Why Are Young People So DIVIDED? (An ANTI-Woke Feminist's View)
In Part One of this episode of The Breaking Point Podcast, I spoke with Connie Shaw, host of The Fringe Podcast and self-proclaimed 'woke anti-woke feminist.' Connie breaks down her unique stance—defending sex-based rights, questioning woke culture, and rejecting victimhood narratives about systemic oppression in the West.
From her role as editor of Leeds Student Radio to facing cancellation over her bold views, she shares her story of battling student backlash and navigating free speech controversies. We tackle big topics: feminism, anti-woke perspectives, cancel culture, social contagion, oppression myths, young women’s success, male struggles, suicide rates, homelessness, and the shifting meanings of sexism and racism. Plus, explore why young women may lean politically correct and how mass psychogenic illness ties in.
Key Takeaways:
Anti-Woke Feminism Defined
Connie Shaw identifies as an anti-woke feminist, advocating for sex-based rights while rejecting systemic oppression narratives in the West.
Young Women Outpace Men:
Statistics show young women surpassing young men in education, earnings, and social metrics, challenging traditional gender narratives.
Cancel Culture Targets Dissenters:
The harshest cancellations often target left-leaning individuals who deviate from progressive norms, such as Connie and figures like Graham Linehan.
Social Contagion Among Young Women:
Phenomena like eating disorders and identity trends suggest young women are particularly susceptible to mass psychogenic illness.
Oppression Needs Context:
Connie critiques the overuse of "oppression" in the West, arguing it dilutes the term for women facing extreme regimes like the Taliban.
Leftist Hypocrisy in Categorisation:
Progressive ideology ironically mirrors right-wing tendencies by boxing people into identity categories, undermining its own goals.
Personal Resilience:
Despite accusations of grifting, Connie’s strong sense of justice drives her to challenge prevailing views, even at personal cost.
Companies mentioned in this episode:
- Fringe podcast
- Leeds Student Radio
- Free Speech Union
- Battle of Ideas
- Andrew Gold
- Graham Linehan
- J.K. Rowling
- Matt Walsh
- Daily Wire
- Charlie Bentley Aster
Transcript
Hello everybody.
Speaker A:Welcome back to another episode of the Breaking Point podcast.
Speaker A:Today we are here with Connie Shaw.
Speaker A:Connie is the host of the Fringe podcast.
Speaker A:Connie, you describe yourself as anti woke feminist.
Speaker A:So what is an anti woke feminist?
Speaker B:Well, I describe myself as that, but I'm still trying to decipher what that actually means.
Speaker B:And I've spoken before about how I do find it quite difficult sometimes to reconcile being anti woke and being a feminist.
Speaker B:Because lots of people who are anti woke consider feminism to be woke.
Speaker B:But I would say currently to be an anti woke feminist, it mainly means believing in the sex based rights of women and not believing in gender.
Speaker B:So being a gender critical feminist or a sex realist feminist would be, and being an anti woke feminist in general, I would say I'm pretty anti woke in the sense that I think it's quite damaging to build a society based on how many oppression points collective groups have.
Speaker B:Which in itself seems contradictory to the idea that feminism is trying to fight against the oppression of women.
Speaker B:One thing that winds me up about some feminist narratives is that the idea that women in the UK or in the west in general are systematically oppressed.
Speaker B:I don't believe that.
Speaker B:I believe there is sexism.
Speaker B:I don't believe we are systematically oppressed in the same way that women living under the Taliban.
Speaker B:If we call ourselves oppressed, then we don't have another word to refer to women living under horrific regimes.
Speaker B:So in that sense I would say I'm an anti woke feminist because I don't want to paint myself as a victim as a woman.
Speaker B:But I'm still able to recognize that there are serious things that we need to overcome when it comes to the way that women are treated because of their sex.
Speaker B:And I would say at the moment the biggest hurdle to it is gender ideology in the West.
Speaker B:And so in that way, because gender ideology is woke, I consider myself an anti white feminist.
Speaker A:Just going on the feminist point, it's really interesting you bring that up because it's something that rattles around my head quite a lot.
Speaker A:The statistics on how much better young women are doing than young men are just staggering.
Speaker A:And the fact that more people don't know about it, if you look at basically every single aspect of life, you find that young women do better, they're doing better than young men, they earn more, they're better educated, they have more friends, they have more sex, they have more better relationships.
Speaker A:Now 80% of people that kill themselves are men, 90% of people that die whilst working, and then 75% of homeless people are men.
Speaker A:The list just goes on and on.
Speaker A:And one of the things that baffles me and I think really gets under my skin is how as a society, we don't view suicidality rates as a view of who is struggling and how the term oppression has many terms, actually.
Speaker A:If you look at all the isms, you can see that, what, racism, sexism and all those things.
Speaker A:All the.
Speaker A:What are they?
Speaker A:Oh, what's the word?
Speaker A:Begins with the discriminatory sort of terms.
Speaker A:If you look at their definition 20, 30 years ago, what they mean now is almost so far separated from what they originally meant that you almost can't even consider them to be the same terms because they don't really mean the same thing.
Speaker A:Maybe the crux is there, but the petals or whatever, so to speak, the outskirts have completely changed shape, form, color and everything.
Speaker A:So what your history, your.
Speaker A:When I was watching another podcast that you were on and you were speaking about how you were once a sort of pro.
Speaker A:Let.
Speaker A:Let's get into what happened, what you're doing now, and what happened with you at university and what it is that you did to end up in the situation that you're in.
Speaker B:Yeah, so I was elected as the Daytime editor at Leeds Student Radio, also known as lsr.
Speaker B:And I started that position in the start of this academic year in September.
Speaker B:And at the same time I started my own podcast, which I purposely made separate from LSR because I knew that they probably would not want to be platforming my beliefs, such as the fact that I was gender critical.
Speaker B:And part why this is so relevant to my role as the Daytime editor is that I was overseeing all of the talk shows on lsr.
Speaker B:And there are five talk shows, and they include Politics Hour, Women's Hour, and LGBTQ Hour, as well as two others.
Speaker B:And so the fact that I was talking about gender ideology on my podcast from a gender critical perspective meant that there was a lot of backlash from students.
Speaker B:And the second episode that I did was an interview with a detransitioner, Charlie Bentley Aster, and that got quite a lot of backlash.
Speaker B:And the person who helped me edit that podcast, because he put so much time into helping me edit, I credited him in a caption.
Speaker B:And he received an official warning from a separate society and was told that he must distance himself from me and my work and if he didn't, further measures would be taken.
Speaker B:So at that point I purchased my Free Speech Union membership, just in case, because clearly if that can happen to someone who helped me edit, then someone at some point is probably going to come for me, who actually made the podcast.
Speaker B:And then I continued with the podcast.
Speaker B:I did a couple of other episodes.
Speaker B:LSR went to the Battle of Ideas on Media Passes.
Speaker B:And the Battle of Ideas is a freedom of Speech festival.
Speaker B:And we advertised the event as a station, we did a ticket giveaway, and at that event we'd secured interviews as LSR through the organizers, but I'd also personally secured interviews with Andrew Gold and Graham Linehan.
Speaker B:And the day that I published the Graham linen episode was the 28th of October.
Speaker B:And then the following day, Graham published an article that I wrote for his substack, in which I was describing how gender ideology has captured University of Leeds.
Speaker B:And then the day after that, on the 30th of October, I received an email telling me that I'd been suspended from my committee position and as a member of lsr, and that I was being investigated by the student union as a result of my social media substack and media production.
Speaker B:And I was accused of putting the health and safety of other members at risk of not acting in a duty of care.
Speaker B:And so that investigation went on for a month and I went to an interview and they told me that the investigation was not about my right to hold and say gender critical views.
Speaker B:But they then asked me, how do you maintain an inclusive environment at nsr, considering your choice to publicly post your views makes some people feel unincluded.
Speaker A:It's a big problem.
Speaker B:So on one hand, I was told it wasn't about my views, but then I was asked a question directly about my views and how that impacts other people.
Speaker B:The outcome of the investigation was that the allegations of misconduct were dropped.
Speaker B:But there is another allegation that I had brought LSR into disreputed and they maintained that allegation and that is the basis on which they removed me from my committee position and they said that I could still return as a member, but if I wanted to run committee again next year, I would have to write a written apology to the wider membership and take mandatory training in online conduct.
Speaker B:And so the Free Speech Union is helping me with my appeal and that's where I stand now that that decision is now in the process of an appeal.
Speaker A:There's two things that sort of poke the heads out of me, given what you just said and obviously your whole sort of story.
Speaker A:One is, as a society and as a language, the parlance of the word gender needs to be abolished.
Speaker A:It doesn't.
Speaker A:The idea that gender's a construct is actually true by definition.
Speaker A:It's a Construct, it was made up by a person, I think his name was Dr.
Speaker A:Mooney, who.
Speaker A:I don't want to, I don't know the story verbatim, so I almost don't want to quote it.
Speaker A:But you should go and look it up and.
Speaker A:Because it's an awful story.
Speaker A:And what gender basically is, is personality to some degree.
Speaker A:So there's spectrums or distributions of personality and there's like, there's a bell curve for the sexes and there's, there's a bulk where most men end up here and most women end up here or whatever.
Speaker A:But there's always going to be outliers and the likelihood that there's a.
Speaker A:Potentially a likelihood that the, the personality traits that women are more likely to land on the high end of the distribution.
Speaker A:There's a likelihood that as a biological woman you may end up on the lower or vice versa.
Speaker A:And you may end up on the lower on multiple ones and you may have a personality as we've all known, that is not very stereotypically feminine.
Speaker A:The word stereotype is correct because as humans we need stereotypes because we actually need to fit things into boxes.
Speaker A:Because if we don't fit something into a box we actually can't really compute it and we're surrounded by chaos and all this links in.
Speaker A:So that's the first thing.
Speaker A:Gender needs to be abolished and we need to just look at people as.
Speaker A:And I almost think this is one of the.
Speaker A:So ironic about leftist ideology is that.
Speaker A:And when you mentioned identity politics is we've actually just moved.
Speaker A:They've taken stereotypical right wing, left wing tendencies and twisted them and they've come back out the other end and they've overlaid them onto different aspects.
Speaker A:So now you fit into this category.
Speaker A:But I thought the whole point of progression was to move away from categories.
Speaker A:But now we're putting you into this category.
Speaker A:So you're a white, straight, cisgendered, heterosexual male.
Speaker A:That's your demographic.
Speaker A:That's what we judge you based on.
Speaker A:People with progressive idea values tend to be creative.
Speaker A:It's a hallmark of being progressive.
Speaker A:But they're willing to put you into a category.
Speaker A:So it's very interesting, that whole thing.
Speaker A:The second thing that comes out is the cancel culture that is basically almost entirely a product of the left is very interesting.
Speaker A:You don't really find people on the right canceling people on the left.
Speaker A:I don't know if that's ever really happened.
Speaker A:I'm sure it has.
Speaker A:I'm sure there are examples.
Speaker A:But the vitriol and the Vexatiousness behind what's happened to you and what's happened to people you've spoken to is another really interesting thing.
Speaker A:So why do you think the left has become so is willing to demonize people more than vice versa?
Speaker B:I think it's interesting you saying how it's mainly people on the right who get canceled by the left.
Speaker B:Because as much as I think that is true, I think the worst cancellations happen to the people who are on the left who don't go along with everything that the left believes in.
Speaker B:So people like Graham Linehan, he is left wing and J.K.
Speaker B:rowling is left wing.
Speaker B:Rosie Duffield was a.
Speaker B:Was an MP for the Labour Party.
Speaker B:But because they don't go along with gender ideology, they have been the most.
Speaker B:They have suffered the most from cancellation idea because they're seen as outcasts from a cult.
Speaker B:Whereas people who are always on the right, for example, Matt Walsh is almost like.
Speaker B:To be fair, maybe I'm.
Speaker B:I don't know, maybe he was cancelled in a way, but it's not the same because he was.
Speaker B:He already had his own tribe, whereas he wasn't saying anything out of the ordinary.
Speaker B:He was already a conservative.
Speaker B:He already.
Speaker B:I mean I come from gender ideology from a different perspective to him.
Speaker B:He sees it more in the sense that I think he does believe there are certain roles that women are more suited to.
Speaker A:Yeah, I'm not a fan of the Daily Wire platform and although people associate.
Speaker B:It with it, I agree with that to an extent.
Speaker B:I do think there are the fact that I do think the eyed women are more likely to be nurturing and have a maternal nature.
Speaker B:I think some of that is rooted in biology.
Speaker B:But I think that he will see that.
Speaker B:That a lot more sort of.
Speaker B:I do and I come at it from a feminist perspective.
Speaker B:So for him it wasn't experienced the same backlash in the same way that Graham has, for example, because like you said, to be progressive often goes hand in hand with being in the arts.
Speaker B:And so he was in that.
Speaker B:And the same with J.K.
Speaker B:rowling, the same with Jenny Lindsay, same with.
Speaker B:So it's.
Speaker B:Yeah, it's.
Speaker B:Who is sort of leaving the cult.
Speaker B:I mean with Charlie Bentley Aster, she was in theater and when she detransitioned, she was effectively outcast from her peers.
Speaker A:That's really awful there.
Speaker A:That is one that gets you, isn't it?
Speaker A:Someone who is trying to.
Speaker A:It's coming from the horse's mouth, isn't it?
Speaker A:And that is the greatest indication of a blind obedience to something because that's not genuine compassion and that's.
Speaker A:So just going back to the.
Speaker A:What was I going to say?
Speaker A:You were speaking about Matt Walsh.
Speaker A:So do you, do you not think that women being more nurturing is biological?
Speaker B:I do to an extent, yeah.
Speaker B:But I don't.
Speaker B:I think I probably, maybe I'm unfairly painting his views on this.
Speaker B:I would imagine that he, more so than me would be in favor and I'm not saying he is actually in favor of this, but I think he would be more sympathetic to the idea that really a woman's place is in the home.
Speaker B:I'm not saying to say that, but I think he'd be more sympathetic to.
Speaker B:In an ideal society, mothers would be homemakers and child rearers and whereas I'm.
Speaker B:It doesn't really.
Speaker B:Yeah, maybe an ideal society, but I don't think that's a fair society.
Speaker A:Yeah, no, the.
Speaker A:If I was to steal man the anti patriarchal viewpoint, I would say that narcissists find a way in under the little slit in the membrane to get underneath and then they cause a damage underneath.
Speaker A:So I would say if you look at really interesting sort of case study is, is Hugh Hefner, when he was trying to push his Playboy, he came out with all the rhetoric of, oh well, I think women getting.
Speaker A:Allowing them to be photos taken of them, et cetera, et cetera, in a provocative manner is actually really liberating for them.
Speaker A:And it's.
Speaker A:It's pro feminism and basically.
Speaker A:And then what came out, which is obvious, what came out when he died, is that he was an awful person, didn't care about anyone but himself.
Speaker A:And that's what narcissist people do.
Speaker A:They find their way in, they exploit it.
Speaker A:And then they.
Speaker A:The same thing happened with cigarettes.
Speaker A:I think the guy that either was the biggest owner of the largest of the largest cigarette company or even the guy that invented cigarettes, found when the suffragette movement was taking place, he saw a sort of a gap in the market where he thought, well, I can just make more money out of people by now by saying that smoking's for everyone or women can smoke or something.
Speaker A:So the point I'm trying to make is that someone like Matt Walsh, not that I'm not him particular, but that sort of.
Speaker A:If I was to take a stance, what I believe is the most sophisticated stance on the left would be that narcissist.
Speaker A:Narcissist.
Speaker A:I've sort of tied myself in knots here.
Speaker A:What am I trying to say?
Speaker A:They would their own agenda, they further their own agenda.
Speaker A:By playing on the prevailing ethic or even the counter ethics so that they can paint themselves as if they're the.
Speaker A:The vanguard and they're fighting for the oppressed and all that.
Speaker A:And I think that that's my problem with the whole sort of the Matt Walsh Daily Wire.
Speaker A:I can't work out if you're genuine or if you're just taking a position to further your own agenda.
Speaker A:And there's many people that are doing that and that's one of the same.
Speaker B:Thing over and over again.
Speaker B:The students at Leeds repeatedly call me a grifter and that I love negative attention.
Speaker B:I love spreading negativity and hate for the sake of it because I'm a narcissist.
Speaker B:I've been accused of being an artist.
Speaker A:And it is a great.
Speaker A:It's a buzzword at the moment, isn't it?
Speaker A:So.
Speaker A:And just used it as well.
Speaker A:It's a bit of a.
Speaker A:Of a trope.
Speaker A:You would you say your temperament is.
Speaker A:Because you strike me as quite a disagreeable person at heart.
Speaker A:And that's not a bad thing, by the way.
Speaker A:I'm.
Speaker A:I'm an agreeable person and it's a fucking pain in the ass a lot of the time.
Speaker A:So what do you agree with that or do you think I've got that completely wrong?
Speaker B:I guess to lots of people I'd be a disagreeable person, but I get what you mean.
Speaker B:I probably wouldn't use the term disagreeable.
Speaker B:I just think I've.
Speaker B:I mean even looking back at reports, my school reports from primary school and then into secondary school, more than once different teachers who have never met each other have described me as having a strong sense of justice, which I don't like that we're all having like a moral compass.
Speaker B:And at school, yeah, I was a snitch and I felt like I had a duty to like call what was wrong thought was wrong.
Speaker B:Things have happened in my life which have made me very.
Speaker B:Not.
Speaker B:I can't think of a better word, but basically stubborn and very sure in what I think is right and wrong, ironically.
Speaker B:But I.
Speaker B:I don't think is that I'm very open to changing my mind in the sense that when I was at school I believed that trans women were women and to think otherwise was hateful.
Speaker B:Changed my mind.
Speaker B:So I'm very open to.
Speaker B:I'm.
Speaker B:I'm desperate to have debates about things.
Speaker B:And that's what's so annoying about the student reaction to my work is that they keep saying that all I'm interested in is showing how I'm right.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:Which an extent, of course, isn't everyone, aren't they?
Speaker B:They're the ones who've kicked me out of the Facebook group, which kind of.
Speaker B:Yeah, I've.
Speaker B:People like, well, please come and speak to me.
Speaker B:I want to be challenged.
Speaker B:They won't, but it's like, I don't.
Speaker B:If they really think that what I'm doing is that wrong, surely they'd want to challenge me.
Speaker B:That's the whole reason why I challenge gender ideology, because I think it's wrong and harm.
Speaker A:Well, it goes back to the whole category thing that I was bringing up earlier.
Speaker A:It's easier to just put you in the box of devil, and we don't touch the box of devil.
Speaker A:And anyone that even entertains the box of devil or flirts with the box of devil is therefore a bad person.
Speaker A:So we can't go near you.
Speaker A:You.
Speaker A:One of the things I do find exceptionally interesting, and I've done quite a bit of research into that, is this idea that for many reasons, women are far more politically correct than men as a.
Speaker A:And.
Speaker A:And I've asked various, you know, spoken about it, and anecdotally, I do find that is the case.
Speaker A:And I think it's really, really.
Speaker A:Did you.
Speaker A:Did you know that women used to be far more conservative than men politically?
Speaker B:I didn't know that, apparently.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Until I think it maybe was like the thousands, but maybe I've got that completely wrong.
Speaker A:But I.
Speaker A:What that is the.
Speaker A:The.
Speaker A:I would say, well, it was because they were under the.
Speaker A:Of patriarchy and they needed to be dispelled and.
Speaker A:And they were dispelled.
Speaker A:And now they see the truth and.
Speaker A:And all that.
Speaker A:And.
Speaker A:And maybe.
Speaker A:Maybe there's some truth to that.
Speaker A:But I think that.
Speaker A:Well, a.
Speaker A:If I'm more agreeable temperamentally, then it makes sense that they're going to be more politically correct because they want to tell the party that they don't want to cause uproar, they want to keep the peace.
Speaker A:And that makes sense.
Speaker A:But I also think there's a respectful authority that women have more than men sometimes.
Speaker A:And I wonder if that's got something to do with hypergamy and their tendency to look up from a dating and mating point of view.
Speaker A:I don't know.
Speaker A:There's not a lot of.
Speaker A:There's a bit of research done into it, obviously, but there's not loads of research done into it, probably for obvious reasons.
Speaker A:But why do you think, if that is the case?
Speaker A:Why could that be?
Speaker B:Well, I can only speak from my own Experience, I feel like I used to be like.
Speaker B:And from my experience of talking and being in seminars with other girls my age at university, there is, yeah, the fear to disagree.
Speaker B:And I think it's because girls are, for some reason, yeah, they're interested in being kind and empathetic.
Speaker B:And when things like.
Speaker B:Like it's happened to me happens, that's not going to encourage more women to speak out.
Speaker B:Although I have had many messages from young women saying, thank you so much for talking about it.
Speaker B:I wish I could talk about it, but I can't.
Speaker B:So it's nice to see someone my age doing it.
Speaker B:So they're saying to me privately that they wish they could talk about it, but they can't publicly.
Speaker B:And so I actually have no idea how many girls at uni agree with me because if they do, they're keeping very quiet.
Speaker B:And I can imagine in seminars when I'm saying something that is making nearly everyone look at me in a really suspicious way, that when others see that happening, they're thinking, well, I don't want to start agreeing with Connie because I don't want to be looked at or spoken to in the way that she is.
Speaker B:So it's almost impossible to know.
Speaker B:Maybe it's just the vocal minority possibly that are happy to speak out.
Speaker B:I think there are far more women who don't believe in it than do.
Speaker B:I think it's only young women as well.
Speaker B:I think very few older women believe in this.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Well, a really interesting thing is that if you look at something like the phenomenon of.
Speaker A:Of mpi, which is a mass psychogenic illness, you find that the most that are most susceptible to being swept up in.
Speaker A:In a mass psychogenic illness are young women.
Speaker A:You look.
Speaker A:And throughout history that's been the case.
Speaker A:You look at something like the Harlem witch trials.
Speaker A:There's no evidence for this, but I would.
Speaker A:Whatever went on there would have been an example of an mpi.
Speaker A:Something happened, then it just spread through the young women of the group.
Speaker A:You look at something like eating disorders, you find that eating disorders spread in friendship groups through each other.
Speaker A:You find there was been some ridiculous MPIs.
Speaker B:It was the same with self harm as well.
Speaker A:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker B:Just another one.
Speaker B:We had a whole.
Speaker B:There was a friendship group where nearly all of them had an identity.
Speaker B:Like one friend saying to me, it's almost like they had said to each other, oh, just say you're this.
Speaker B:Like it's.
Speaker B:But I decide whether it was because naturally people who want to become friends with others who can relate, or is it like it's chicken and egg.
Speaker B:Did they become friends with each other or were they already friends?
Speaker B:One person comes out as something and I'm not saying that they were faking it or whatever, but it was strange that nearly all of them in this one friendship group seemed to have a really specific sexuality or a gender identity.
Speaker B:And not to say that there weren't other people in other friendship groups who didn't, but they all seem to group together.
Speaker B:And yeah, it's very obvious and there needs to be more research into why this is something that girls do.
Speaker B:But you're completely right and that's why it's so obvious that this is just the next social contagion.
Speaker B:And if this is the current one, then it's quite scary to think what it could be in the future.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Well, is.
Speaker A:So I think the.
Speaker A:Sorry to interrupt you.
Speaker A:You're going to say something else.
Speaker B:I was going to say just in, like, suicidality is another one.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Yes, of course.
Speaker A:God.
Speaker A:So you were saying.
Speaker A:You just said, why?
Speaker A:Why is this.
Speaker A:And immediate reaction was, is.
