YouSaid · the spoken record

Rebecca Kukla

lines on the record: 72
first: 2019-01-02
most recent: 2019-01-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Empirical data and empirical science into account and to worry about what's actually happening in messy reality. But on the contrary, there's actually been, it's been prized to not get your hands dirty in that way. The kind of philosophy that manages to maximally abstract away from anything recognizable as a messy real world empirical situation has been the kind of philosophy that has been most lauded and received the most privilege in the field. And so if you can find a way to talk about fundamental ethical questions or fundamental metaphysical questions in a way that translates it all into formal propositions and little toy thought experiments and never ever gets its hands dirty with any of the complexities of everyday life, then traditionally you're the one who's doing philosophy in its purist form, right? The most a priori, the most formal, the cleanest kind of philosophy.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So many things are boring about philosophy as a field. What's most boring about philosophy as a field? So philosophy is changing really, really fast, but sometimes I have to remind myself that it's not changing as fast as I think it is because I'm in something of a philosophy sub bubble. I mostly talk to people who I find interesting and who find me interesting and we all find each other interesting. And so it's sometimes I have to remind myself that there's a whole world of philosophy out there that isn't changing as fast as it feels like it is. But I think so, you know, talking about the discipline as a whole and not necessarily the parts of it that are changing, I think the most obviously boring thing is that philosophers have for ages not only have they not felt any pressure to deal with the real messy empirical world as they find it and to take it.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's because there are other barriers that are making it hard for them to do. And the fact of the matter is they're harming their baby virtually zero by not breastfeeding. And in fact, if they breastfed a little at the beginning, they're arguably harming their baby zero. So we should, our approach should be the twin approach of supporting breastfeeding better and then leaving women alone when they choose not to do it for whatever reason or can't do it for whatever reason.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Class to me the most obvious overwhelming reason why women in the United States often don't breastfeed is that we have six weeks of unpaid leave and no further maternity leave so it's just literally physically hard to do. We're getting better but aren't that great at giving women safe spaces to breastfeed. You know, it's wonderful that there's been a movement to let women breastfeed in public, but honestly a lot of women don't want to breastfeed in public because it's stressful and it's awkward and they don't want to do that. And so giving women more spaces to do it, giving them more privacy, giving them more time off work would, I think, be the main things that would increase breastfeeding rates. I think the really important point about breastfeeding in this American context is every woman has already gotten the message over and over and over again that breastfeeding is better for their baby. They know that already. So trying to guilt them into it or give them that message over and over again is pointless and guilt inducing. If they're not breastfeeding,”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From the point of view of helping their baby that they need to do and after that it should just be a matter of whatever works for their lifestyle. Of course, on the other hand, if you're in a developing country with a poor water supply and formula that you make based on the water is going to be dangerous and formula is expensive and so forth, then compromising your ability to breastfeed by a bottle supplementation may in fact be a really bad choice because if you stop being able to breastfeed, you're going to be stuck doing this much more expensive riskier thing that you might not be in a financial or physical position to do safely. So I think there are good reasons to encourage breastfeeding and to fight back against the marketing of formula in precarious developing world countries, but really no reason here. Now as to why women here don't breastfeed when they don't, it heavily tracks race. It heavily tracks”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it depends where they are and who they are to a large extent. There's a huge worldwide emphasis on trying to get women to as they put it exclusively breastfeed as in no bottles, nothing other than breast milk. Sometimes the advice is a year. Sometimes the advice is two years. If you live in a developed country with decent medical care and a clean water supply, there's not really any interesting evidence that breastfeeding benefits your baby after certainly not after the first few weeks, but maybe not even after the first few days. There is pretty good evidence that those first few days of colostrum have a good immune effect, even on babies who are in otherwise privileged situations. So I think that women who manage to get a few days of breast milk into their baby, if they live in a developed country, have done everything”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things that you're supposed to do at the same time. So it just leads to advice that is over disciplinary and is punitive, but is also just scientifically not grounded in the facts. It's based in this mythology that women have this pure perfect being in them, but they're likely to”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a famous pregnancy book that says, with every single bite that you put in your mouth, you should be asking yourself, does this bite help my baby or am I just doing it for my own selfish end? So this idea, like literally each time you put a piece of food in you, you're supposed to be self-regulating. And this has led to advice that's not only unfollowable for women, but to get more directly back to your question, I think it leads people to see pregnant women as constantly involved in this high risk project that requires intensive risk management. And this has led to all kinds of unfollowable advice and bad science. And just guilt, right? And enormous guilt, because it's impossible, because if you were to follow all these prescriptions at once, you would have to just like not leave your room, and then you would be accused of not getting enough exercise and harming your baby that way. So, I mean, you literally can't do all the things.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It would directly mark the body of the fetus. So if they really craved strawberries, their fetus would have a strawberry birthmark, or the most hilarious one is if they found themselves accidentally lusting after a black man, their baby would turn out black. So there was this idea that we had to completely control women's environments and keep them in a nice, calm, low stimulation environment throughout their pregnancy so that they didn't destroy their fetus because they were so weak and prone to these things. I think this even though very few people would claim that directly anymore, that mentality continues now. There's this idea that pregnant women can't get too emotional or the stress will destroy their fetus or they can't eat too much or they're going to turn their fetus into a future obese person. It's a whole other conversation. Or they can't, I mean, they're supposed to regulate how much sex they have, when they have sex, what they eat, what they breathe, what they wear. There's this one.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kinds of bad behaviors as not really understanding science very well, so as not knowing how to regulate their bodies, as being undisciplined and so on. And so we've developed this kind of double idea that women's bodies are super risky, but also have this incredibly important task. And as a result, I think we've developed all kinds of science and norms and advice based around this idea that women have to be hyper-disciplined and hyper-controlled at all times, particularly when they're pregnant or things will go terribly, terribly awry. So if you go back a couple hundred, this is my favorite example of this. If you go back a couple hundred years, there was this supposedly scientific concept of the maternal imagination. And the idea was that if pregnant women saw things or felt things or encountered things during their pregnancy that got them all riled up,”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, one part of it is arguably just true and not the part that I really pick on, which is that pregnant women are responsible with their bodies for creating the next generation of people, right? So in some sense, the pregnant body has a kind of a civic responsibility, which is really distinctive. Out of that pregnant body is going to come a person who is going to belong to the next generation. And so there's been this sort of longstanding idea that goes back several hundred years that the pregnant body creates the body politics so we all have a collective investment in how that process goes. So far so good. At the same time, though, pregnant women's bodies have been seen as profoundly untrustworthy. I think because women and women's bodies have been seen as profoundly untrustworthy, right? Women have been seen as easily swayed by hormones and emotions as fragile, as easy to tempt into various”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, topic change. In a way, but not quite. No, yeah, no, that's fine. I was waiting for more misogyny. This is a kind of misogyny, I guess, yeah. I think that there's a long, so this was what my first book, Mass Hysteria, was about. I think that we have a centuries-old way of conceiving the pregnant body and the task of pregnancy that has led to some really profound distortions in how we understand pregnancy and particularly how we understand what pregnant women should do, what their responsibilities are, and how we give advice to pregnant women. And in particular, we have seen”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I love about Professor Mann's version is what she wants to say is, look, misogyny is a system of social norms that are embedded in our practices and in our environments and our institutions that serve to punish women who step out of their proper gender roles and keep women in various ways in the primary role of serving men's needs. And that part at that level of generality, I think, is extremely helpful.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's going to go a long way towards making clear a lot of social phenomena. And the reason I like it, what I like most about it, so I disagree with Kate Mann in some of the details, but what I really appreciate most about her account is that misogyny becomes about social structures and social norms rather than about particular men having particular icky ideas or intentions in their head. In general, I think trying to figure out what's going on inside people's heads or what they're feeling or what they're intending is kind of morally uninteresting and epistemologically impossible. We never know what's going on in people's heads. And in fact, the empirical evidence shows that we don't know what's going on in our own heads very well either. You can prove that people don't understand their own intentions or the contents of their own minds very well. So I think understanding misogyny as hateful attitudes towards women or ill intentions towards women is a non-starter.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's fair. Okay, so to be both a philosopher and an economist for a moment, I think that as a philosopher, what I'm going to say is that terms like misogyny, as they're used in lay language don't have single neat meanings. People's actual uses of them on the ground are messy and conflictual and so on. So when we say, is this the proper understanding of misogyny? We always have to understand that as a kind of a normative or a prescriptive project as much as a descriptive project. What we're saying is, is this the most useful, productive way of understanding misogyny, understanding that there's going to be lots of other things that people mean by it that don't fall under this heading and lots of other things that we could have called misogyny that aren't going to fit it and so on. But is this a productive strategy? And if that's how I'm understanding the question, then I think yes, I think it's a very productive understanding of massage.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Women, so why speak as a woman? But I do think that there are times where a conversation is going on in a way that universalizes a male positioning and it helps to intrude into that conversation and say, look, there are other people in the room who don't have the position that you are presuming. Now, that doesn't mean that we all have the same position as one another, but it does mean that there's a usefulness to reminding people rhetorically sometimes that what might seem like a universal position is not in fact a universal position. So speaking as a woman might just mean speaking as not the kind of man who all of you are right now presuming is the neutral case or not even noticing that you're taking as the neutral case.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was not substitutable by somebody who hadn't had that set of experiences. So it was very important to include women's voice quay women so that they could represent this perspective in this set of experiences. I think that over the years the idea that there is a thing no matter how much you pair back, that there is a thing that is women's common experiences or women's common perspective has become increasingly debunked, including among feminists. Almost nobody would stand up for that anymore. Everybody understands that every woman is different and that women's experience are inflected by their race, class, body shape, ability level, age, region of the country, just innumerable details that are going to intersect with and shape their experience. So there isn't such a thing as the women's perspective. So you might think that that means that there's never a point to saying speaking as a woman, blah, blah, blah, because you can never speak for”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A fantastic question, and there are so many levels of complexity in how to answer it. I am trying to choose. So I think that is it okay if I sort of wind back and go back 20 years and then make my way back to the question. So I think that 20 or 30 years ago, a lot of feminist philosophers were just starting what's now known as standpoint epistemology, which is a version of epistemology that in its sophisticated form, I'm very sympathetic with. But in its early relatively unsophisticated form, the idea was that women just in virtue of belonging to the group women had a particular perspective coming out of their set of experiences that”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We hear high is less serious than low, right? Before we even get to that point, why do high voices sound unserious to us? And why does uptalking sound unserious to us? So I think at a very basic, basic level that even women don't generally question, just everything that's coded as feminine comes off as less authoritative. And I really want to make sure to add on here or bring back in the point that plenty of women are not particularly feminine. So it's not like we can just avoid this by not coming off as feminine because if we don't come off as feminine, then there are a whole other set of penalties that we're subject to, that we come off as violating norms or as just hard to understand or as I don't want to use a bad word on the air, but as meriting various gendered insults that get thrown our way a lot if we don't uphold those norms.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I actually think that everything I just said holds just as much or almost as much for women as for men. I think we're all trained up really early regardless of our own gender. We're all trained up extremely early on hearing male voices as authoritative and seeing masculine self-presentations as authoritative. And so we don't see them as authoritative in women either whether or not we are a woman. It was actually a real eye-opener for me a lot of times women will get advice to do things like not up talk where you end your comment with what sounds like a question, right? That's up talking and women do it more than men do. And we're told that it sounds weak and open-ended or we're told not to talk in a high voice because high voices are coded as non-authoritative and unserious. And I sort of accepted all that advice until somebody pointed out to me one day that the prior question is why”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are appropriate behavior than men are. I think there's almost no way we can position ourselves so that we sound as experts. So oftentimes the content of our words matters less than our embodied presentation as a woman.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A rhetorical disadvantage that we're at That's a fascinating question. I think that there is almost no correct way for a woman to use her voice and hold her body to project the proper kind of expertise and authority in a conversation. I think that there's massive, I don't even want to call it a double bind because it's a multidimensional bind where if we sound to feminine sounding feminine in this culture is coded as frivolous and unserious if we sound too unfeminine then we sound like we are violating gender norms or like we are unpleasant or trying to be like a man. I think that almost any way in which we position ourselves if we try to be polite and make nice then we come off as weak. If we don't make nice then we're held to a higher standard for”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source