Maiden Mother Matriarch with Louise Perry

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.
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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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.
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For this bonus episode, I spoke with Johann Kurtz about his viral essay 'Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise', which was partly inspired by a previous MMM bonus episode. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Samuel Johnson was one of his history's great readers. He read constantly: while he walked, while he ate, while he socialised. He insisted that one ought to read for five hours a day, and to read on every subject one could. This was newly possible for eighteenth century people, who suddenly had access to affordable books.

But Johnson understood that he was unusual. "People in general do not willingly read, if they can have anything else to amuse them," he conceded. "The progress which the understanding makes through a book, has more pain than pleasure in it."

James Marriott's new book is on the rise and fall of reading. He argues that reading is fundamentally unnatural and difficult, which is why the rise of radio, television, and the internet has so readily displaced books. James also argues that reading has profound effects, not only on our brains, but also on our politics. Democracy and literacy have historically gone hand in hand. As we become post-literate, will we also become post-democratic?

James Marriott is a columnist and critic at The Times of London. His new book is titled The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society.
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