Episode 64: Transcript

Episode: 64: How Science Is Redefining the Penis

Transcription by Keffy

Annalee: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about science fiction and everything else. I’m Annalee Newitz. I’m a science journalist who writes science fiction.

Charlie Jane: [00:00:10] I’m Charlie Jane Anders. I’m a science fiction writer who thinks a lot about science.

Annalee: [00:00:15] A lot of our science and science fiction is shaped by the idea of evolution that Charles Darwin and his buddies cooked up in the mid-19th century. It’s helped us to understand species diversity, but it’s also read to a lot of misunderstandings, especially when it comes to sex and reproduction. So to help us separate out the good from the bad, we are super lucky to be talking to biologist and science journalist Emily Willingham whose book, Phallacy, and that’s spelled with a “ph”, is all about where penises fit into our evolution. But also about how the science of sex has shaped our pop culture, from romance movies to dating advice books.

[00:00:52] Welcome, Emily.

Emily: [00:00:53] Hi, glad to be here. Thank you for having me.

[00:00:56] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.

Annalee: [00:01:22] I’m super excited about your book. It’s an incredibly riveting read. And I wanted to start by just getting some definitions out there on the table because one of the things about an entire book about penises is that it turns out that penises are nothing at all like what I thought they were. And you talk a lot about penises and vaginas, male and female, but like I said, those definitions don’t really work.

[00:01:51] So I wonder if you could just tell us how you’re defining penis. And also, what is this thing called an intromittum?

Emily: [00:01:57] Okay, so I do have a whole chapter about what makes a penis, and it turns that that’s a really complex topic.

Annalee: [00:02:03] It is!

Emily: [00:02:04] But, turns out it’s not maybe what anybody thought. But what I did do, really before I even started writing, I was thinking, oh my God, there are so many names for these organs that you insert into another animal for the purposes of mating and reproduction. And so, there are so many names. They kind of have a lot of different uses and they’re not simply confined to what biologists would view, at least, in non human animals, as one sex or the other. And so I decided to come up with the term intromittum, which is the singular, which is the thing that gets intromitted, and an intromission is an insertion. And the plural is intromitta with an a, which is a neutral, I believe. Some linguist is probably going to come track me down if I’m wrong. A neutral form of the Latin noun.

[00:02:55] So I was going for neutral when I decided to use this term.

Annalee: [00:02:59] So an intromittum is just any organ that you use to inseminate, or to pass, not even inseminate, but to just pass along genetic material.

Emily: [00:03:11] Yeah, to send along a gamete inside another organism. Typically to reproduce.

Annalee: [00:03:19] Typically, yeah. I mean. I don’t even know if it’s typically, it’s just yeah, it’s just like—

Emily: [00:03:24] I don’t know either.

Annalee: [00:03:26] But it, but the other thing that’s interesting is that these organs aren’t always passing along what we would think of as sperm. They also pass along eggs. So you don’t have to be, kind of a whatever a male is. Let’s just say that we understand what a male is, you can also be passing eggs along.

Emily: [00:03:48] Yeah, exactly. There are people who will definitely, and I am one of them, get into the finer points of whether or not passing these gametes is an internal process or an external one, but a couple of examples, the female seahorse, for example, has an extension that she uses to pop some gametes into a pouch on the male. And another example, there’s a whole genus, now, of animals that live in caves where the female does something similar, except she really inserts into the male. So it is considered internal transmission. So she has an intromittum that she inserts into the male of the species and transmits her gametes.

Annalee: [00:04:28] Yeah, so these are like, really fancy tubes.

Emily: [00:04:32] Yeah.

Annalee: [00:04:32] Can you tell us just as kind of a greatest hits moment. You have so many interesting intromitta in this book. Can you tell us about some of your favorites, or some of the ones that really helped you understand how complex penises actually are?

Emily: [00:04:48] I would have to say, it’s going to be in some kind of insect, right? Because they are all over the place with this stuff. And I feel like the flea was kind of a… would surprise most people with its apparatus that it has and the fact that it’s coiled up, many times its length inside the flea body. The way it comes out and shoves its way in, but there are still some coils that are doing something inside the flea. And the other one would be barnacles, which are, they can modify them and they can become thicker or shorter. They have these little millipede-like attachments on them that make them look like a toilet brush almost. They’re just really striking. So those are a couple. There’s so many.

[00:05:38] I could write a book about them, there are so many.

Annalee: [00:05:43] And why do we think of these organs, like these spring-loaded organs, the bristle brush organs. Why do we think of these as all being somehow related to the human penis? Why do we keep comparing ourselves to these animals?

Emily: [00:05:58] We are, of course, a self-centered species. The thing about mammals, or actually any animals that make eggs is that our intromitta, across, kind of have a common origin whereas when you get into these arthropods, they just make it out of anything, it seems like. I’ve got some scales on my thorax, I’m going, that’s going to eventually shape itself into an intromittum. The spiders, they’ve got their little, their boxing glove things that they insert into the female. The bed bugs, they use something that is a lot like a hypodermic needle in terms of how it’s inserted. It’s just all over the place.

[00:06:39] And so we’re actually not very exciting. We seem to think our penises are extremely exciting, and I know they are to us, right? I don’t know about you guys, but I think they’re really fun, but…

Annalee: [00:06:50] Oh yeah.

Emily: [00:06:50] Yeah, but, you know. It’s not super impressive in terms of bells and whistles when you look around at the rest of what’s going on.

Charlie Jane: [00:06:59] Well, now I find bed bugs even more horrifying than I did before, which, so thanks for that. My question is, what does studying the intermitta of other creatures tell us about us? Tell us about human reproduction? And why is it useful to do that?

Emily: [00:07:15] That’s a great question, thanks for asking it. It was really kind of the motivation for the book. You know that in evo psych, for example, there have been arguments that the human penis has very specific accoutrements that are designed for a way to compete with, to have this sperm compete with other sperm in the vagina, and all these things that kind of implicate women in certain, perhaps, unflattering behaviors.

Annalee: [00:07:39] I’m going to intromit here, and say, by evo psych, you mean the the field of evolutionary psychology.

Emily: [00:07:43] Yes, exactly. Yeah. And it’s not the whole field, but there are certainly some people who subscribe to these interpretations and you start to look at around at other penises, even among other primates and you realize that ours is not, it’s not got these accoutrements. It’s not got some of the sexual selection, people call it, the armature, that you find on some of these… Like, if you look at a seed beetle, which is, it lives in legume seeds. Which, sorry, again, Charlie Jane. This might put you off of those, as well. Their larvae burst out of these legume seeds, which is why they’re called seed beetles. Their intromittum is like a mace had a baby with a toilet brush had a baby with Captain Hook. It’s really got a lot going on. An that’s because seed beetles have a very complicated coevolution back and forth between what’s happening inside the female reproductive tract and what’s happening with that intromittum. And we don’t really show that kind of really nuanced dance with all of these specialized structures that have been kind of going back and forth over millenia and being shaped, one on one side and one on the other.

[00:09:03] And so, it’s really, it’s kind of an all-purpose intromittum, ours is, as you may know. You can stick those into just about anything reasonably successfully, right? And it’s not going to get complete hung up with spikes and all this other stuff, which makes it, it’s fun because of that.

Annalee: [00:09:24] Why do other animals need to develop intromitta that have all these spikes and armor and springs and… what’s going on there?

Emily: [00:09:32] Well, the leading hypothesis for that is that because the females commit more to either the development of the little baby organisms, or if you want to extend it even to care after they exist. Not necessarily seed beetles, but with some others, that their role is almost to really be as careful as possible in terms of with whom they mate and what the outcome is.

[00:09:59] And so, there’s a sort of tendency where there’s tension in the mating process for the female to sort of have obstacles that interfere with the ability of any old intromittum to wander in there and leave some gametes behind.

[00:10:15] And then you get coevolution for the successful intromitta that carry features that do get around those obstacles, and so that goes back and forth between the two sexes. Because the males usually, they don’t invest that much. They make some stuff, they leave it, they leave.

Annalee: [00:10:33] Mm-hmm, but that’s not what we’re seeing with humans. One of the things I thought was so cool about your book is that you keep coming back to this theme that the human penis is actually not made for fighting. It’s not one of these kinds… they’re actually, even when they’re hard, they’re pretty soft. They’re soft friendly little tubes and they’re made for, you say, for love and intimacy.

Emily: [00:10:59] Yeah.

Annalee: [00:10:59] And I wonder if you could talk about that, kind of in a biological sense. How do we get to that place by looking at the biology?

Emily: [00:11:07] I just think the general pattern is the fewer features that the intromittum then the more likely there’s going to be some sort of a complex courtship and intimate behavior between two potential mating partners and this expectation that you’re going to go through a checklist of behaviors. All of that negotiation happens before there’s intromission, and we’re like that. Whereas with something like a seed beetle, there’s not really all that negotiation, necessarily. The negotiation happens where the rubber hits the road during intromission. Sorry. They don’t use rubbers, to be clear.

[00:11:46] And so ours is shaped more like, this is just another part of the fun of developing this attachment between two people who are, or three or four or however many, are planning to share some intimacy together. So we do all of this before intromission.

Annalee: [00:12:07] So basically, for the seed beetle, the act of intromission is kind of equivalent to the human act of going on a first date and asking a bunch of awkward questions and deciding if you’re attracted to each other. They don’t do that because they don’t have Tinder for… as far as we know, they don’t have Tinder for—

Emily: [00:12:25] Yeah, there’s no seed beetle Tinder, I don’t think. Yeah.

Annalee: [00:12:27] Yeah, we haven’t found it yet. But they do have this kind of elaborate back and forth that’s all biological.

Emily: [00:12:35] It’s all on the ground where the physical structures are meeting and the female’s got sort of a structural response and the male has a structural response and evolution selects over time on both sides where they do this dance back and forth. Their dance is right there where these structures meet, whereas ours and a lot of other organisms where the intromittum is not super fancy, we do a dance beforehand that’s pretty complicated in a lot of cases.

Annalee: [00:13:03] It’s so interesting. Let’s take a quick break and when we come back we’ll talk about the cultural fallout from all of these misconceptions.

[00:13:09] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.

Annalee: [00:13:21] One of the things that you say very early in your book, Emily, is you’re quoting from the important scientific film, The Princess Bride, and you say, people talk a lot about survival of the fittest, but it doesn’t mean what they think it means. So, what does it mean?

Emily: [00:13:40] Well, I do think we have probably, maybe consider changing that phrase. People tend to interpret that as having something to do with strength and I think that has bled over into this idea of what’s selected for at the genital level, as well. That it has to do with strength and winning, right? And in the end, your win is that you survive and reproduce and that your gene variants have representation in the next generation. That doesn’t have to do with being strong. It just have to do with being selected by your environment, right?

[00:14:16] You can be as weak as unsalted potatoes and still be selected as long as it’s a great environment for being an unsalted potato. So. Which, I’m not meaning to equate to human penises as unsalted potatoes, but the idea is that it’s not a matter of strength. And it’s not even really a matter of winning as much as it is a matter of being chosen for having a fit in a given environment.

Charlie Jane: [00:14:44] Yeah, I mean, I’m interested in basically this idea that sexual selection is all on the female side and that the male is basically just available and that the male has to find a partner, has to convince a partner to mate with him. And I’m interested in what your research has shown about that in terms of the functioning of the genitalia and also just the cultural baggage that we put onto it

Emily: [00:15:10] All right. Well there are a couple of ways, there are a couple of forms of sexual selection, which is a subset of natural selection. You can have males fighting with each other to gain supremacy, in which case that is kind of a winning thing. And you would see that with things that have antlers. That’s what they do. When the female is making the choice, that can either be something before copulation occurs, or it can be on the ground, there, in her genital tract where if there are little pockets and things, where she—where there’s some, maybe version of sperm sorting going on. You have to have more than one mate, the female, for her to be making any choice like this.

[00:15:50] So if you see species where females mate with more than one male, especially in a pretty short period of time, you can infer from that that there’s probably, she’s making some kind of choice on the ground, possibly in her genital tract about which male is going to win the gamete race, there.

[00:16:09] And again, that comes down to the fact that she has to invest a lot, usually, the female does, in the production of the offspring, and in some cases even carrying that out to parenting of some kind. So.

Charlie Jane: [00:16:25] But this idea of competition, this idea that the female is a resource that the male has to compete over, doesn’t it kind of oversimplify the process, because obviously, the way that genitals function, both parties have to be kind of into it for it to function optimally.

Annalee: [00:16:41] Well, at least among humans, yeah.

Emily: [00:16:44] Among humans, absolutely, but consider the duck. For example.

Annalee: [00:16:49] The duck penis. [crosstalk]

Charlie Jane: [00:16:51] Yeah… ducks are the worst.

Emily: [00:16:54] Yeah, they can be the worst. There’s forced copulation, which is, I don’t want to call it rape because that’s a human crime and construction, but it’s forced copulation in some ducks and the female actually is not necessarily volitionally consenting to that and if you look at the duck vagina, you see that there’s coevolution between the features of that vagina to resist this forced insertion relative to the features of that corkscrew, explosively emerging penis on the male. And those are signs that this is not something that everybody’s like, gone through the whole courtship process to agree to, right?

Annalee: [00:17:33] Yeah, ducks sort of famously have penises that are incredibly long and have these complex shapes, right? They aren’t just a—I mean, I’ve seen them described as springs, but they can have all kinds of weird twists and turns, and…

Emily: [00:17:50] Yeah, they… alarmingly. They emerge very alarmingly quickly and you can have, there could be a duck penis that torques in one direction, that corkscrews in one direction. The vagina may corkscrew in the opposite direction as though to unscrew it.

Annalee: [00:18:06] Wow.

Charlie Jane: [00:18:06] Wow.

Emily: [00:18:06] When it’s… yeah.

Charlie Jane: [00:18:08] Oh my God.

Emily: [00:18:09] With the forced entry. And they have cul de sacs and all kinds of other stuff that just… blind ends, you know, because the female, no female duck is consciously going, well, I’ll choose these sperm, but there are choices being made there on the ground.

Annalee: [00:18:25] And then how does that, then, color our perception of our own mating rituals among humans. It feels like a lot of our scientific research on animals has kind of led human male scientists to try to fit our culture into these kind of brutal scenarios that we learn about from ducks.

Emily: [00:18:49] Yeah, I’ve seen some of that, those unfortunate efforts. I mean, that’s part of the lesson of this book is if you look at penises and the more accoutered the are, the more bells and whistles they have, the more likely you are to be on the duck side of things, versus sort of kind of featureless version of an intromittum and a species that has a high social demand. You don’t expect to see the duck side of things much at all except as something that’s unacceptable. So that’s an important takeaway from looking at, if you look at all species. Another thing I want to add is we’re alone. We’re the only member, living member of our genus. We’re separated by our closest living relatives by millions of years. And it will always be somewhat of an error to try to extrapolate, especially from any individual species about our own behaviors or what we, quote, “should” or “should not” be doing.

Charlie Jane: [00:19:45] So a rule of thumb, or perhaps we should say a rule of penis, is that the more complexity and the more kind of attachments and add-ons and, you know, robot things and whatever… flame thrower—

Annalee: [00:19:57] Bearings.

Charlie Jane: [00:19:58] —the penis has, the more flamethrowers the penis has, the more likely it is to be used for forced copulation.

Emily: [00:20:05] I would say that is a possibility, or just tension. The female is probably mating with multiple males and making some choices there and that’s not what our penises or our vaginas look like as humans. They don’t seem to have those features.

Annalee: [00:20:18] What’s the story that our penises and vaginas tell about how we evolved to hook up?

Emily: [00:20:26] It’s funny because there are so many stories I don’t know which one you would want me to choose. But in my opinion the story is that we have brains and that’s what we would have more involved in our hook ups than our genitalia, necessarily. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I think that connections on so many other levels beyond, wow, look at that dick, is, that’s how we operate, right? And I think that what we have upstairs is way more relevant.

Annalee: [00:20:58] Yeah, I mean, it’s been a long time since I’ve just like, made a guy whip his dick out on a first date, you know what I mean, right?

Emily: [00:21:04] [crosstalk]

Annalee: [00:21:04] It used to just be really firm about that. Like, we’re not going further.

Emily: [00:21:10] Break out the ruler. Yeah.

Annalee: [00:21:10] Until I see everything. But you know, now, I feel like yeah, I’m a little, I’ll take it a little more slowly.

Emily: [00:21:17] Right, and maybe second, third date, right? I mean, I haven’t used the six inch ruler in a long time on my first dates, it’s been forever.

Annalee: [00:21:23] I know! It’s funny. It seems like it’s mostly guys who are doing that.

Charlie Jane: [00:21:29] So what about, you know, the idea—we’ve mentioned a guy on a first date. What about the notion that genitals are kind of the determinant of our gender or our identity as people, kind of?

Emily: [00:21:42] Yeah, that’s something that we lay onto people and it’s a bit toxic, isn’t it? That we would insist on that as some kind of expectation when, in reality with intimacy and interpersonal communication, it actually doesn’t matter. And when you look at studies that look at what people with penises are interested in, and the people who interact with them, they want the intimacy. They want that connection as much as they want anything else. Anybody who has sexual experience knows that there’s so much more to it than the genitalia, first of all, right?

Annalee: [00:22:21] Yes.

Emily: [00:22:21] And there’s so much more to becoming comfortable with somebody and really getting the just party down in the way that you want to because you’re comfortable enough with that intimacy to do it.

Annalee: [00:22:30] So, speaking of partying down. I wanted to talk a little bit about Jeffrey Epstein, who comes up a number of times in your book as a villain and also kind of someone who is a misleader in the field of science. And I wonder if you could talk about how his work and his life have shaped modern ideas about penises and evolution?

Emily: [00:22:57] He’s… he kind of exemplifies this idea that male, men, are supposed to go around and seed people and that that’s supposed to be the evolutionary drive for them. And he, because of his money, he could walk into rooms full of men who ought to have known better and offer money or apparent support of money, and they didn’t ask him to leave even though they knew what a wretched human being he was and what a criminal he was. And I think those two things intersect in a way that male scientists, by and large, have asked the questions and decided how they’re going to be answered. And Epstein was just an example of that and an example of how money can fuel all of it.

[00:23:44] And I think it’s time for us to let other people ask and answer these questions. As my book points out, we have a lot less information about vaginas in general than we do about penises because there has been so much focus on it. And this kind of evolutionary psychology focus on these questions has always seemed to come from the male perspective, almost always. And Epstein was very into that kind of thing.

Annalee: [00:24:07] And he was funding a lot of that research.

Emily: [00:24:09] Yeah, he wanted this to serve his purposes, which, you know, are unspeakable.

Annalee: [00:24:18] Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting how, I mean, and you point this out in the book, that he used science as a kind of, a way of dressing up what he was doing in a kind of legitimacy. He was like, well, it’s not just molesting a bunch of girls, in fact, this is, whatever.

Emily: [00:24:34] Yeah, evolution, evolution makes me want to do this, it shapes my psychology so that I will want to seed young girls and they will bear my fruit. And these questions get asked because certain people are looking for a kind of legitimacy to what they want to do and they want to have the language of science and putative scientific results to support it.

Annalee: [00:24:56] Yeah, and he didn’t have a duck penis, so he was just… the wrong pattern.

Emily: [00:25:03] I heard things about his penis, but it didn’t sound very duckish.

Annalee: [00:25:05] No. So let’s turn this around and talk about, before we wind up here, talk about positive directions. Where do we go next in these kinds of studies to really, to understand vaginas, to understand penises in their proper place?

Emily: [00:25:21] First of all, there are labs. So, entomologists are pretty good at looking at vaginas a lot of the time because of that coevolution between the intromittum and the receptomittum, which [inaudible] to call vaginas, but anyway. Where should we go is that first of all, we need to have more women have access to these halls of science and be able to stay in them so that then we get questions for people who are not the historically white male bastions of science. When we get that, a lot will follow. You may have noticed in the book that the people who were looking at vaginas and made break-through discoveries of vaginas in vertebrates, were women. And still kind of tend to be.

[00:26:10] The other thing is, we need a detox in our culture from this expectation that the penis makes the man and the man makes the penis, because not all men have penises and not all people with penises are men.

Charlie Jane: [00:26:20] Yes!

Annalee: [00:26:22] Yes.

Emily: [00:26:22] And also, we need to stop conflating this single body part with a whole human being. I have seen people say, when somebody walks into a Starbucks carrying an AR-15, for example, they’ll say, oh, small dick energy there. And I think, you know? We really need to stop thinking, oh, this is because of the size of this man’s penis. This is because of a lot of toxicity in our culture that made him think that this is something he needed to do to perform. We need to get past that.

Annalee: [00:26:51] Yeah, I think that’s really important to acknowledge that doing this is diminishing male people as well as building them up. That there’s this kind of, this way in which, yeah, if you fold everything into penis anxiety, you don’t ever learn what the real problem is because it’s not about dicks.

Emily: [00:27:12] Yeah, I agree 100%. I have three sons—

Charlie Jane: [00:27:14] Absolutely.

Emily: [00:27:14] —and I absolutely do not want them diminished to just a body part like that, ever.

Annalee: [00:27:20] Yeah, they have lots of other good body parts.

Charlie Jane: [00:27:22] It’s sort of dehumanizing. I mean, you know, part of what makes human beings so complex and awesome is the whole totality of who we are and not just this kind of, yeah, this one body part and this one process.

Emily: [00:27:33] Yeah, absolutely. I really think we need to focus on our minds and what we let seep into them, and what we let ourselves express.

Annalee: [00:27:42] That’s a great place to end. Emily, can you tell our listeners where they can find your work, online and in the real world?

Emily: [00:27:50] Yeah, absolutely. The book itself publishes on September, 22nd. As everybody knows, pre-orders are extremely important. It is available at all the usual places. I encourage indie buys if you can.

Annalee: [00:28:00] Yay!

Emily: [00:28:02] I’m on Twitter at @EJWillingham, and I have a website where I just put up things where I frequently contribute to Scientific American and Medscape, places like that. And that is EmilyWillinghamPhD.com. That’s where you can find me.

Annalee: [00:28:14] Excellent. All right, well thank you so much for being here.

Charlie Jane: [00:28:18] Thank you!

Annalee: [00:28:18] And talking dicks. That was great. Talking intromitta.

Emily: [00:28:22] Thank you. Yeah.

Annalee: [00:28:24] Which is my new, favorite genital. Well I guess—

Emily: [00:28:24] Thank you for having me!

Annalee: [00:28:26] Yeah. I like all genitals, but intromitta seems like a good umbrella term for—

Emily: [00:28:30] Yay, genitals.

Annalee: [00:28:32] Okay, we’re going to take another quick break, and when we come back, we’re going to have a segment we call, “Research Hole.” Come fall in with us.

[00:28:41] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.

Annalee: [00:28:55] So, Charlie Jane, tell me about a research hole that you fell headlong into.

Charlie Jane: [00:29:01] So, I’ve been recently reading up on a horror and sort of dark fantasy author named Leonard Cline, C-L-I-N-E, who, among other things, murdered his friend in a house just down the street from the house I grew up in in Connecticut, in, I think, 1927.

Annalee: [00:29:19] Whoa. Okay, so not when you were living there.

Charlie Jane: [00:29:21] He was [crosstalk] ‘20s. No. Slightly before my time. He was staying at this house, hanging out with his bestie, Wilfred Irwin. And they had a—they got drunk and had a quarrel, and Leonard Cline shot Wilfred Irwin who died a few hours later of his wounds. Leonard Cline went to prison for manslaughter, but was let out after eight months for good behavior. But then died of a heart attack some time later. And he, he was a newspaper journalist who worked for the Baltimore Sun and a bunch of other papers. And wrote for The Nation. After he got out of prison for murdering his friend, he got a job at Time Magazine, immediately. Like, Henry Luce decided to take pity on him and give him a job. And he wrote plays, but he’s best known for these novels that he wrote. The first one of which is called the God Head, which is a novel that I think is really hard to find nowadays. But when it was published in 1926 or 1925, it was widely praised and regarded as a literary masterpiece.

[00:30:25] Online, there’s a great review of it from The Harvard Crimson talking about how, much like the poor, first novels are always with us, but this is a novel that is more memorable and exciting than six out of ten of the best novels. It was very confusing. Anyway.

[00:30:42] So, the God Head is about this guy who decides that he wants to become a god, or he wants to become super powerful. So he moves to this small town on the shore of Lake Superior where the elements have randomly carved a scowling, angry face into the side of the mountain nearby and he decides to terrorize the townspeople by reminding them of all of their Finnish superstitions. They’re all Finnish people.

[00:31:05] And he sort of delves into the superstitions and traditions of Finland to try to drive all the townspeople mad. And in the end, the scowling face on the side of the mountain comes to life and starts singing and everything goes fucking—

Annalee: [00:31:19] In Finnish?

Charlie Jane: [00:31:19] —completely insane. I don’t know if it sings in Finnish. That’s a really good question. I think it just kind of bellows.

Annalee: [00:31:24] This is a really targeted form of terror, I’m just saying.

Charlie Jane: [00:31:30] You know… Finnish people are going to be really freaked out. You know, and I actually read a bunch of Finnish weird stories in the last few years, and the Finns do love their weird dark fantasy. That’s a thing with them, and there’s actually a great anthology of Finnish dark fantasy.

[00:31:49] So he followed that up with a weird comic novel, called Listen, Moon!, with an exclamation mark. I don’t know what it’s about. But then his masterpiece, the book that kind of put him on the map right before he died was this book called The Dark Chamber. Which is about this guy named Richard Pride, who, much like the protagonist of the God Head, Richard Pride wants to sort of become a superior person and so he decides that the key is to recover all of his earliest memories by bringing a musician, who is the main character of the book, to his house to play music for him that will force him to reexperience his past memories. And basically everybody in the house, wait for it, goes mad.

Annalee: [00:32:34] I thought you were going say they were all Finnish.

Charlie Jane: [00:32:36] They all turn Finnish. No they all go mad. The dog in the house goes feral, people commit suicide. People run away. People elope, there’s a lot of eloping. And finally, the main character, like, gets away and marries the guy’s daughter, but he comes back and finds that the guy, Richard Pride, has been killed by his dog, who he killed in turn. Like, he and the dog killed each other at the exact same time. And so it’s like, basically another novel about how if you tamper with dark forces, you know, shit will happen. 

[00:33:08] And H.P. Lovecraft loved The Dark Chamber and kind of lavished praise on it in his book about the supernatural. And so that’s kind of the main reason why people remember Leonard Cline now, as somebody who was kind of an influence or kind of a contemporary of Lovecraft. But unlike Lovecraft, he actually was a murderer and also a journalist. So he was a pretty interesting guy.

[00:33:30] Annalee, what’s your research hole?

Annalee: [00:33:33] There are no Finns or murderers. I actually, I just want to say—

Charlie Jane: [00:33:37] Or are there?

Annalee: [00:33:38] That’s a good question. I don’t understand how Cline got away with murdering someone and only going to prison for eight months and then immediately got a job at Time Magazine.

Charlie Jane: [00:33:51] You know, good behavior.

Annalee: [00:33:54] I’m so confused. Anyway. That’s, I guess—

Charlie Jane: [00:33:58] I think if you’re drunk, it’s just like, whatever, you were drunk. You know.

Annalee: [00:34:02] That’s, you know, it’s rough justice, I guess.

Charlie Jane: [00:34:05] Yeah.

Annalee: [00:34:05] Connecticut…

Charlie Jane: [00:34:07] Probably had it coming. 

Annalee: [00:34:08] Yeah.

Charlie Jane: [00:34:08] Connecticut’s a rough and tumble state, man.

Annalee: [00:34:11] Yeah, I think that’s something to do with it.

[00:34:13] So I have been going on a research hole because of this study that came out a couple of weeks ago in the journal, Population Studies. And the reason it really caught my imagination was it was looking at how, basically, people who are Gen X, people who are in their ‘40s and ‘50s now, how their health compares to their parents’ generation, which is basically the Baby Boomer generation, people who are now in their ‘60s and ‘70s. And people in that Gen X generation, in this study, which was—it was done in England, and it was a survey of about 135,000 people. So, a huge survey that’s done annually in England, that’s the health survey.

[00:35:02] So people who were in that Gen X group reported that they were living longer, but they were sicker than the previous generation. That they just reported in their middle age having more chronic health problems. But, like I said, they were surviving longer, and the thing that was really chilling about this study. Because at first, I was just like, oh, it’s just like cranky Gen Xers saying that they’re sick more often than the more stoic elder generation, which is like, well, yes it’s true that half my face fell off, but I’m powering through, and it’s no big thing.

[00:35:41] But actually this study was accompanied by actual data on health, like, nurses were checking people’s health and so their self-reporting was going right along side reporting from health professionals saying, nope, actually, this generation of people is more sick than their parents’ generation. They’re suffering from cardiovascular disease, diabetes, hypertension, a lot of diseases that are associated with poor eating habits, partly because now the cheapest foods tend to be high in fat and so those can cause, that can cause hypertension and a lot of other things.

[00:36:25] So, basically, the picture that we get from this large British study is that people who are getting older now, people who are in their middle age now are just less healthy than previous generations. And it goes against our stereotype of how these things work. We think, every generation is healthier because medical technology is getting so much better. And we don’t have these terrible things that our grandparents had. We don’t die of a broken leg because we have antibiotics. But it does seem like things are getting worse and the really creepy part, like I said, is that the Gen X group that’s sicker is living longer. So they’re living longer, shittier lives than Baby Boomers are living. 

[00:37:18] And so, I don’t know. It got me thinking about a lot of stuff. It got me thinking about how, like I said, that there’s—we have this idea—and I think it comes out of science fiction, partly, that the future, unless we go into a dark dystopia, that the future is always better and that the technology is always making things better. And that’s not necessarily true. And even as our technology is getting better, that isn’t actually helping people to lead healthier lives, which is another topic that really stood out to me in this study. Or another, well, I shouldn’t say topic. Another issue that stood out.

[00:37:53] And also, a lot of these issues that people are having, like I said, like diabetes and hypertension, that doesn’t really come from medicine not advancing. It comes from preventative care not being terrifically good. It comes a lot from just sort of the management of our health care. And that, you know, we actually do have the knowledge and the medicine to prevent a lot of these conditions from getting bad but people just don’t have access to them. Either because of poverty or lack of education, or lack of health care.

Charlie Jane: [00:38:30] So, I have a couple of questions. First of all, how do we know that Gen Xers are living longer if the Gen X generation is still middle aged, and the other question is, could this be partly because Baby Boomers had access to secure jobs with better health insurance when they were during their prime work years, versus Gen Xers who kind of go from job to job and don’t really have steady health insurance?

Annalee: [00:38:54] I think those are really good questions. So, basically the way that they were calculating life expectancy had to do with just how many people were alive. So, in other words, people were living longer. We saw more people that were reaching middle age in that Gen X group.

Charlie Jane: [00:39:12] Oh, okay.

Annalee: [00:39:12] And then it’s just a projection, right? So they’re just assuming that there’s more people surviving to a certain point means that more people will survive another 20 years. So people are surviving longer. People are surviving into their middle age. It’s more common for people to survive into middle age, I should say. But, in poorer health.

[00:39:36] And I think it could really be the case that this has to do with job security. We know, in the United States that hypertension and cardiovascular disease are correlated with job instability and poverty and downward mobility.

Charlie Jane: [00:39:51] Right.

Annalee: [00:39:51] And that’s why, for example, Black communities have such a high rate of both of those, of cardiovascular and hypertension. Cardiovascular disease and hypertension. And then that also gets into questions around treatment, as well. Because this group of people that they studied were British. And National Healthcare System in England is being chipped away at and eroded. What we could be seeing there is also just a failing national healthcare system. Or a national healthcare system that is not as robust as it was during their parents’ generation.

[00:40:27] There’s a lot going into this. And I think you’re right. I think if you were a science fiction and you were thinking about worldbuilding in the context of this study, you’d want to ask all those questions. What are the social factors? What are the factors in the health care? Are people in fact not getting access to technologies like statins that help people with high blood pressure and things like that? Yeah, I mean, it’s all that stuff. It’s super complex. I don’t know, it’s really interesting. I keep thinking about this study. It’s haunting me. I wonder if that means that Millennials are going to have an even shittier quality of life.

Charlie Jane: [00:41:04] Live long and don’t prosper.

Annalee: [00:41:06] Yeah.

Charlie Jane: [00:41:06] Basically.

Annalee: [00:41:10] Yeah, so it’s like, we may be really heading into the world from that Torchwood miniseries when everybody was living—I mean, it was a complicated.

Charlie Jane: [00:41:21] Miracle Day.

Annalee: [00:41:22] Miracle Day. It was an uneven, it was an uneven miniseries, but definitely the horror at the center of it was this idea that people didn’t die but they still got sick and they still were injured and so there were all these people who couldn’t die but were like literally immobile and all their bones were broken and it just horrible.

Charlie Jane: [00:41:41] That was such a powerful, horrible image, yeah.

Annalee: [00:41:45] Yeah, so, anyway, on that cheerful note. We’ve had some murder. We’ve had some declining health outcomes for younger generations. Anyway, thanks so much for listening!

Charlie Jane: [00:41:58] Yeah, thank you. We’ll be way more uplifting next time, we promise.

Annalee: [00:42:03] Yeah, so you’ve been listening to Our Opinions Are Correct. We would love it if you would check out our Patreon, it’s Patreon.com/OurOpinionsAreCorrect. For just a couple dollars, you can get all kinds of nifty things like audio extras and essays and writing prompts and a chance to just chit-chat with other people who are following the podcast. You can also follow us on Twitter at @OOACpod. And you can find us whereever fine podcasts are purveyed. Please do leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, because you know the drill. It helps people find us.

[00:42:39] This episode was recorded at Women’s Audio Mission here in San Francisco. Our producer is the amazing Veronica Simonetti, and the music comes from Chris Palmer. And we will be back—no, we’ll be back in two weeks, and we’ll be talking to you then.

Charlie Jane: [00:42:54] Yay!

Annalee: [00:42:55] Bye!

Charlie Jane: [00:42:55] Bye!

[00:42:57] Outro music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.