Diary of a CEO: Self-Help or Red-Pill Pipeline?
Image Credit : Alan Quirvan via Unsplash
Steven Bartlett seems to have a strange obsession with population decline. Not to say that it is a non-issue. In a society where young people are having less sex, women are less likely to have children, and incel culture is on the rise, it is understandable for one to question how we might adapt to a new, less-populous world. But Bartlett's angle on the matter is not so subtly reflective of a certain manosphere ideology. And with the podcast’s setup, portraying itself as credible educational self-help content, with supposed ‘subject experts’, insightful and therapy-coded questions, the damaging ideology seemingly becomes more legitimate. Hence, when Bartlett asked his guest, Dr Alok Kanojia, “Should we put systems in place to make sure these men [incels] meet partners?” he inadvertently set an agenda for discussions around population decline, blaming women for the issue and simultaneously casting them as tools for the solution. This sentiment, a supposed entitlement to women’s bodies, lies at the centre of incel rhetoric, a subculture of men who blame women for their involuntary celibacy. The proposition sparked outrage online and was aptly compared to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopian novel about a not-so-distant future society where women are forced to procreate (or state-legalised raped, to put it more bluntly) to alleviate a population crisis.
It is important to note here that Dr K rejected this notion, explicitly stating that no one has the “right to reproduce”. But the real issue arises with Bartlett’s initial questioning, which poses an increasingly dangerous subculture in the form of genuine critical thought, which is then seriously engaged with by a ‘legitimate’ expert. One may debate whether this was simply a case of the audience’s inability to critically grapple with uncomfortable discourse, given that it is generally agreed that one can ask a question without tying oneself to that opinion. But the fact that he consistently brings up the subject on a platform with 14.6 million subscribers suggests another story.
A recent interview with ‘self-help’ guru and Love Island star Chris Williamson (take that combination as you will) sparked an even more ominous conversation. They again discuss the ‘issue’ of population decline, blaming it primarily on women’s emancipation. “Is it not a consequence of the fact that we have more freedom?” Bartlett asks his pseudo-intellectual interviewee. “It’s more like ‘me me me’ now. There is a subtle narcissism which is bred in society,” he continues. And ‘blaming’ is the key word here. The discussion honed an obvious and surreptitious cynical contempt of women, as if they were the selfish narcissists that should tolerate the sacrifices of child-bearing as a matter of retaining ‘family’ values.
Population decline is a complex combination of social and economic factors, which they blatantly played down, as was any consideration of a woman’s autonomy. Similar to much of Bartlett’s work in the realm of male ‘self-help’, including the Dr K video, women are marginalised from the conversation. The use of scientific jargon wilfully ignores women’s agency, portraying them as abstract non-identities, a means to the end of ‘passing on one’s genes’.
Again, one may argue that critical engagement with these controversial concepts is essential to keep them from the dark corners of the internet, hidden and unchallenged. But the key point here is that Bartlett seems to remain wholly uncritical. Whether information is empirically untrue or morally questionable, he makes little attempt to scrutinise or question the discourse at hand. All we get is an emphatic “that’s interesting” or “I never thought of it like that”. The audience is thus left to follow along with the proposed narrative.
The male entitlement being promoted through his deliberately pointed questions and disregard of women’s narrative position plausibly implies that Bartlett has swallowed the infamous red pill, or at the very least has the pill firmly in his hand. This is a wake-up call for women. The manosphere is not some subculture buzzing in the depths of a Reddit thread, or a farcical, raging bald guy humping his Bugatti. Bartlett is a paradigm case of such ideology being served to the masses in the form of palatable intellectual self-help.