Maiden Mother Matriarch with Louise Perry

In this bonus episode for paid subscribers, I spoke with Ed West about the nativist protests in Dover and Portsmouth, and how the British government might respond. Will there be moves to ban face coverings and crack down on protest movements? Or will the government give way to the Right, and put an end to the asylum crisis?

Aboriginal people have lived in Australia for at least 65,000 years, surviving as hunter gatherers. 250 years ago, the British arrived, bringing with them industrial modernity, as well as disease and – sometimes – violence. During most of this modern period, British settlers and their descendants adopted what has been called "the great Australian silence", paying little attention to the Aboriginal people they had displaced. Since the 1960s there has been a transformation in how non-indigenous Australians think about indigenous culture and history. One of the key voices in this transformation has been that of the anthropologist and linguist Peter Sutton, who has a particular expertise in Aboriginal languages and has lived and worked with Aboriginal people all over Australia for more than half a century. In 2011, Peter published a book titled 'The Politics of Suffering', in which he argued that decades of liberal policy in outback communities had worsened the suffering of Aboriginal people. Today we discuss what Australians get wrong about indigenous affairs.

In this bonus episode for paid subscribers, I spoke with Nina Power about the power of communism as an ideology.

You may think that you don't care about status. You may tell yourself that since you're not bothered about material displays of wealth, that means that you are above petty disputes over where one stands in the social pecking order. The author and journalist Will Storr says you're wrong. Everybody cares about status, he argues, even if we don't realise it. We are evolved to obsess over status, and to immediately recognise it. You don't identify a high status person (solely) through their expensive car or designer clothes. You also notice their more relaxed postures, their better health, the fact that other people interrupt them less often, the fact that they have more friends. Everyone wants to be high status, whether or not they'll admit it.  These status games aren't something we can avoid, but by better understanding them we can play them more judiciously. That's what Will Storr's book, The Status Game, is all about. 

In this bonus episode, Mary Harrington and I spoke about the public response to the Lindsay Clancy murder case. Be warned, there are some dark themes discussed.

There is a certain kind of caricature of women that pops up in cultural commentary right now. Modern women, we are told, are inundated with male attention at all times, and all of it is deeply unwelcome. According to this view, says Phoebe Maltz Bovy, “straight women merely put up with men’s advances because we don’t want them to murder us, or because we rely on them for a roof over our heads, or maybe because they seem nice and this is our way of saying thank you.” In a new book 'The Last Straight Woman', Phoebe asks us to forget this caricature of 21st century womanhood, and to take a moment to think of the frumpy, horny women who are often forgotten in this discourse. The women who sincerely and enthusiastically desire men, and find that they get less male attention than they would like. Today we discussed whether #MeToo was only concerned with "hot girls", why so many women are identifying as something other than heterosexual, the politics of female agency, and much more.MMM is sponsored by 321 - a new online introduction to Christianity, presented by former MMM guest Glen Scrivener. Check it out for free at 321course.com/MMM. Just enter your email, choose a password and you’re in — there’s no spam and no fees.