone by the wayside.
No I don’t believe in bending over so backwards that a household can’t function but being aware that food shouldn’t make somebody feel uncomfortable on a daily basis and there should be some attempt to be mindful of peoples preferences. I think it’s good thing. And I did have some sensory and texture stuff that made me really uncomfortable and I could never literally discuss it because it would just be mocked. I guess the thing is is that it wasn’t so great before this and maybe we should find something in the middle which happens mostly, just not on social media or in wealthy communities.
One of my closest friends has/had a daughter who is just rail thin and was always falling off the bottom of the growth charts and would just never eat anything unless it was just so from about the age of 2 or 3.
Eating there is always this weird production where everyone else is eating normal food and she is getting strawberries and string cheese.
And while on the one hand I can understand how when you child is eating so little they are unhealthy you are desperate to do anything to get them to eat. On the other hand how their whole house revolves around her eating definitely does not help the problem. I think in some sense they took a temporary problem and made it a permanent problem by their reaction to it.
When you say, the whole revolving around it and it was a production do you just mean she was eating different food? Cutting up a few strawberries doesn’t sound like a big deal if your child isn’t growing
I don't live there, we are close friends but I have eaten lets say only 20-30 meals there over the past several years (we live on opposite sides of the country).
No its not about the level of effort, obviously string cheese is easy! It is about how the whole house there revolves around the kids and their drama. Bedtime was this huge production with her and their other son, long past the time my kids grew out of it (my wife still spends a lot of time on our kid's bedtime, but it is a choice, they will absolutely just go to bed if you tell them to with no production and that happens regularly). Meals there always needs to be an alternate plan for what she is eating, or literally the whole meal needs to be crafted around her.
I think one time I was visiting I don't think I ever saw her eat one "normal" thing. We are having bread and green beans and chicken, she is eating cut up strawberries and string cheese. Another time we are eating salad bar and shrimp and cut up fruit, and she is eating macaroni and cheese. Or whatever.
Just a lot of discussion about her needs and her pickiness etc.
It doesn't seem like there is any unifying theme to her behavior than playing absurd power games for attention with her parents. And she has been doing it for 10! years. And now their younger kid is in therapy too and has an ADHD and other diagnoses.
I don't know maybe I am just blessed with sane kids, it is so hard to know. But I detect this real pattern among parents I know where the ones where they let the kids push them around, the kids are just a mess. And possibly that causation is "bad kids make bad parents", and it isn't really the parents fault.
But there is some decent part of me that strongly, strongly believes that if she had just come and lived with us for a month when she was 3 or 4 none of this would have happened because we simply wouldn't have put up with her shit. Kids live inside the boxes you craft for them, particularly at that age.
IDK parenting it hard, and it is dangerous to be judgy because different children are different. And yet I detect pretty clear patterns among whose kids are "normal" and whose are a "handful" (or in therapy at 7) and it definitely isn't about how conscientious and well adjusted the parents are. Or how nice or good of people they are. To me instead seems to be more about how willing the parents are to for lack of a better word "let your kids know who is boss".
Don't let your kids win a fight with you ever. It is fine to recognize your are wrong and apologize, to have them reason you out of your position. But they should never bully you out of your position, or wear you down emotionally so you give in. Once they understand they can manipulate you, you are setting yourself up for failure.
To add to this, I know many families who have dealt with weird sensory issues and whose kids have mostly overcome them by the time they are about 5/6 years old, and the unifying theme among all of them is that they never made it their whole personality. They just did the PT/OT/whatever kind of therapy and didn't adjust their entire family dynamic around it and their kids learned to cope and got better. I have also been blessed with normal kids and have a hard time judging families who haven't, but it seems to me like there is a sweet spot in between, "we just parent old school and don't take any shit from our kids" and, "little Johnny only eats buttered noodles and grapes cut into eighths" where the issues are real but can be overcome with a bit of outside help and no-drama consistency.
You have just described my parenting style as well. In fact, my husband and I used to joke that our friends should give us one of their sons (being a whiny, picky eater was the least of his issues) for a week, and we would return a new person. With him, it was definitely a way to manipulate his parents and make the household revolve around him. Fun fact: As an adult, he is STILL unlikeable.
My sibling is autistic and was an extremely picky eater growing up. Mom worked around this by coarsely chopping the offending foodstuff while meal-prepping so he could easily pick it out at dinner. As we got older our parents would ask him to try one or two bites of whatever side vegetable he had left on the plate before moving on to dessert.
I feel like there was usually a back-up meal to microwave if he tried a couple bites and couldn't handle it. We helped out in the kitchen a lot and I think knowing exactly what was going to be in a meal, and knowing he wasn't going to starve if it freaked him out, made it easier for him to try new things.
I feel like it worked well! He's a fairly adventurous eater as an adult.
I was an extremely picky eater, and so is my son. His friends seem to have no such issues. I think there will just always be some kids who are shitheads about food.
Now, I would never have him diagnosed with whatever acronym that was. I just get him to eat what we can and know that he will probably grow out of it, like I (sort of) did.
You also don't know what foods his friends obstinately refuse at home....
I just know I'd die of happiness if my son ate a tenth of the things I see the other children eat. There are no fruits or vegetables he will willingly eat, and he throws up if he eats rice. He's pretty much an ideal child in every other way though, so I guess I'll keep him.
Also just to follow up, I'm willing to admit that people frequently have "texture issues" with various ethnic foods - Konjac, the big chunk of fat on a caribbean pork chop, the weird bite of liver, etc., but that kind of stuff just gets put in the "I don't like it" bucket whereas the "texture issue" bucket is mostly comprised of foods that are commonly eaten in America.
Everyone in my immediate family has some kind of texture issue with certain foods, and yet I wouldn't describe any of us as picky eaters.
It’s probably not as black and white. I’m a moderately picky eater from a long line of picky eaters. My 80 year old aunt (who grew up in very modest circumstances with no candy at all) won’t touch tomatoes, cucumber, poultry or anything she’s never eaten before with a ten foot pole. She lives alone now and only cooks what she likes so it’s not a problem for her any longer. My wife, who would have met the criteria for ARFID as a child, had her restrictive eating issues beaten out of her by her (physician) parents. She will now eat anything but doesn’t really know what she likes any more and can’t tell when she’s full, so tends to overeat. So yes, permissive parenting does affect how we deal with it, but restrictive eating itself is definitely not a new phenomenon.
It's really cruel to tell kids that they "can't" do something because they find it unpleasant.
To Hadley’s point about professionals who have kids identifying as trans causing a chilling effect in their own workplaces about addressing the issue, I was recently told by a literary agent that he couldn’t ever represent me if I wrote a book about trans issues because he had colleagues whose kids identify as trans.
Really enjoyed that. I’ve always loved reading her whether in the Guardian or the Times, and she’s just as funny in podform. I don’t think I’ve ever heard her in audio form before. Nice to hear her voice!
I’m impressed that she can be so sanguine about the whole Guardian debacle - she was really screwed over by the management team who should have stood up for her.
Has anyone heard any of Julie in Genderland yet? It’s a 10 part podcast that’s just out, featuring Julie Bindel talking to parents, detransitioners and others. I’m 3 eps in and it’s eye popping even for someone who thought they were fairly well versed in trans issues. The overstep of UK social services alone ought to be a national scandal.
Had no idea this podcast series existed, thanks for the tip!
Ohhhh. That sounds fantastic!!
been saying this for years, adopting a nonbinary identity is just the newest way for girls to try to “opt out” of going through female puberty. i literally bound my chest for years in the early 2000s, i didn’t want breasts or hips because those things represented fat to me (along w everything else that sucks about being a woman.) you can see a lot of these kids have ED as well anyway, i really think it’s all the same root problem in many cases
Yeah IMO nonbinary actually makes a lot of sense when viewed as a way for girls to escape being female without necessarily committing to hormones and surgery.
Being fine with what happened to Woody Allen is probably my most divergent opinion from K&J on the pod. Dude is a creep who gives off the vibes of someone who would do gross exploitive things and everyone near him said, ya, absolutely it tracks. Sorry skeezy 80 year old rich guy, you have to retire instead of making another movie about an older getting with a younger woman.
Everyone's entitled to their "vibes," of course. But I do hope that facts matter more than vibes when it comes to judging other people to have done terrible things. Otherwise, we're all just religious fundamentalists or QAnon devotees by some other name.
He violated the rule about getting involved with multiple members of the same family. It’s an old rule, but a good one.
I agree! And (because) it usually ends in disaster. In this case it ended in what 2 investigations determined were false accusations likely coached out of a small child by a vindictive and abusive mother. Fortunately, it also ended in a long, happy marriage and two grown, healthy kids.
I’m old school, I guess. It doesn’t matter that it didn’t end up as badly as it might have, because if he’d followed the rule she might have been happily married to someone else, her mother would not have found nude polaroids of her on her own mantel, and Woody Allen might not be even now be being called a creep on a podcast comment thread (he’s a creep). He did a bad thing. I don’t care that it worked out for him in the end.
Considering that her mother physically and emotionally abused her, I doubt Soon Yi cares too much that she found those pictures, but I know that Allen wishes they hadn't entered the relationship the way that they did. I don't know if he's a creep, anymore (maybe he is, but absent evidence, we don't know). I don't think what someone did decades ago should define them if they don't do that thing anymore. The idea that "once a (X), always a (X)" is for people who don't believe in parole or the human capacity to evolve and improve.
It’s definitely messy behaviour, but as long as messiness in your personal life doesn’t interfere with your work and doesn’t escalate to illegality, I don’t think it should destroy someone’s career. If making messy, stupid (but legal!) decisions in your personal life is to be a career-ending sin, we’ll have to write off most creatives, artists, and performers.
I did not say his career should be destroyed. I said he’s a creep who broke an old and good rule.
Nah, like I said, not interested in your “well akshually” defenses of him. The vibes are backed up by a little thing called getting involved with a step daughter once she was legal age after building a career on self portrayal where of being a creep.
I don't think what they did was the right thing to do, but she was never his step-daughter. Not that facts would matter, as a devotion to "vibes" tends to deprioritize anything which might create nuance.
I dislike the affair with Soon-Yi and don't care that it's been 30 years. Gross.
That doesn't mean he sexually abused a child. Lots of people do some bad things but not every possible bad thing.
Listening to this podcast was the first time I have ever thought that Woody Allen may have gotten a raw deal.
I don’t think many people have ever believed the pedo thing. It was just too thin and out of character. Particularly since it has been wildly obvious since Manhattan that his thing is older teenaged girls. He was inappropriate with the actress Hemingway around the time the movie was filmed.
I just think going for the daughter of your girlfriend is gross, so it hasn’t bothered me that people have wrongly branded him as a pedo. But I guess that’s wrong.
For anyone interested, there's a very interesting, important, and relatively unheard perspective here:
https://mosesfarrow.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-son-speaks-out-by-moses-farrow.html
I've interacted with several of Mia Farrow's many, many children on various different occasions and they are universally very strange. I feel like no one has ever questioned how she's able to get an endless supply of kids to adopt and how that living situation could possibly be functional.
Moses Farrow's account should absolutely shame anyone who joined the mob to destroy Allen. Required reading.
I believed Dylan's accusations when they were published in the NYT, as did a bunch of my friends and family at the time.
Having read more about the case since, I think I was credulous and wrong to believe the accusations on the basis of a newspaper column. I bet a lot of people didn't read more and still believe the accusations.
I believe that Dylan herself thinks that it happened. That doesn't mean that it did.
That's my best guess, too. So sad.
Yeah, marrying his step daughter is creepy as shit NO MATTER WHAT CONTEXT. A good person would never do it- it’s like the Louis CK thing. CK is very funny and I used to enjoy his material, till I realised it wasn’t surrealist “what if” it was a confessional.
Mia Farrow was 21 when she married Frank Sinatra, age 50, in 1966. I've never heard of a woman gasping and fainting over that relationship. This is sexist hypocrisy.
Yes, but Farrow was a grown adult and not getting together with someone from her extended family. But that said, she’s been kind of inconsistent about her views on the subject, considering she was friends with Roman Polanski long after her accusations against Woody Allen in the early 90s.
Plus her own brother is a convicted paedophile. They’re still close. She never mentions that
And Farrow's long been a defender of Polanski as well.
Thing is, he didn't marry his step daughter. He never even lived with Mia Farrow and didn't have even a friendly relationship with Soon Yi until she was an adult.
I think it's very important to have a firm grasp of the facts if one is going to judge another person as having done something terrible.
They kept separate apartments, but they were very much together for years and years. They have two bio kids together! They didn’t just meet for coffee a few times and casually date.
As for a friendly relationship with Soon Ye, he regularly picked her up from High school and spent a lot of time with her. I’m sorry, it’s gross behavior.
I don’t give him bonus points for waiting until she was 21 before banging her.
The fact that they are still together could point to it being true love.
Remember Mary Kay Letourno and the middle school student she had sex with? They stayed together too, for many years, and it was just a testament to how much she fucked up that poor kid.
I don't mean to imply that they entered into the relationship in a healthy way. They've both said as much. I only mean to push back against claims that he's a pedophile. It was a bad situation made worse by bad, impulsive choices and I'm glad to see that their relationship has been better/healthier than most would have been in those circumstances.
He did get out, finally. What a thing to have to reconcile in your adulthood, as you raise the kids you had with your abuser.
There is nothing remotely "gross" about two adults, of any age variant, have a loving relationship. Your anxiety is Victorian nonsense.
Listen here bigot, you haven't considered power differentials. A man who dates a woman even a single day younger than him is clearly engaging in abuse! It's gross and makes me feel ikky and so that means it's bad. He has way more power and in a fair and equal society a women would never willingly accept this. The same is also if he earns a single dollar more than her and while I'm at it we should consider race too. White people have all the power so we can't just let them date non-whites either.
I think there's a bit of a difference between 12 (Vili Fualaau) and 21 (Soon-Yi Previn).
I remember Mary Kay Letourno and that in the end, they stayed together and even had a family. And, no, I don’t consider that a symptom of long-term damage, even if the circumstances where they first got together are rightly considered an abuse of power. But at a certain point, busybodies need to step the fuck aside and not second-guess other people’s consensual relationships or sexual practices.
They divorced and the husband gave a statement to People Magazine saying that he now recognized that the relationship wasn't healthy.
https://people.com/crime/mary-kay-letourneau-vili-fualaau-splitting-up-after-reconciliation/
He didn't exactly turn around and hate on her or call her an abuser, either. It sounds like a situation that was, to use Jesse's favourite word, complicated. In stories like this, many folks tend to cherry-pick out only the most damning details.
He had a sexual relationship with his son's sister which also involved cheating on his son's mother. That is a huge violation of family boundaries. Even setting aside the allegations of abuse (which are just about impossible to unravel at this point), that's behaviour that shows he has no concern for the emotional security of his own child, let alone anyone else in that household.
Besides the fact that the allegations of abuse were unraveled by two separate, professional and public investigations which both concluded that there was no evidence that abuse occurred and much evidence that Dylan was coached by her mother, and that the son whose sister he cheated with has a very good relationship with them both (see the link below), yes, he absolutely did a very bad thing 33 years ago, I completely agree. What does this tell us about who he is today?
How has Allen behaved in the last 30 years? The last 20 or 10 years? Certainly, no one here knows for sure, and there's been no evidence of similarly irresponsible and unhealthy behavior.
It's reasonable to judge behavior and actions, especially when someone is harmed in one way or another. But, *absent any relevant evidence*, I don't believe it's reasonable to judge the character of person decades after they behaved in irresponsible and even harmful ways.
Yes,those investigations did take place, as you say, but Dylan Farrow continues to maintain as an adult that the abuse happened. That doesn't make me jump to the belief that Woody Allen is definitely an abuser but it does make think, combined with his willingness to trample over normal family boundaries in a way that I consider abusive to his child, that he might be. I don't think anyone will ever be able to know at this point.
I agree with you that none of us knows how Allen has behaved for the last 30 years but does that really mean we can't make a judgement about his character based on what we do know? I mean, as far as I'm aware, Roman Polanski hasn't sodomised any more 13 year old girls but I still think he's a bad person.
I very much understand and respect your perspective, but I don't know these people, so I don't expend any energy having any opinions as to whether or not they're good or bad people. I only know what they did decades ago. This could be partly because I often work professionally with folks who have been released from prison and try to help them start over. I always tell them that I don't care what they did so much as I care what they're doing.
I think the very worst thing about all of it is that Dylan sincerely believes she was abused. I have nothing but sympathy for her. My opinion is that, based on the investigations and our growing understanding of false memory syndrome over the last 25 years (along with the physical and mental abuse endured by her siblings), Mia Farrow is primarily responsible for the pain Dylan experiences. Of course, I'm old enough to have been mistaken about many things and I could be mistaken about this.
"I think the very worst thing about all of it is that Dylan sincerely believes she was abused."
That's how I see it too, and however that happened is heinous. If the allegations are true of course and if, as the evidence points, they're untrue.
Well, if you buy into Elizabeth Loftus theories on memory, even a small suggestion that an event happened during childhood can trigger a false memory, never mind being raised in a family situation where you’ve been told since you were 7 that this happened to you. I’m sure Dylan Farrow believes this happened to her, but that’s not enough to make it an open and shut case, imo.
As to Polanski, on one hand, his victim, Samantha Geimer has long since forgiven him and wants the case dropped and the press to just leave her alone. On the other hand, there are several other allegations against Polanski, some for even a more serious degree of sexual assault than the Geimer case.
Sorry, but Soon-Yi is no victim, as much as busybodies want to force her into that role. That said, it was a pretty horrible thing to do to his ex-wife. I don’t think that rises to anything remotely criminal (though I suppose there’s a kind of victim feminism that sees hurting a woman’s feelings in any capacity as abuse), but I wouldn’t blame someone for seeing that as a negative judgement on his character. I also wouldn’t blame someone for being relatively indifferent - “that’s between him and his family”, etc.
Half agree. Do I think he's a pedophile or a criminal? No. Do I think he's a disgusting slimeball for cheating on his wife with her newly-legal daughter? Hell yes, and for that reason I have zero interest in him or any of his work. However, I understand that some people are able to look past that, and that's their prerogative.
It's reasonable to dislike how they entered their relationship (as I do), but I do think it's relevant that he was never married to Mia Farrow, never lived with her, and Soon Yi was never his daughter, legal or otherwise. I totally get the "creepy" vibe, and very much respect your prerogative to ignore him and his work. On the bright side (!), they've been together for over 30 years, married for 27, raised two grown daughters and seem to be very happy together.
Good for them. Still don't like him. I never called Soon Yi his daughter. Cheating on a woman with HER daughter is nasty enough on its own. I don't care what their relationship was like afterwards, that's creepy as hell.
Allen never cheated on Farrow. Farrow screwed Frank Sinatra and lied about the pregnancy. She was, and still is, despicable. Woody Allen is still a genius with a wife who loves him dearly.
Yes, he did. The divorce was initiated after the affair came to light. And I never defended Mia Farrow or her cheating. What she did was wrong, too, but not as wrong as banging your girlfriend's daughter. Come the hell on.
Yeah, I think trying to figure out who in the Farrow-Allen relationship was a better person morally is kind of a bum angle.
Woody Allen makes better movies so I like him more.
Sadly he hasn't made a great movie since, I'd say, Manhattan Murder Mystery
I think they were both pretty messed up in their own way and it’s questionable whether they were fit to raise a family. That said, being a train wreck in your personal life isn’t enough for me to judge someone negatively as an artist. In fact, “Husbands and Wives” is a good example of a great film coming out of bad personal circumstances.
I don’t consider “creepy” to be a serious moral judgement. I only judge someone if they’ve crossed the line into real abuse.
Your standards are different than mine, and that's fine if it works for you. Avoiding "creepy" men is a survival skill for women, I don't expect you to understand.
It's not looking past it exactly. I think it's more not making it a central focus.
A good friend's parents married when the mom was pregnant at 15. Did I judge her dad harshly when I learned he was 21 at that wedding. Yes, I did (as did most of our friends, and my friend and her siblings for a limited time). But at some point, defining someone by a terrible wrong, rather than what's in front of you (in my friend's parents case, the best 50+ year marriage I ever knew), is a big miss.
Here’s my take: the way Woody talks about the beginning of his relationship with Soon Yi, including the things she supposedly said to him, doesn’t past the smell test based on what is publicly known about her.
Frankly, it reminds me a lot of how men who’ve been caught with underage girls talk about their relationships, using phrases like, “she was the aggressor, she came on to me” and “she’s not what everyone thinks, she’s so smart and mature”. It also feels like a vibe of facilitated communication (see previous the BARpod episode or the Netflix documentary “Tell Them You Love Me” for details), where the person supposedly speaking sounds identical to the person transcribing the quote. The Soon Yi in Woody’s recollecting sounds a lot like Woody.
Here are some excerpts from his autobiography that dip into what I’m talking about: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/woody-allen-soon-yi-previn-affair-memoir-220941443.html
The fact is, Woody met Soon Yi when she was age 7, not when she was 21. They’ve stated that their relationship began when she was in college, that he never realized he was attracted to her before then, that he was barely in her life at all! Okay. Just as many people look at the court records of the Dylan’s/Mia’s accusations with a skeptical eye, I’m extremely skeptical about Woody’s self reporting here.
I don’t think Woody is a pedophile, for what it’s worth. But I do think he’s demonstrated that he’s potentially an opportunistic abuser based on the Soon Yi stuff.
I also don’t think we can draw conclusions that their relationship is a beautiful love story just because of the length of their marriage, as another poster already pointed out, Mary Kay Letourneau stayed married to Vili Fualaau for 14 years. These kinds of relationships with epic power imbalances can be a complete mind fuck for the younger/less powerful people involved.
All that to say, I hope that I’m wrong and Woody has never touched a younger girl since he’s been with Soon Yi, and that his daughters are safe and happy.
It doesn’t track, though, because there was never any evidence, there were two official investigations, there is also no indication he had pedophilic tendencies that surfaced with any other young person. Yes, the Soon-Yi thing was hurtful, improper, icky… but it was not child rape, and it was not illegal.
“…and everyone near him said, ya, absolutely it tracks…”
http://mosesfarrow.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-son-speaks-out-by-moses-farrow.html?m=1
Why are so many Americans turning in sex-phobic prudes? Allen is a hardworking genius who deserves all the love he receives from his wonderful wife, Soon-Yi.
I wish Substack had a dislike button
The thing is they're not really sex-phobic per se. If this guy had a gay relationship with a male with a similar age gap, the same people losing their minds over this would be totally fine with it. Or if he was in a polycule.
In part because this board is in the “gender-critical” orbit, hence radical feminist views about sexuality, which are prudish as all getup, are commonplace here. Albeit, ”TERF Island” Brits can easily out-prude Americans, with fewer barriers for calling in the state to intervene in matters of private morality.
Yeah , he still fucked his stepdaughter (a child found living on the street at age 7 and then adopted by a crazy lady) and took pornographic pictures of her while he was still married to that crazy lady. So yeah, he didn’t have to touch Dylan for me to think he’s morally repugnant and is mostly suffering the consequences of his actions.
I think what they did at the beginning of their relationship was wrong. So do they. And, for clarity, she was never his stepdaughter and he was never married to Farrow and they never lived together and he never spent the night at their home.
Doing something morally repugnant decades ago doesn't mean that person is still morally repugnant, especially absent any evidence whatsoever that the repugnant behavior continued.
ThEY wErEN’T mArRiEd. Allen is the legal father to three children with Farrow. He came to the house every day, many days at 6:30 am with breakfast. They were partners for 10 years. Call that what you will. I’ve read everything you have posted and years ago at that. Sometimes they say the relationship didn’t start until she was 21, but other times they say she was 19. And Soon Yi says that he pursued her and that is what she liked, “feeling wanted”. What he did wasn’t illegal. I watched an episode of that HBO show about the whorehouse in Nevada. The main pimp had a girl there the night before her 18 th birthday. He fucked her at midnight and put her to work the next day. Also not illegal. Soon Yi was a street urchin adopted by an abusive woman. Allen did nothing to stop the abuse, but started fucking her when she was 19.
It’s fine that you are ok with it and it’s fine that others are not. That’s one thing about tolerance- you have to tolerate people not agreeing with your moral judgments.
He is living with the fallout of his choice. It wasn’t an illegal choice, but people don’t have to condone it even though you do.
And I still watch woody Allen movies AND I lose no sleep for what he has gone through. Not a miscarriage of justice. Crazy abusive woman he didn’t protect his kids from comes for him and he suddenly cares about her victims. Both he and Farrow reaped what the sowed.
That's a long response when I've only corrected your factual misstatements and I've said (repeatedly) what he did was wrong. No matter how wrong it was and whether or not he deserved professional consequences for that bad behavior, my primary points are that we don't know what kind of a person he is now, decades later, and that it's wrong to accuse someone of pedophilia and child sexual abuse when there's no evidence for it. Pretty simple, really.
This sounds like the same bullshit that leads people to excusing Polanski. There are levels to past behavior, and his was pretty damn low.
Considering I don't excuse Allen for his bad behavior, I don't know how that could lead to excusing Polanski's much worse behavior.
Again, my only points are that what he did was bad (no excusing!), but we don't know what know what kind of person he is today, and there's no evidence that he's a pedophile. That's it, pretty simple.
And let’s leave soon Yi aside. Allen had three children he was a father to. When he had the affair with Soon Yi there was no other possible outcome than his relationships with those children exploding. Imagine if your father chose fucking your sister over exiting his relationship with your abusive mother in a clean way. There is no way that you fuck a woman’s daughter and then you have a functioning co-parent relationship afterwards. No way, and especially if the woman is already abusive to the kids, forget it. He thought shit all about the three kids he was most definitely responsible for. He didn’t care what this crazy woman would do to those kids. The situation itself violated all sorts of family boundaries apart from whether or not he was technically Soon Yi’s step dad. All of the other kids, Dylan, Ronan. It was a massively destructive thing to do. Farrow is also of course responsible. She is just as responsible for everything that happened to those kids. But they both did and it left a stink on them. When we shit the bed it stinks.
I'm with you.
Have to kind of agree. I felt dirty watching "Allen v. Farrow" and chose to turn it off, as I felt like it was too much of other people's he said/she said business, given what came of the investigations. And while I do think it's sleazy to cheat on your partner with her daughter, I don't think it's body-of-work cancel-worthy. But I also think it's obvious he's been somewhat of an "uncomfortable lecher" since "Manhattan." And the movie in which Larry David was him by proxy was even worse.
Yeah finding out about that made me have to unsubscribe. There’s a hell of a lot wrong with that man than just being “kinda creepy”. I’d argue that the people who defend him are the ones going mostly off vibes.
Nobody defends how he entered into the relationship with Soon Yi. What he deserves to be defended from are accusations of pedophilia. It's not "vibes" that support that defense, but rather two professional, public investigations that found no evidence that Dylan was abused and evidence that she was coached to make the accusations by her mother.
I'm totally with Hadley on not putting kids on the public Internet. The obvious way the mom *could* incentivize her kid to eat on video would be to record the videos and either not post them at all or post them on a private account for family and close friends.
I have a ton of videos of my kids on my phone going back years, and some of my kids really enjoy watching themselves on video. Grandparents like the videos, too. Kids can get the pleasure of their little performances without being told to read scripts so videos can be posted publicly and their PARENTS' accounts can go viral.
By the way, there are already professionals who work with kids with ARFID, so I definitely wouldn't buy the argument that parents need ARFID influencers in order to help their kids eat.
I'll add one further concern I have, as a non-expert in ARFID: After a parent in my extended family announced that her kid, who has always had serious eating issues, had gotten an ARFID diagnosis, I looked up the diagnostic criteria. They include this criterion: "The eating disturbance is not attributable to a concurrent medical condition or not better explained by another mental disorder." The child in question in my family also has symptoms of mild autism (on the end of the spectrum we used to call Asperger's), which is also often associated with extreme pickiness about food. I genuinely don't know whether ARFID or ASD is a better Dx for this particular child and defer to the parents and professionals involved.
But a worry I have about putting ARFID into online influencer circles is that parents concerned about their children may not be able to discern which diagnosis is most appropriate, and if they guess wrong, some children may not have all of their symptoms addressed.
My first thought listening to this without having seen the visual was "let me guess, the mom is conventionally attractive."
It's the opposite, the ARFID influencers will reify their children's decision to not eat.
That girl may genuinely have ARFID through no fault of anyone, and this might actually be the best therapy for her, and I’d still believe her mother is a terrible person and I’d still believe her mother is a terrible person for turning her daughter into an influencer, as opposed to having a private account. Social media is just not safe for young children and there’s no way the mom hasn’t figured that out by now even if she didn’t realize initially.
Nobody mentioned this, and I'm wondering if I should, but here goes:
I'm suspicious about the audience who likes to watch little girls eat pickles. I know there's a massive "feeder" comminity on OnlyFans, etc, who pay to watch fat nude women eat an entire choclocate cake, bucket of chicken, etc. I just can't help but think a significant portion of her audience is getting off on this.
Sadly that was my first thought too. I'd never put images of my kids online - doing anything.
Thanks for that thought (you’re not wrong though)
I have ARFID that i work very consciously through, and the mere fact that she took bites of the pickle is seriously so so so good. I often have to be drunk to get myself to try things for the first time. I only start to appreciate food the 2nd or 3rd go around. It's a huge win that they found a way to get her to take this first step, which is by far the scariest, ESPECIALLY for a child that young, and with a food that is both moist and strong-smelling. What a great, positive thing!
But why on earth isn't her insta account private? Why would you choose to add on that additional layer of public scrutiny? How is this young child going to process that as she grows up? Hello, my mom put my personal struggles on display for thousands of strangers before I could understand the repercussions! It's like trading one problem for another.
Hannah and her mother seem like a combination of Munchausen-by-proxy meets Munchausen-by-internet. Mom has crazy eyes, I feel like she's behind all of this. I think the story about her having ARFID as a toddler is baloney. I think she was just a picky eater, and that mom enabled and pathologized it until it truly did become ARFID. Also, toddlers don't "enjoy being on camera"; they enjoy the praise and attention their parents give them while they're filming.
Ok there is something deeply disturbing and unsettling listening to that little girl's food reviews and motivational content - it sounds scripted, unnatural, and exploitative.
It was absolutely scripted. Didn’t she score the pickle 4.8 out of 10? That’s not eight year old behaviour.
The language about “journeys” and so forth was incredibly therapeutic and scripted. I honestly think this might be the darkest thing I’ve ever heard on the pod.
I agree. I work in an elementary school, and the way this girl spoke just raised red flags for me.
Is the author David Sedaris? I know Hadley’s interviewed him.
I was wondering that! He's coming to my tiny Utah town in November, and I'm paying an exorbitant amount to see him. Would be nice to know it's going to a fan.
It’s probably the best exorbitant amount of money you’ve ever spent. To be able to hold 2000 people in raptured silence while reading alone on a stage is something I never thought I’d see.
It was worth it last time I saw David Sedaris. He’s still a smart cookie. Felt like there were some layers of meaning. He took some random questions at the end too. OH. And he worse these super cool Japanese style pants. Some gender people would see it as a skirt, but he just said they were comfortable.
Hmm, so I could ask "hey, what's your favorite podcast?"
Wore not worse, my autocorrect is confused.
Logan? Not so tiny, especially when you consider how many `cultural' activities there are! Would agree that the dining options are rather limited for a town that size, though.
(I lived there for years and am going back soon for work.)
I got free tickets to see him like 15 years ago! Not a rock concert or anything, but it was fun.
My guess too.
This was also my guess!
That was my guess.
Ohh good guess!
My guess was Jon Ronson, but Sedaris does seem more plausible.
So not J. K?
She said it was a very funny author, and while Rowling has bits of humor, that’s not what she’s really known for. And Sedaris seems like exactly the kind of humor Katie would adore.
And they’re both from North Carolina. I can see her being a big Sedaris fan.
Great episode, love Hadley, appreciated her book very much! But I take issue with something she says about anorexia, something she also says in her book. She stated early in the episode that anorexia is always about not wanting to grow up to be a woman, not wanting to separate from mom. It's not always. I am sure it is that for many girls/women, and maybe its a generational thing (I was anorexic at the end of the 70's/early 80's), but for me it was a murky soup of wanting to be thin like all the magazines, TV shows and movies told me I should be to be an attractive woman (it was like I thought I couldn't be a woman if I wasn't thin); wanting to get my mother's approval (she was a hostile, angry person who rode me from 1st grade on about my body); and equating success and love with being thin. I knew I had to separate from my mom cuz I was sure she had it in for me, and I left home at 19, right in the middle of my first stage of recovery. I couldn't wait to get away from her and to get out in life with my new thin, very under control body. Unfortunately, I was 25 lbs underweight and had to stop starving myself, had to find a new way to relate to food. Living on my own was tough at that time, but it allowed me the space to figure some things out for myself.
Being able to go without eating made me feel euphorically in control and - not proud of this - superior over others who had the nasty, dirty habit of eating 3 times a day. And I got SO MUCH positive feedback when I started to lose weight - from family and friends. It was a very broken way of thinking and behaving, and I am so lucky that I found a way to stop without doing any lasting damage to my body. But I continued to have the thinking and anxiety around food and it took a long time to figure out how to eat and live. And it didn't help that I left home to go to NYC to study acting - physical scrutiny at auditions did not help the healing process. I still struggle a little today, but at 63, I remind myself that it no longer matters because no one is scrutinizing me. And my mother passing away last year took a huge thick layer of this off of me.
Interestingly, when the anorexia failed, i.e. I had to stop, I realized that I wasn't so much trying to get my mother's approval after all: I was actually trying to prove her wrong, probably so I could separate from her more easily. But the habits that came out of years of self-imposed starvation and body distortion had taken hold and its taken the rest of my life to recover.
I found out in my 30s that my mother had been anorexic in college. And she repeated that at the end of her life, starving my Dad at the same time. He was nosediving into Alzheimers at the time so he couldn't really recognize what was happening. When I got up to see them right before she passed, he was easily 20lbs underweight.
It's definitely a mental disease of control - a form of OCD - and certainly with the ubiquity of online porn, hook up culture, social media hyper-sexuality with all of the body enhancements that are so normalized now, I can see how it is now a reaction to not wanting to grow up to be a woman. But that wasn't my experience or motivation at all. Maybe that is what saved me from the worst of it.
I agree that her description didn’t exactly match my experience either, but I got the sense it came from her analysis of her own situation after the fact rather than her felt experience at the time (maybe I’m wrong here though).
1000% agree about the anorexia/OCD connection. To be honest, I think the OCD piece is what connects EDs with the trans stuff (in addition to the autism connection). But I also wonder how much of these diagnoses are expressions of the same underlying cause.
Yes, a very personal analysis that is not universal.
I have read one memoir of anorexia (only because it was the only other work by an author who wrote a novel I thought was brilliant). She describes it more likely you than Hadley. She was a high achiever who suddenly found it harder to be "best" at the things she had been best at before (to be clear she wasn't failing, just not being quite as high ranking over her peers). She found that she could be best at being thin.
The anorexia recovery process for my daughter, now 16, became easier in my household after I read Hadley's book. I have never struggled with any ED's but my husband did when he was young and his mom was a big part of that. The OCD connection was a revelation for me as was the competition to be be the sickest. It changed my communication with my kid and she appreciated that I recognized these aspects of her behavior because it was frustrating for her that people always assumed it was a desire to be thin/society pressure yadda yadda. There are aspects of the book that don't describe our experience, but I am really grateful for her account. It shed a lot of light for me and helped me course correct on some wrong assumptions.
I'd have to relisten, but I thought Hadley said that anorexia was "almost always" wanting to escape from womanhood (but not, like, 100% that).
Maybe I misheard her but I don't think so because she says it in the book that way, too, and that is why it struck me when she said it here. I know she has done a lot of research on this and it is likely that her experience is much more indicative of what EDs are experiencing now but just came here to say that its not a one size fits all. If I had not been anorexic myself I probably wouldn't have noticed it but it was really jarring to read and then hear her say again that we all just want to not grow into womanhood and leave our moms. No group is that homogeneous.
I actually think the most important line of the episode is where Katie is talking about how when she was in high school being trans "wasn't a thing".
Obviously, there were a few people with lifelong gender issues in any era of history. But it's easy to forget how recently this whole subject wasn't a social or political issue at all.
Yeah… I’m friends with a trans woman who says to her knowledge she was the first out “trans youth” in our local school district. She’s 37.
So in the same age ballpark as J&K. And a lot of the community here, myself included.
I went to a 2000-person high school that was racially and economically diverse and was a special ed center as well and had a lot of students with complex medical issues. I worked in the counseling office for a year because I ran out of classes to take so I saw a lot of people. No one ever discussed this concept in my school.
I was a psych major in college. We covered John Money and the Johns Hopkins case where a boy with a botched circumcision was raised as a girl (and ultimately committed suicide). The idea that someone could intentionally try to change their gender presentation through surgery was never mentioned. I took psychology of women, women's history, and other women's studies courses. I took neuroscience and physiology and covered endocrinology. I went to my aunt's gay commitment ceremony before gay marriage was created. I went to Capitol Hill occasionally to advocate for a variety of left wing causes, including gay rights. Never heard the word transgender or any synonym thereof in any of these contexts. Never met someone who identified as such.
I think the only time before 2016 or so I ever heard of the concept was when Ronaldo (the Brazilian soccer player, not Cristiano Ronaldo) had some scandal in Brazil involving transgender sex workers and I had no idea what the story was talking about so I looked it up. And I thought "huh, that's odd" and forgot about it.
I’m 39, and I didn’t knowingly meet any trans people IRL until after college, though the concept was brought up in my women’s studies classes (this was prior to the “gender studies” rebrand) and the critical theory class I had to take my junior year as an English major. My sister’s six years younger than I am and by the time she was finishing up undergrad, she and multiple members of her friend group were various flavors of trans-identified.
I was wearing a full Florence Pugh in Midsommar frown as I was listening to that child influencer segment.
At least children being abused by their parents in the 1990s typically then didn’t have to live with the fact that their abuse would be preserved in the digital archive for the rest of their lives. Really gross stuff!
(For reference, this is the frown: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-preview.redd.it%2FenbSZEzcA_VSDufvcWpijZZd9esoVLXLwOBHoggONng.jpg%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3D463e9b209a4404dc03ae91c94567abe0a31c9666)
This expression is known in our family as "mad-dog face"
There are two important aspects of the slander of Woody Allen which Herzog and Freeman failed to mention:
1) People who believe Allen raped a child in that house have no idea how children are raped.
2) Mia Farrow's fabrications were evil, Dylan Farrow has been morally lazy for decades, and Ronan Farrow is a fraud.
Two lesser problems:
1) Farrow was 21 years old when she married [in 1966] 50-year-old Frank Sinatra, so the "ick" factor expressed by women over the Allen-Previn relationship is stunningly hypocritical. There's nothing remotely "morally questionable" about a man - of any age - have a sexual relationship with a 21-year-old woman.
2) Allen broke up with Farrow because she cuckolded him with Sinatra. Men have no trouble stating the obvious: Mia Farrow is a despicable person.
Yeah, I hard disagree with you on point 1 of the lesser problems. 50+ year olds baging 21 year olds is creepy as fuck. Also the familial aspect is extra creepy.
Convenient that he glossed over the fact that she was his partner's daughter
Yeah it's pretty gross. My friend had a short relationship with my cousin. He was only 4 years younger than her so totally within the bounds of normality. But he was my baby cousin. He was 6 years younger than me and I remembered him as a baby etc. He was still a cute little kid when I was in my teens. My friend hadn't known him then so it was completely fine from her PoV but it creeped me out. It was a very casual relationship and it didn't cause any issues or anything, I kept my feelings to myself and I am sure I would have got over it if it became serious. Still it always gives me pause when grown adults start up sexual relationships with people they knew as little kids, if I got the creeps from my friend dating my cousin how do they get over it? Or is it part of the appeal *shudder*.
Farrow was no longer Allen's partner when he and Soon-Yi fell in love. Farrow was a ruthless monster.
Farrow can be a monster and Allen can be creepy. The two are not mutually exclusive. Also banging somebody you previously knew as an adult when they were a child is gross.
Why?
Because you had a child/adult dynamic with them and at some point that switched to wanting to to have sex with them. It's weird.
Don't get mad at me, get mad at menopause.
Are you saying that when you went through menopause you started to want to fuck teenagers? You know you can get HRT right?
What is an objective acceptable age gap then? 10 years? 15 years? 2 years? Really curious to know.
Depends doesn't it? 10 years is fine if you're 50 with a 40 year old but not so fine if your 20 with a 10 year old.
It's weird how, in my day to day life, I have never met a 21 year old who has had a relationship with a 50 year old yet these age gaps are common when you throw in vast amounts wealth.... or you live in hideously oppressive societies. It's almost like all things being equal we prefer partners around our own age and experience.
Good to know that consent is no longer between two or more adults, but between those adults and third-party busybodies and what they consider “creepy”.
I guess I missed the part where she mentioned consent.
It is almost adorable that you think that the power in a relationship between a 21 year old woman and a 50 year old man rests with the man.
Not as adorable as your poor reading comprehension. Tell me where I said this? Unless you are speaking about my reference to hideously oppressive societies in which case yikes.
It's directly implied by your position. That is, unless you expect me to believe that the reason you find a relationship between a 21 year old and 50+ year old "creepy" is because you are concerned *for the man*.
And no, I'm not talking about in hideously oppressive societies, and I think you knew that.
Mate, I didnt gender it. Consenting adults can do what they want. I don't want a law against it. I thinkits gross and creepy and I have been clear why. Overtly transactional at best, abusive at worst. Like I said to the other guy give me an alternative explanation that with all things being equal these relationships are not common. Try reading this slowly and perhaps get an adult to help before you respond it'll probably save you time.
If you see a 21 year old woman with a 50 year old man, you know something is fucked up there.
He's almost certainly rich. If he's not, the chances that she's super fucked up increase by a lot.
He is also a fool- there's no fool like an old fool. He has convinced himself that she's with him for any reason other than money.
Would 21 year old Soon Yi have been into a short homely broke 56 year old man? Are you kidding me??
the question isn't "would she have gotten with him if he was broke?" that answer is obvious. Just the same as if she had a 24 year old supermodel boyfriend: "would she have gotten with him if he was ugly?" The model wouldn't have less power over her than a man 30 years his senior. The real question is, "is the only reason she's still with him because of his money?"
If your husband looked then the way he does now, you wouldn't have gotten with him. So what? He looks the way he does now. You've been with him for years. Should someone come in talking about how immoral your marriage is for whatever reason because they had arbitrary moral qualms about the way you met?
Actually Molly women will always choose income over age. This is why my 90 year old husband is snoozing peacefully while I count his money.
I meant what is the gap if both are consenting adults. Maybe that wasn't obvious? Are you going with 10 years? So an 18 year old could at max marry a 28 year old before you consider it creepy?
No, 18 ans 28 is creepy. Instead of sitting here offering me age gaps to judge jump to whatever your point is. Otherwise we may be here a while.
My point is we should judge people as best as possible on objective and consistent criteria. We set up a rule, the age of consent, for this reason. One can argue to increase it or decrease it, or to establish something more like a gap, like 10 years, but to morally condemn someone for doing something that is right now perfectly legal without offering any alternative besides whether it makes you personally feel ikky, is intellectually lazy. For instance, one can say homosexuality feels ikky but so what? How does this advance any discourse? But perhaps that wasn't your goal to begin with so whatever.
I gave you my reason, did you miss it? 50 year olds and 20 year olds only tend to get together with a hefty sweetener or threat. This indicates that otherwise people are unattraced to those significantly older than them. The fact you need to throw in wealth or a visa or deeply ingrained oppression indicates that these are not relationships built on mutual love and attraction. Am I wrong? Is it just coincidence? Please do let me know your alternative take if you believe these relationships are usually transactional at best or abusive at worst.
Every single person gets with the person he or she is with because of "hefty sweeteners." Usually it's looks or charisma, which are usually not as earned so much as given. At least money is earned. Then you learn to love them over time.
Jesus Skull surely you can't have been this unlucky in love. Mutual interests? Respect? Shared values? These mean nothing? It's just money or superficial genetic lottery shit?
Also, its by the by but the kind of money that attracts 21 year olds to 50 years is very often unearned.
Aren't*
The issue I have is ALL relationships are transactional. It's not just 50 and 21 year olds. As such your issue with this is simply a matter of degree and isn't even consistent because you object to a 28 year old dating an 18 year old which is a way lower age range. You can't figure out a range because your ACTUAL reason is whether it makes you feel gross. Any imbalance in age, income or status is enough to warrant the label of transactional and would invalidate the majority, if not all, relationships. This is why I called you lazy because you won't even spend 5 mins to think through your own position.
You also make the mistake of assuming women will all chose what you would choose. In freer countries should women choose STEM fields as much as men? If they don't it, must be misogyny! ORR maybe women have different preferences?
No matter how free or equal the society, women will always choose income over age. Whether the gap is 5 years, 10 years, 15 years or more. It's human nature in the same way men will chose the reverse. Even if a women is well off (which in this particular example, what this woman destitute? I don't think so), they will always want someone who earns more. Which invariably means the guy will be older.
Fucking off pushing your incel talking points onto me so you can argue against them. It's transparent and you have the fucking audacity to call *me* lazy while making sweeping generalisations.
Fucking incel loser.
Incel? Really? Grow up. And my generalizations are based on evidence, which obviously makes it better than whatever you're pulling out of your ass.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0146167215590987
I assume you agree that one person’s legal consensual acts and choices are not somehow binding on other people’s moral or aesthetic judgments. Because that would be a nightmare society.
My issue is that the people who are making morel and esthetic judgements aren't consistent (picking on some people but not others), nor are they coherent (they can't actually answer what criteria should be met that would qualify a relationship as not "creepy"). For instance, If someone just say they don't believe in approving of an age range greater than 1 year, fine. I don't need to agree with that but at least you put 5 min of thought into what you even believe in.
My second objections is that the moral judgments influence law in the end, so it's worth debating. Maybe some of you are content with just sitting on the sidelines and scolding others but others will want to use the law to prevent this from happening. After all if something is morally unacceptable why would you allow it to continue?
If you personally had never encountered a particular dynamic, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. I was 19 when I started dating the man who’d been my college professor. He didn’t earn much (in my country being a college teacher doesn’t pay well), but he was very smart and bookish, while most men my age were boring to me. And the fact that he had more life experience than me was what attracted me in the first place.
It obviously exists but it is rare. Like how you are sharing this anecdote. I note you are not saying "most of my partners are 30 years older than me, this is very common" but rather sharing a specific example. The exception that proves the rule.
Not to answer a question with a question but: why would anyone want - or think it’s their right - to define an acceptable age range for anything involving consenting adults?
Yes, but the clinching counter-argument is:
1. Woody Allen is a man.
Katie + guest are always my favorite episodes
She’s a lot better at it than Jesse, I’m not sure why.
I feel like this and the other replies in this subthread are the kind of comments made by sociopathic parents who like to pit their children against each other.
WHY CAN’T YOU BE MORE LIKE YOUR COHOST
She's just a way way way way way way more socially intelligent person in basically every respect. It's not Jesse's fault, his disability comes from being on the coast and thinking the primary form of relating to people is through discourse.
She’s choosing guests that vibe with the audience. It’s getting very samey from my point of view.
Parts of the audience, at least. I'm getting a little bit bored of the British TERFS who got cancelled at lefty publications and pretty much all say the same thing.
Then again Katie's guest picks have been excructiating otherwise so I'll take it.
Just to offer a contrary opinion: they're my least favorite episodes.
I think Hadley Freeman is right about the genetics of anorexia. I remember reading "Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight—and What We Can Do About It" by Harriet Brown. She insists her daughter's anorexia is a result of genetics but the book is full of anecdotes about how her family has a dysfunctional relationship with food and weight. She also talks about the family's history of anxiety, and that is heritable but how a family deals with anxiety in a child can determine if they're just high strung or develop an anxiety disorder.
Genetic research on psychiatric disorders is really difficult because you have to deal with changing definitions and political pressure. Funders and disease advocacy groups really want it to be hereditary. And I understand why: we tend to see a disease as more legitimate and worthy of study if it's biological in nature and something that's hereditary is clearly biological in nature. This is why you now see attempts at showing the borderline personality disorder (people with it were usually abused as children) is highly heritable.
But the thing is that genetic effects interact with environment. Type II diabetes has a very strong hereditary component, but it is very rare in people who are living a not rich country lifestyle where you eat a lot of whole foods and get a lot of exercise. Personality traits are heritable and women with certain personality traits are more likely to develop anorexia so you may have that type of genetic factor. But it's probably not like the situation with classic manic depression where you have families where it's inherited in an autosomal dominant fashion with high penetrance regardless of the family environment and stresses.
I don’t know how much truth there is to this or if it’s one of those nice sounding bromides that actually doesn’t check out, but the statement “genetics loads the chamber, environment pulls the trigger” has always stuck with me. Personally my family has an irrepressible neurotic bent and a tendency towards obsessive thinking with lots of anxiety, which plays out in lots of people as quirky behavior or, in many cases, treatable mental illness. At the risk of oversharing, while I definitely showed signs of already trending in that direction, some incidents that, let’s say, amplified my need for bodily autonomy, directed my obsessive thoughts toward food and fitness.
Would that have happened anyway? No way to know. But it’s telling, I think, that many of the patients I was in treatment with shared my environmental antecedents and not always the family makeup.
"She insists her daughter's anorexia is a result of genetics but the book is full of anecdotes about how her family has a dysfunctional relationship with food and weight." These points don't contradict.
Genuinely struggled to listen to those videos of the kid. Not her fault but that is creepy AF.
Also, I mean no offence to anyone and I'm maybe I'm being harsh but that family also having an autistic child is the least surprising thing ever. Maybe legit but it all feels a bit too much "look how special and unique our family is".
In 2024, being on the spectrum isn't a sign of genius, it's a sign of suffering the same decline everyone else is suffering. Everything has become too left brained. All the curves have become overfit. It's the beginnings of a linguistic and behavioral meltdown. Fuck I gotta go outside.
Okay I’m only making this comment bc twice Hadley Freeman made a statement to indicate that BiBi has Trump wrapped around his finger and each time it had nothing to do with the topic. It strikes me that she ever so subtly thinks that the Jewish state has some secret nefarious power. BiBi does not have trump wrapped around his finger. In fact, he’s been sucking up to Trump b/c he pissed him off when he was one of the first to congratulate Biden on his 2020 election win. So strange to ascribe one man so much power over a man whose narcissism makes him entirely unpredictable and beholden to no one. In terms of Israel this former Guardian writer still sits with the Guardian.
That is a laughably inaccurate and uninformed statement. You need to familiarize yourself more with her writing before accusing her of having the Guardian’s anti-Zionist beliefs. That’s not her viewpoint at all:
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-progressive-left-hates-the-jews/
https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/opinion-this-undeniably-overwhelmingly-feels-different-for-all-jews/
https://www.thetimes.com/world/middle-east/article/a-long-history-of-telling-jews-don-t-retaliate-jp0g6xqxw
For what it's worth, I (as someone who has followed her and read her work for years) do not think she believes Israel has a secret nefarious power.
Yes, from what I’ve seen of her views on Israel that’s a complete mischaracterisation.
Trump’s relationship with Netanyahu is probably a bit more complicated (it seems to me that Trump delegated a lot to Jared Kushner, who is more up Netanyahu’s ass than Trump himself) but accusing Hadley of antisemitism seems bizarre to me. She’s Jewish herself and her most recent book was about the left’s awful reactions to October 7.
Wow, this is really interesting. It’s a different issue she suffers from. It’s akin to the Israelis blaming BiBi for no hostage deal when the reason for no deal is Hamas. I don’t like Netanyahu and think he has to go for many reasons including that he can’t be trusted, but she still grants Netanyahu too much power. Would that it was true. If he had the power ascribed to him things would be less hopeless and easier to solve.
Thanks for doing the research. I made this comment without knowing anything and that is how I interpreted her random invocation of Netanyahu twice.
I can see why it would sound strange without context, but I do think it’s fair to say that Netanyahu got some significant policy concessions during the Trump administration and could expect to do so again if Trump is reelected, which I think was the point she was trying to make, just maybe stated in overly strong terms.
Thank you for writing my thoughts
Very interesting episode! The audio of the Instagram was creepy / sad enough... but watching a bit of he video?!? Yikes!
I am glad you mix up the format a bit like this every once in a while. Katie, despite her superficial snark and aloofness, is a very sincere interviewer
I fast forwarded that shit like it was a torture scene. No thanks.
It strikes me that Hadley’s swift (and accurate) summation of Handmade’s Tale is that “women cannot escape their biology” and that they’ll always be exploited by men because of this. Then later in the episode, she connects anorexia to a desire to escape womanhood. She later points out that the families with ROGD type daughters are largely the same types of families that used to have anorexic girls- the upper middle class liberal types, the NPR parents, etc.
Are these all the unintended consequences of the 3rd and 4th wave feminists? In a righteous attempt to get girls behind their banners, did they inadvertently damage the mental and physical health of some of them, convincing them that womanhood isn’t worth the struggle and that they should just opt out, even if by self mutilation?
Am I late on this realization that everyone else has already had, or am I off on this completely? This all dawned on me while scratching my stupid beard and driving in a pickup truck, so be gentle.
I mean the clearest example of a social contagion phenomenon of late probably isn't the trans issue or the eating disorders, it's #metoo.
I used to walk to class in college and see on the front of the building this giant quilt of patches that were meant to be girls "telling their stories" of sexual assault. The thing is, if you actually read them, a lot of them were completely implausible at like a B&R level, or they were describing things that weren't crimes like regret or breakups. But getting on that quilt, or posting on social media with that hashtag, was a big deal. And given how low the rate of actual violent crimes is, people would have to dissemble or exaggerate, and each time they did so they set an example for the next person.
And what kind of message does that send to young girls? If you thought that everyone around you was constantly being raped, you'd probably have some anxiety around your sexuality.
And did it help those girls to look back in their past and reconstruct an event as a rape in order to be part of a movement? Likely not.
But at the same time, #metoo wasn’t all bad. It was based on some real, predatory behavior that needed to be corrected. Just like feminism isn’t bad (I know, I’m a hero) but there’s an incentive to overstate and navel-gaze in ways that could be destructive to the population the movement is ostensibly trying to help.
Even for those people that are victims of violent crime, and there are definitely some, I'm not sure that consciously building a social contagion phenomenon out of it is healthy, for them or for everyone else.
And to tentatively extend this, what effect on young men does it have to tell them that they two can never escape their biology and they are just rapists waiting for their first victim.
The people telling them this are simply aghast at the idea that these young men are flocking to a political ideology that doesn’t demonize their existence.
This is a clever trick. Make a crime next to impossible to convict on, then use the fact that people rarely prove (or even allege) it as justification to claim that the crime is very rare, thereby in turn justifying making it next to impossible to convict on! We know they're liars, because only liars file rape claims!
Good stuff.
Nice try, but this isn't the fault of feminism.
On faith?
I’m not trying anything, just gaming things out. I’m willing to be wrong here.
A dude blaming feminism is rarely in good faith, but whatever.
No wave of feminism has been about rejecting womanhood. Rejecting culturally enforced sex roles, yes.
3rd wave was/is all about "empowerment" basically fun feminism in service of men. I don't think we really know what the 4th wave is shaping up to be.
Thanks for forgiving my genitalia and indulging me.
My understanding was that 3rd wave was more focused on abolishing gender roles, but maybe I’m getting my waves confused. I don’t know if feminism’s stated goals were ever to act in service of men. Maybe some of its idea ended up that way with the sexual liberation, but wouldn’t that be an unintended effect?
But that’s kinda what I’m saying. I’m not saying that feminists are advocating for girls to reject womanhood, I’m saying that might’ve been an unintended consequence of feminism’s rhetorical approach.
That was 2nd wave feminism.
What rhetorical approach do you mean? If you think critiquing sex roles leads to girls rejecting womanhood, you must think we're simple. Things like anorexia and even ROGD seem to be an attempt to exert control in a society with pretty rigid sex roles.
The point that Hadley made is that anorexia and ROGD is more prevalent in the same upper middle class liberal social circles. These social circles tend to be more critical of said sex/gender roles. Be mad at Hadley if you’re going to be mad at me.
Look, I don’t think these circles are wrong to be critical of gender roles. But, if you grow up hearing that the world is a terrible place for women, womanhood MAY seem a little less appealing. That’s all I’m saying.
Hadley mentioned as well that when you see what is presented as a possible outcome of being female, some may choose to run away from it. Eating disorders or gender dysphoria can both come about from seeing roles in violent porn and highly retouched media and not wanting to have to conform to either.
If the life paths that you're presented are decoration, sex object, or caregiver and those seem unappealing, it can be daunting. You actually have easier options to do so when you have middle class or more resources, including the space to not be working or caregiving all the time and actually having time to examine your place in the world.
I'm not mad at you, I just think you're full of it.
Coming from someone who came into this conversation assuming bad faith, I’m sure you can appreciate how wounding this is.
I’ll let it go. Hopefully we’ll have more constructive conversations about different topics in the future.
I always appreciate your comments and I think you were on to something interesting here. I'm always up for throwing ideas around!
Thanks, Molly. I'm always happy to read your perspectives as well.
I'm totally open to the possibility that this idea is wrong. I'm definitely walking a tightrope between correlation and causation, which I realize.
I was raised in a... well, if not a cult, a high control group. So, nowadays when I see a sacred cow, I have the tendency to poke at it. I understand how that would not always be well received.
Maybe?
I was born in '67, so I was absolutely steeped in the women's rights movement while I was growing up.
At the same time, my family was Catholic and very traditional. Being the woman of the house- a wife and mom- was a position of power and respect in my extended family. I couldn't wait to grow up and be a wife and mother myself.
I remember vividly wanting to grow breasts in the worst way, and always searching for any sign that I was- finally!- reaching puberty. When I finally got my period it was unsettling, but also thrilling. I was coming into my power.
It makes me so sad that girls don't experience womanhood this way.
Yeah, at the same time, I understand that it could just naturally be an uncomfortable time for some girls.
Being from New Jersey and dating Italian girls, I know a ton of Catholics. I know the absolute adoration and matriarchal value that family system puts on the mother/grandmother. Do you think you would've seen your entry into womanhood the same way if traditional values were sneered at in your household?
I think it would be a considerable analytical mistake to confuse bog-standard social sorting with the etiology of actual mental illness.
Why? We’re talking about a population that’s very vulnerable to social contagion.
I'll play along with that assumption, although to be clear, I'm not taking a position one way or the other as to whether it's true. (I do know that there is a correlation between levels of general mental illness and political orientation, but the "social contagion" tag is confounding things here.)
But assuming that it is in fact true that there is a correlation between "social contagion mental illnesses" and "NPR families," that still fails to answer the question whether "being in an NPR family" causes you to suffer from social contagion mental illness, or whether suffering from social contagion mental illness causes you to become an NPR family!
Sociopolitical groups in the US have polarized along all kinds of lines. It seems much more plausible to me (and also much less convenient) that this is a case of like finding like than that some inherent defect in center-left feminism causes mental illness. There's no historical or evidentiary basis to think that.
Whilst ignoring your rather crude strawmanning, yes the direction of correlation/causation is often difficult to know. However, it’s not hard to explain how some people if exposed to a set a of ideas through what they listen to/read etc could be prone to forms of social contagion.
The reverse seems somewhat bizarre.
If you have a theory as to why people prone to social contagion mental illness would as a result become NPR listeners, we’re all ears 🤷🏼♂️.
If you disagree with the observation that the same sort of middle class liberal families having trans identified adolescent girls now that used to have girls who cut and had eating disorders, that was Harley’s observation. Not mine.
To throw another element in the mix, there is a long historical record of upper class young women going absolutely bonkers in contagious ways - e.g. the Dancing Fever in Europe, contagious laughter epidemics, "anorexia mirabilis", the Salem Witch Trials... Young men tend to get caught up in territorial and honor disputes and kill each other, young women tend to get caught up in social manias and harm themselves in mind boggling ways.
Obviously, this isn't true for every single person of either sex, but it seems to be a pretty clear historical pattern.
Imagine how this would have gone down if TikTok existed at the time
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_plague_of_1518
This made me think of “Off with his head” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, which ironically had a moment on TikTok. (Dance til you’re dead)
After listening to the show, I think we need a new diagnosis added to the DSM - Munchausen by TikTok.
Munchausen by internet is a pretty well-studied phenomenon, to the point where some experts have argued that it should actually be characterized as its own variation of mental illness in the DSM:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3510683/
(I tend to think this is just over-categorization, but I admit that the line between "variations of the same disease" and "different diseases" is not a bright one in many contexts.)
It was a tweet from Hadley Freeman that led me to discover this podcast back in 2020 so it was great to hear her on the show! I'm in complete agreement about how wrong it is to farm an eight year old's food issues for likes and attention. The weird, obviously scripted audio of the kid speaking sounds like a black mirror episode. Munchausens by proxy on Instagram...😬
I thought GIDS was pronounced with a hard G all this time…It’s “.gif” all over again.
I noticed that too. But, right or wrong, here my “rule”:
If the word starts with a soft or hard G, then the acronym is pronounced with the same sound.
So, for me, GIF will always be a hard G, as in Graphics. 🤷🏻♂️
HADLEY AT LONG LAST! I was also wondering what she would sound like because not only is she from America, she’s from Long Island, and mashing that up with British RP is wild.
I was intrrigued by Hadley's point that effective treatments for Anorexia included "don't reward it." And rewards included putting the patient at the center of attention.
When I was growing up in the 60s and 70s, you certainly weren't rewarded for being "homosexual." And the argument that decriminalizing sodomy would normalize it--causing in increase in gay people--seemed ludicrous. (For those who don't know me, I am a gay man who "came out" in the late 70s).
Today, of course, there's no stigma at fancy private K-12 schools to declaring yourself "queer" or "nonbinary". In fact, you'll get promptly rewarded, as do your parents for being good allies! And everyone's doing it.
It's certainly easier to change your pronouns and wear boys clothes than to starve yourself; you get special treatment, and your parents and friends are heroes for their allyship.
And just as non-gays have colonized "queer" (née gay), non-anorexics are taking over "anorexia" (and eating disorders in general). Meet the "atypical anorexics." Yes, fat people are now calling themselves anorexic. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/18/magazine/anorexia-obesity-eating-disorder.html You get the attention and a label, but you're still on the all-you-can-eat plan.
Stop rewarding things!
"Stop rewarding things!" is a marvelous multipurpose motto. I am officially adopting it.
Katie at 38:23 proving that she doesn't read the comments thoroughly.
I'm not sure making schoolboy factual errors about the contents of your own website's comment sections speaks highly to someone's tendency toward conscientious fact-checking!
Are you the guy she's talking about? lol
No, she was talking about Zagarna.
I'm linking some songs just because I think they make a funny answer to your question:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmRy-JW5aps
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1kbLwvqugk
Great podcast, Katie. As your guest notes, the parallels beween anorexia and e among adolescent girls is remarkable. I was a boy and I don't recall puberty as being particulary difficult, except for the occasional pimple and a heightened sense of self-conciousness. But it seems that puberty for girls is much more difficult and one of the main causes is that adolescent girls are subject to the male gaze from boys and men. Perhaps in the future you could have a guest to more closely compare male and female adolescence.
I think Katie flattened this in an uncharacteristically thoughtless way, actually. The idea that a sexual encounter could be nothing but pleasurable for a pubescent boy and that boys don’t have the potential for having deeply scarring, humiliating sexual experiences is… well, wrong? Granted, physical pain is far less likely for men.
And then there's the guilt and shame. The very notion of being sexually aroused is both an unforgivable sin and a constant threat.
I don't know how anyone does it.
There’s that for sure, a stiff wind will result in awful embarrassment.
Then there’s the performance aspect. Just like girls have a genetic lottery with their breasts coming in, some boys draw the short straw with a… uh… short straw. And speaking of porn warping expectations, a young man’s first experiences will almost certainly be embarrassing.
Again, you have to weigh literal pain vs embarrassment, but I say horse hockey to the idea that male puberty is this universally euphoric sexual experience for boys.
Yeah, I was disappointed by that too.
I don't think it's necessarily harder for girls, just different and equally hard in a way they can't imagine, just like how Katie points out men can't imagine how women think about sex in pubrety.
The thing that comes to mind first was something I struggled with a lot during pubrety; going from a child who would be helped and accepted mostly anywhere, to a man who would he treated as a threat by default whenever he goes.
This is an under appreciated thing, and I’ll add a personal wrinkle: I was a straight male eating disorder patient in a 99% female hospital when I was going through puberty. Literally everywhere it felt like I was intruding, threatening, dangerous, and I started apologizing just for being around. I wasn’t there to hit on people (it was the furthest thing from my mind) but it was so unusual and confusing at first, since it seemed I was causing problems merely for existing as a human. A unique and amplified set of circumstances to be sure, but I have no doubt that countless others have experienced some version of this and maybe not fully been able to process it. It pains me to think that my nephews (currently seven and four) will go through similar realizations.
Indeed, being treated like a threat is a constant weight to carry around.
Puberty was certainly difficult for some boys but I've never heard of your complaint before. This is not to diminish it any ways. Some boys probably felt as you did but didn't articulate it.
Bad acne was painful for both boys and girls, as was adolescent awkwarkness. But, for most boys, there were advantages, I think, including greater strength, height, and bigger penises. And, although teenaged boys are very sexual, few were sexualized by older girls and women.
Eating disorders are also much more common for gay males than straight males. I wouldn’t be surprised if the stress that some gay boys feel about their sexualities is showing up in the same way as girls’ anxieties about puberty.
When my husband told me what puberty was like for him (including masturbating for hours a day) i was truly aghast. My brain instantly went places I did not want (was that going on in my brothers’ room growing up?? Eewwwwww?).
Tbats… let’s say extremely rare for girls.
You can be sure that there was plenty of masturbation going on in your brothers' bedrooms. Teenaged boys talk about it among themselves with no sense of shame.
nooooooooooo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5RjG4-K9Gc
Watch to the end, trust me
I’m a woman so I’m just guessing here but it seems to me that a lot of it comes down to timing, especially compared to your peers. I suspect that boys who go through puberty later than their friends and classmates have a harder time while for girls the ones who hit puberty earlier struggle more. I’d be curious if that jives with other people’s experiences? I also don’t remember having a particularly hard time during puberty despite being female and I suspect it’s because I was a bit older but I might be over extrapolating from my own experience.
I'm a woman too and my ED started before puberty. I don't think it had anything to do with fear of becoming a woman as much as it did fear of becoming a fat woman! I don't know, maybe if I had more therapy I'd think otherwise, but I'm not sure that would be a more accurate understanding.
Wow, that hits close to home! Mine happened before puberty too and I had a hard time finding the correct framing (probably because I was a literal child) for that exact same feeling. Therapists kept implying or outright saying, “well, this is just fear of growing up and dealing with adulthood and sex” and inside I was like, no, it’s fear of
growing up and NOT having sex because I don’t have abs like Brad Pitt! (Turns out that’s not all you need in order to sleep with people but that’s neither here nor there, point remains the same)
I was struck early on in this episode by hearing that interviews shouldn’t just involve blowing smoke up someone’s arse. These Katie lead episodes are universally like this. It would be a genuine pleasure to come here once a month and find an episode where Katie had to talk to someone who she disagreed with at least slightly.
It’s funny because I enjoy the Katie interview episodes, but I always walk away with something I yapped back at my podcast app in disagreement about.
I think she’s taking the “friendly conversation” approach that The Fifth Column takes with guests. Even guests who they don’t align with they rarely take to task, and Michael Moynihan is very capable of a contentious interview.
Agree. Even in my group of teen friends, with various kinds of eating disorders, it was pretty dramatic how different our experiences were.
I was struck with comparing how anorexics vs young trans kid dressed. Loose fitting sweats - that's a pretty standard uniform for a lot of teens. Also, I think Hadley said that what anorexics want is attention and my understanding was dressing in big clothes was a way to not draw attention to your body size. It wasn't adding up to me, and I'm someone who's always drawing parallels between eating disorders and gender dysphoria.
It bears remembering that mental health has diagnoses, not diseases. In the rest of medicine, there is generally some sort of objective test. You're either having a heart attack or your not, and generally we can figure that out pretty quickly. You either have syphilis or you don't. You're born with Down Syndrome or you're not.
Mental health is completely different. We don't have a comprehensive understanding of the conditions, there are generally no objective correlates, and so we can treat your mental health symptoms, but we really don't know what disease you have.
Hadley’s book on anorexia goes into far more nuance than this interview did. She explores many theories about anorexia—it’s worth reading. And her focus is on young girls and anorexia specifically, not eating disorders in general.
Katie is a fantastic interviewer. She leads a lively discussion and brings out the best in her guests. Being interviewed by Jessie is like being interviewed by a wooden post who makes you feel awkward.
I think Jesse it wary of overshadowing the guests. I thought he was great with Hannah Barnes and the gender doctor lady (can't remember name).
My theory is that Jessie just has too much experience as a science journalist talking to experts, which is why he’s so great when speaking to people who work in or report on gender, but maybe slightly awkward at other times. Except the episode with Jeff Maurer, I thought that was great because they have enough in common that it was more like an informal conversation.
Yeah the Maurer episode was good.
To be clear I do know how to spell Jesse’s name. This is what I get for posting after midnight *facepalm*
Dr. Erica Anderson? I remember that being a good ep, though I haven’t listened to it in ages.
Katie tries to draw out much more of a picture of an interviewee. Jesse is good when interviewing a technical or scientific expert about their work, but he doesn't have good feel for anything beyond that.
Sorry, Hadley is biased on her Woody Allen take. There is ample evidence that WA was sexually involved with Mia's daughter Soon-Yi when she was 17, not 21. Soon-Yi was a troubled teenager. You're whitewashing this.
WA's net worth allowed him to leverage the legal system.
Dylan Farrow has stood by her story for decades. I stand by her.
Moses's college was paid for by WA, presumably because Moses disowned Mia.
WA has himself to blame for his shoddy reputation.
Let's say they really do have has happy a marriage as it seems, and that soon-yi wouldn't be as happy with anyone else. What does that do to your moral view here?
He is 35 years older than she is, and began dating when she was a teen. And the father of her adopted siblings, and the boyfriend of her adopted mom.
So at the very least it was a really complicated way to start a relationship.
I think there is a good argument one could make that the relationship fucked her up, and people stay in fucked up relationships all the time. For decades, even.
On the other hand, I don't know them at all, and I think people should be taken at their word.
So that leaves me in the position of not using the longevity/outward happiness of their relationship as a data point.
Yeah also the trauma of the whole nation scrutinizing your relationship almost surely would bond you together or break you. In this case they went ride or die.
Perhaps SY is simply enamored of the lifestyle of the rich and famous that she has been leading since her teenage years as WA's muse. There's nothing morally redeeming about that on her part.
But I'm less interested in the WA/SY angle than in Hadley's biased portrayal of it, and her seeming absolvation of WA. At best, one can make the case that WA's abuse of DF was not established in a court of law. His far greater fame, wealth, and connections to power than MF possibly had something to do with that.
Ultimately, however, only two people actually know what did or didn't take place: DF and WA. Hadley wasn't there.
That's all that can be established with all the known evidence, for which there is indeed plenty that DF may have in fact been abused by WA. Hadley's invocation of WA's religion is IMO baffling and unnecessary.
it was interesting episode. I have no doubt it is true that girls/women are more prone to internalize and boys externalize but I think about so many people I know who defied the gender roles on this. Lots of men I know who internalize their internal strife - partly because they know they can physically harm someone if they get violent and that’s the opposite of what they want. It’s so hard to say what’s socialized vs some sort of natural inclination based on being male/female. My husbands the anxious / OCD one of us, he has self harmed in many ways including with food. I guess one way a lot of men do it is with drugs/alcohol. Anyway. Shits complicated.
The high rates of male suicide and drug related deaths suggest an abundance of internalized strife to me.
GREAT example of how "common sense" or "popular wisdom" can be contradictory.
Mmm… buttered noodles…
This was a brilliant episode. Freeman is a brilliant person. Very exciting for me to finally hear her speaking voice—surprisingly smoky! It was a joy to hear her discuss so many un-joyous things.
Yes, she’s amazing. I wish I could have her over for tea. Do expats have afternoon tea in Britain?
One of my high-school friends who was anorexic (there were a couple) wanted to try to get approved for a double mastectomy because she only identified "90%" as a woman so she didn't fully identify with her breasts so the doctor shouldn't argue against cutting them off.
Maybe she should get a 10% reduction.
Seriously, there is something so weird about the idea that we're supposed to fully identify with body parts like that. Having a body is kind of a horrorshow, it's never going to be nonstop validation and euphoria! I understand wanting to remove something if it causes severe and persistent distress, but the bar now seems to be set much lower than that.
There seems to be an expectation now that medicine can simply eliminate all the difficult parts of the human condition. You see it also in the way that "mental health" has become the default frame for talking about any kind of conflict or difficulty in life.
To be fair, this person was in the grips of an eating disorder so of course she was saying weird things. I'm sure her body did cause her severe distress actually, but she was throwing ideas at the wall to see what would convince people to give her what she wanted - which was not actually to relieve her distress but to suffer and hurt herself. Contemporary ideas about gender identity were just a convenient vehicle and made it look to others like this wasn't just another form of self-harm
I don't like my boss. Me or her must be mentally ill!
Everyone who disagrees with me is very, very sick.
I may be wrong, but I am 99% confident there arenot any cases of ARFID in hunter/gatherer subsistence cultures.
Aren't they just giving diagnoses to things in the normal range of human experience. In the case of ARFID things that people normally grow out of. One of my kids went through a phase of eating only 3 food items non of which were hot food (or 4 if you count chocolate). This was preinterent so we did what people did pre Internet we went to the grandparents who said "just leave him to it". So we gave them some combination of these 3 foods for every meal. It carried on and I went to GP, as we were just feeding him lots of the 3 foods wherever he asked he hadn't lost weight so the GP also said leave him to it as well. It lasted maybe 18 months all in all.
I know lots of Arfid people will screech that my son never had arfid but I wonder if I had made more of a big deal of it and made it a battle it would have got worse. Certainly one of the reasons I stopped making a big deal out of it is because we got down to three foods in the first place. Thankfully the foods were relatively healthy. I was scared to lose another one and that, combined with grandparents wisdom, stopped me pressing. I would have completely forgot about it (despite the anxiety it caused at the time) only it comes up a lot when talking to friends who have picky eater toddlers.
> Aren't they just giving diagnoses to things in the normal range of human experience.
Yes.
My strong suspicion as to the large rise in ADHD diagnoses is that everyone's attention span got shorter over the past ten years since you _always_ have distraction nearby you on your phone, and you can change the distraction effectively instantly because of the multipurpose nature of the device.
Do we need to medicalize that? Probably not, but Vyvanse works whether you have a psych dx or not.
I do wonder if this is a side effect of our hyper palatable food supply and overly anxious parenting, although I also wouldn’t be surprised if cases are just being missed in societies with higher child mortality.
Hunter gather societies can have as high as a 50% child mortality rate. Do you think we should emulate that particular aspect of hunter gather society?
Hadley mentioned on this podcast that Michael Jackson was charged and convicted, which is false, he was not convicted and was actually acquitted on all charges. Other than that, a very interesting listen.
I think she also said Epstein wasn't convicted -- he was, in 2008, but obviously for the tiniest fraction of what he'd been up to.
I’m guessing the famous author Hadley took Jessie to meet was David Sedaris.
That was my guess too!!!
Dammit! I went to a David Sedaris show yesterday and could have asked him this during the Q&A.
Great episode. Well done, Katie. I feel like she really brings her A game for these guest host episodes. She’s a great interviewer. Also, love/hate the “exploitive IG stage mom exploiting kid’s pathology” episodes.
“TERF island.” Come on, TERF of TERF hall was right there.
Good luck on your book, Katie! I promise to
Maintain full awareness of parasocial boundaries.
I probably shouldn't say this. It seems true, though I am sure there are exceptions. Every 51 year old man's dream: a 21 year old woman. Hell, that's at least 3 years beyond legal in our civilized society.
I think I just developed cyclical vomiting disorder.
Why is that their dream?
I’m going to hazard a guess at “firm and naive”
Why is naive preferred?
They don't have enough life experience to call an older man out on his bullshit.
To quote the magnificent Olivia Rodrigo: “because girls your age know better”
Know better than what?
Know better than to put up with bullshit, as stated above. And to know she has other options she might be more attracted to, that she can earn her own money rather than relying on his, assuming he has any, or that his income is on par with his peers.
Naive is preferred because then the younger partner is also able to be groomed and molded into the ideal of what the older, more experienced partner wants.
Thanks. I agree. I was asking to see if I could prompt a moment of self awareness from the original commenters.
Can someone please tell Katie that Herzog is not a Jewish name, it's a German name? I realize Jesse has mentioned this to her more than once but she just cannot process this info for some reason.
I think it's because Israeli President is Isaac Herzog
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Herzog
She doesn’t seriously believe it, she’s making a joke about other people’s misapprehensions, which have apparently been a thing her whole life. A couple years ago a Jewish magazine even published an article about how she’s a bad Jew (they deleted it pretty quick and I don’t remember the name of the magazine unfortunately).
I believe she may be joking.
Would be helpful if the Dad were in these videos as I'm trying to figure out the family dynamic and why the girl has such anxiety. If there's a Dad. The mom does appear a bit angry but it's hard to tell if the kid has been using the ARFID to control the parents (and if so, is that because the parents are screwed up somehow?). Interesting. I do not mean to be too cold about it, I'm sure it's a struggle.
HADLEYYYY. Looking forward to listening to this.
The speed with which she made up her mind about arfid mom and the judgmental passion behind her anger kinda left me feeling a little "yikes". I was a teen model and my mom went along with it because I wanted it, but even though my mom was cared of being seen as a stage parent she went along with it to be supportive. I had wanted to be a child actor before that and my mom resisted. I mean I hate attention now but it's possible that the kid wanted this
She's 8. She has utterly no comprehension of what the consequences are. It's an easy judgement to make.
The difference is you were a teen, this child is 8.
I had the impression that Hadley had already reviewed some of these videos in advance of recording the podcast.
Yes, of course parents try to be supportive of their children--even when what their children want isn't good for them. I told my daughter at age 8 or so that no I wasn't going to let her be a model--even though she had been spotted and recruited to model for a catalog. She was disappointed at the time, but I think she got over it.
There's an article about the mother of a middle-school Instagram influencer who has to deal with men using the posts as pornography--and she's so afraid of disappointing her daughter (who loves being an influencer) that she won't shut it down.
Parents can shut it down. What the kid wants should never be the whole rationale.
Question for Hadley - is it supposed to be pronounced "JIDS"? I've been reading GIDS for years and assumed it's pronounced to rhyme with "kids"
Everyone I’ve heard discuss it, including Hannah Barnes and Hillary Cass, have said ‘jids’. Although that still rhymes with ‘kids’ so now I’m wondering what part you’re confused by.
Oh lord, of course it does. I now realise what I wrote makes no sense. I should've said I assumed GIDS was pronounced like "gimp" not GIDS like "gist".
The "g" stands for "gender," and I have heard other people based in the UK pronounce it that way, so I think it's correct, but I agree that the acronym alone *looks* like it should be pronounced with a hard g.
Wait, "JIDS" rhymes with "kids" but "GIDS" doesn't?
I explained my mistake elsewhere in this thread.
I saw your clarification post like three seconds after I hit “post".
I'm just out to confuse people with my thoughtless comments. Nothing to see here
I figure as gender is pronounced with a soft g, then GIDS would be? But I guess that would mean it should be pronounced “j-eyed-s”
I’m surprised to learn that not rewarding anorexia and keeping normal life despite what the child’s starvation is effective treatment. I’ve always been taught you have to lean in, be empathetic. I’m 29F, no personal history of eating disorders beside maybe mild arfid
I hadn’t heard Hadley Freeman before and enjoyed what she said, and how she said it. Her accent sounds to me like an American who has a bit of a head cold. Quite nice.
Regarding Polanski- I’ve liked all of the movies that he’s directed that I’ve seen. He was perfect on both sides of the camera in Chinatown. So I was eager to see his movie A Gentleman and a Spy that won top honors at Cannes. It has never been theatrically released in the US, and it’s not on any streaming services. There are no English language DVDs available.
I have cyclical vomiting disorder! It's interesting because I just looked it up and, on Wikipedia, it's different to how it was described to me when I was diagnosed (and indeed how it is for me). Weird.
I had never heard of it, but it sounds pretty gnarly. It seems like it’s got a lot of shared symptoms with chronic migraine.
Hopefully you’ve had success managing it, doesn’t sound fun.
I didn't know it was linked to migraine but I have those too. Like I said its a bit different from how it's described when you Google it, or it is for me.
I manage it fine. I rarely have an issue anymore. I have a weak stomach in all sense of the word. I have a really low tolerance for dodgy food and I will be sick as a disgust response quite easily (which is lame and I hate it). I always thought these things were separate from the CVD but maybe not, I am trying to remember how it was explained to me at the time but I cannot remember the details other than if I vomited once my stomach would continue to make me vomit for hours or days afterwards. The main thing I took from my diagnosis was to not be sick the first time. So I just became extra cautious about all things that may make me sick, that seems to have done the trick.
Her “accent” gets way less pronounced as the interview goes on. Probably because she’s talking to an American. My step brother does this with his South African accent only when he’s talking to his mom (my step mother) on the phone. She has a very pronounced accent but he usually has none. It’s a very strange phenomenon
This was super interesting. Thank you. (And I like Hadley's accent.)
So I just discovered that if you click "transcript" and then click back, you lose the comment you were writing. Great interface there!
Anyway... does the fact that I'm not constantly reacting to Katie's stupid baiting-- that I actually have substantive interactions that prove she's lying about me being a troll-- piss her off? It sure seems like it pisses her off, to the point that she's now actively trying to pick fights by making obviously-ridiculous claims (I guess the theory being that if she trolls me hard enough, I'll fight fire with fire?). It's honestly funny at this point.
Anyway, one thing that really seems to piss her off is pointing out her pro-Trump behavior for what it is, and we've now reached the point of her actively trying to sanewash his inane ramblings-- so let's do a bit of that and observe that it is not, in fact, "batshit" (that's an exact quote) to think that immigration detainees and even (gasp) prisoners should, again exact quotes here, "ensur[e] that federal prisoners and detainees are able to obtain medically necessary care for gender transition, including surgical care, while incarcerated or detained." Let's link the actual context here, since it's not linked in the show notes and it's helpful to read the full thing (grammatical emendations included):
https://assets.aclu.org/live/uploads/2024/08/Harris-ACLU-Candidate-Questionnaire.pdf
I mean I get that the average voter probably thinks that prisoners and immigrants shouldn't get any medical care at all, and should just be left to die of disease, but a. most of them won't actually admit that, and b. views can be pathological even if they're quite prevalent, so I'm comfortable calling that pathological.
At any rate, once you force the better angels of someone's nature to admit that yes, actually, prisoners and detainees do deserve to get medical treatment, you can't justify (legally or morally) denying access to that treatment on the basis that it's about gender transition. That's just discrimination, it's obviously morally wrong, and if you're running a prison system, it's actually unconstitutional.
I suppose Katie and Hadley's way of squaring this particular circle is just to take the extremist position that all transition is self-harm and medically unnecessary, and therefore by definition there can't be medical treatment that is about gender transition. Which, fine, you're going down the radicalization rabbit hole, might as well jump in with both feet, right? But you shouldn't be surprised when people notice it, point it out, and warn other people about it.
What a bunch of cope. You're jerking yourself off about what a ~le ebic trolol~ you are while actively giving this woman your money. As far as I'm concerned, she and Jesse are the ones coming out on top in this situation.
I'm reconsidering it. It's one thing to waste money on stupid shit that amuses you; it's another thing entirely to waste money on someone who's now actively producing pro-Trump content (and who has exposed themself to be quite intellectually dishonest in the process). The latter could be viewed as an affirmatively bad act.
I'm open to arguments that I should stay, but I'm probably not going to.
No one is arguing for you to stay. Pleeeeeease leave.
J&K should make it so that the more obnoxiously you post, the higher tier of subscription you need to buy to keep posting. By this time next year half their revenue could come from Zagarna cope.
Came to say the same. So, I did.
Seriously, Z? You’re open to arguments that you should stay???? Hahahahaha.
To be clear (and as fair as I can be): I don’t think most people here outright object to the overall content of your posts. Many of them seem informed and come from a place of deep conviction. Bravo! Really.
It’s your near uncanny ability to come across (nearly 100% of the time) as an asshole, snob, prick, and prig. THAT’S, I suggest, what people can’t stand.
Really, go in peace - but go.
Jon doesn’t speak for me, I do object to the content. I think Z’s brain is broken in a jaggedly leftward slant that could one day land him as a main character on an episode of BARpod.
I was trying to be even handed. 🤷🏻♂️
I just have to topple Z to take the spot of Public Enemy #1 here.
lol what on earth Katie and Jesse are hardly pro-Trump. I think if that's how you see their content it's definitely time for you to say farewell to your Barpod primo membership.
Accurately stating that Trump was correct in one of his accusations obviously means that Katie’s a secret MAGA chud.
Right, off you toddle!
How do you know you’re the asshole?
Are you sensing a case of stolen asshole valor here?
No, everything appears to be on the money. I just like to peer into the mind that hears “there’s only one asshole in our whole community” and confidently says “Katie’s trying to fight me!”
Because on a previous pod (Episode 267) she specifically noted that "the asshole" was the one who kept observing that she kept trying to slide anti-anti-Trump content in sub rosa while simultaneously refusing adamantly to say who she'd be voting for. From the transcript (which I have to say, is helpful when it's not eating your comments!):
"K: We only have one asshole in this community. And, you know, we're going to let him stay. He popped back up.
J: He popped back up.
K: He today he was in the comments today. He was he's convinced that I'm going to vote for Donald Trump. And so I encouraged him to stake a large amount of money on that. And then after somebody somebody like bet this guy, you know who I'm talking about."
[Which I knew where to look for because I listened to it!]
Also, she literally replied to me in the thread in question:
https://www.blockedandreported.org/p/premium-tickles-pickle-ripples-giggle/comment/67188737
[Incidentally, this also shows that SHE knows that I do, in fact, listen to the podcast; she's just lying here.]
To be fair, even without this, every time the “asshole” is mentioned someone will pop up and name you as he.
I'm super late to the thread, but listened to the episode today and wanted to not directly bother Katie or Jesse or Hadley with some thoughts.
I struggled with severe anorexia beginning when I was 18 through when I was 22 or so (basically all of college). I was never hospitalized for it, though I should have been, because I wanted to hide it from my family and was scared of being pulled from school. It took a lot of work and support from friends, but I essentially got out of it myself over time.
Because I never had formal therapy for it, I feel free from some of the therapy-language and the desire to figure out a specific "reason" for my anorexia. I profoundly disconnect with Hadley's prognosis that all anorexic girls are trying to avoid womanhood...whatever it was, that wasn't it for me at all. This was the 2010's. Rather than being influenced by pop culture or porn into ideas about the perfect body, I was conscious the whole time of how sick I looked and how badly I freaked people out. I also didn't know any other anorexics, and I didn't really look at pro-ana content online, so it wasn't contagious for me.
I did relate to what Hadley said about wanting to be visibly sick. I also think Katie nailed it with comparisons to addiction or OCD. Even when I really really wanted out, I had all of these compulsive behaviors that both kept me thin and kept me alienated from others (wouldn't want to go to a party or get dinner with friends). Anyway, I just think that Hadley has maybe too-narrowly theorized an ultimate reason for girls becoming anorexic.
Ironically, I came across this Tumblr post just the other day:
https://www.tumblr.com/teaboot/762275609644793856/god-i-hate-scrolling-through-aesthetic-and
This link between ana/trans 'aesthetic' is not unnoticed, even by trans folk.
Everyone now is on The Truman show. But they know it & court it.
The guest mentioned the controversy over Jeremy Corbin and antisemitism. I would love an episode on that because I feel like that whole story had all the hallmarks of a racism/bigoty witch-hunts, except it was targeting a left wing figure. Other than that it was pretty similar in that the actual accusations were incredibly vague.
IIRC when they actually had to go to court to kick him out of the Labour Party, they ended up dropping those accusations because they knew they had nothing.
I'm glad I have a son.
Wait until you hear which gender is most likely to be a school shooter
Really great episode!
Katie - why have you guys stopped uploading to YT? I was hoping to see the video you played on this podcast.
Ok, seen it in the show notes!
I can't hear tomahto without picturing that bed and breakfast woman from Parks and Rec.
"What the f$&# is a German muffin?"