Janice Fiamengo talked her new book: The Goddess That Failed | Fireside Chat 278

"The encouragement of women to be their worst selves — that's the phrase that always comes back to me. It's like they just want women to be awful. And a lot of women, surprise, have in them the capacity to be awful." Brian and Alison talk to Professor Janice Fiamengo about her new book, The Goddess That Failed, on the founding documents of the feminist movement and what they actually say. Also: the Seneca Falls declaration, signed by men, asserting that man's object was absolute tyranny over woman; the Suzanna Danuta Walters essay instructing men how to be despised slightly less; the Redstockings manifesto and where emotional labour came from; and why women who defend a mother who killed her children can't be angry at the perpetrator. "Some of us were alive in 1974. I shopped with my mother, who had a whole bunch of credit cards." Support the show: feedthebadger.com/support Send us a message: feedthebadger.com/justthetip Join the community: badgernation.online

"Chronic bitulism. Not botulism — it's not bacterial, it's a completely different bug. A condition of chronic irrational irritability in which one draws connections between unrelated thoughts and facts, to support a continued bad mood." Brian, Hannah Wallen and Dr Randomercam on GTA VI, and a bond system that tracks time spent together, text replies and mutual attentiveness — with those numbers feeding into story outcomes. Also: the Red Dead patch that penalised players for killing the suffragette, and what the panel reads into a developer doing that; obituaries for Tim Curry, Dolly Parton and Peter Cullen, plus a game of guessing which of the three said what; and a viewer reporting a TikTok defence of Lindsey Clancy — "let's not think about her children as living people for a second, let's think of them as vases." "I don't give a shit about new bands and haven't for twenty years. I don't want to know who Cardi B is and it annoys me. That's how I feel about GTA VI — and now, out of the blue, I know all about it." Support the show: feedthebadger.com/support Send us a message: feedthebadger.com/justthetip Join the community: badgernation.online

"This isn't even a target anymore. It's the smell a target left. You know how radiation leaves a shadow? That's it. And they're saying — hey guys, try to hit it." Brian and Alison read a blog by a woman explaining that men are radicalising, and that feminist men give her the ick. Also: why going to college now reduces a man's likelihood of being married; what the genetic bottleneck argument actually shows; and her stated ask — "I'm asking for someone who thinks I am a person" — set against the 2.3 times more income liberal women want men to earn. "Apparently her personhood is denominated in buckaroos." "I've laid out these minefields of things that could destroy me should he do them. But he shouldn't feel nervous about that. He should be blithely strolling through this minefield as if he doesn't have a care in the world — while caring deeply." Support the show: feedthebadger.com/support Send us a message: feedthebadger.com/justthetip Join the community: badgernation.online

"There's a kind of ghoulish happiness about people they think are bad and dangerous being killed. They were celebrating, but they were also signalling — look at me, I'm saying the thing everyone's supposed to say." Brian sits down with Dr Benedict Beckeld, philosopher and author of Western Self-Contempt: Oikophobia in the Decline of Civilizations, on why cultures come to hold themselves in contempt — and why he thinks it isn't new, or an excess of empathy. Also: macro and micro monomania, his terms for reading all of history through one lens; which class the contempt starts in and how it spreads; the Canadian identity built on not being American; and whether the "weak men create hard times" idiom survives contact with the historical record. "Nothing is more human than taking a good idea too far. Once somebody levels a good point of self-critique against his own community, the next person has to show he's even smarter, and levels a more extreme one." Support the show: feedthebadger.com/support Send us a message: feedthebadger.com/justthetip Join the community: badgernation.online

"It's very important to not notice the thing, because if you notice the thing, it becomes your responsibility. You don't want to be responsible for it, so it doesn't exist anymore." Hannah Wallen hosts with Lauren Brooks, Mike Stevenson and Richard the Lionhearted on what a health system does to the men inside it — assessment regimes, disability payments that come in under the wage they replace, and who is trusted to explain their own symptoms. Also: baby Alfie, held until he died rather than released for treatment abroad; the invisible disabilities that get you accused of faking; and why the panel thinks the male loneliness epidemic is misnamed. "They want him to apply for a job and report to work while he's dying. And the people who assess you aren't trained nurses or doctors. They're just random people they found off the street." Support the show: feedthebadger.com/support Send us a message: feedthebadger.com/justthetip Join the community: badgernation.online

"It's like running a foot race against a seal, on dry land, and the seals are the ones judging it." Brian and Alison watch two debates against Rachel Wilson on whether feminism has done more harm than good. Also: the ten years Marxist feminists spent trying to derive the material benefit men extract from providing for women, and what they built when they couldn't; the "I'm not going to go to your Substack" exchange; and why the pool of married liberal men doesn't behave the way the advice assumes. "It's not a man getting drunk and beating his wife. It's a man not getting drunk, waking up at 5 AM, going to work in the steel mill, destroying his lungs with toxic chemicals, coming home at 10 PM and handing over his pay packet. That is men's oppression of women." Support the show: feedthebadger.com/support Send us a message: feedthebadger.com/justthetip Join the community: badgernation.online

"A male feminist stands on the world stage in a bubbling swamp of volcanic misandry, and he meticulously sets up the firing squad that will execute him." Brian, Hannah Wallen and Dr Randomercam on the women posting in solidarity with Lindsey Clancy, and the copycat cases that followed. Also: how the colour convention flipped, and why the ones who got pink never traded up to red; what Kamala Harris had to be ordered by a judge to hand over; and the argument that amplifying this makes more of it. "When you lie down with dogs that have rabies, don't be surprised if you get bit. Men, you shouldn't support feminists. Whether you do it or not, you're going to get accused eventually." Support the show: feedthebadger.com/support Send us a message: feedthebadger.com/justthetip Join the community: badgernation.online

"She's got intuition. She also has elite knife-fighting skills — she thinks she's a Barbary pirate. If she reckons she's going to knife-fight a bear, she's displaying incredible delusion about reality." Brian and Alison read a blog by a writer explaining that women choose the bear because the bear is indifferent to them, then work out that nobody asked the bear. "It's like listening to a guy brag about a yacht you know he doesn't have." Support the show: feedthebadger.com/support Send us a message: feedthebadger.com/justthetip Join the community: badgernation.online

"The worst part of a death like that is that all you can do is learn from it. You can't comfort the family. You can promise them you're going to do better, but their family member is still dead." Hannah Wallen hosts with Lauren Brooks, Mike Stevenson and Richard the Lionhearted, on an ITV News investigation into learning disabled and autistic patients dying in NHS care. Adrian Pulton, 56, went into hospital with a broken hip. He was incorrectly listed nil by mouth and went nine days without food. His sister says he told her he knew he was going to die. By the time the family worked out he wasn't being fed, he was too unwell to recover. Also: why knowing something about your own condition makes doctors less likely to diagnose it, what happens to a patient who understands everything and can't enunciate it, and the healthy seventeen-year-old whose family waited years for an answer. The trust's statement said they had undertaken an investigation "to identify any learning points." "If you don't know what NPO stands for, you don't know that your family member has been ordered no food." Support the show: feedthebadger.com/support Send us a message: feedthebadger.com/justthetip Join the community: badgernation.online

"If tomorrow men invent some anti-matter device that produces the twelve additional Earths needed to satisfy women on the left, then by making those women dependent, those men are oppressing them — so now they owe a hundred and forty-four Earths." Brian and Alison respond to an Australian video arguing that feminism is a death trap that will eat itself, and won't do it before it takes millions of unborn children with it. Also: why men on the left have to earn 2.3 times what a conservative man does to get married, the ratchet that makes today's liberal expectations tomorrow's conservative baseline, and what happens when the stay-at-home dad conversation becomes a conversation about what women want. "This is just watching two people argue over something they read on a cereal box. Can we get back into the realm of historical facts, please?" Support the show: feedthebadger.com/support Send us a message: feedthebadger.com/justthetip Join the community: badgernation.online