How the Internet Turned Illness Into Status for Privileged Women with Suzy Weiss

Suzy Weiss
A spoonie is a member of a community of chronic illness sufferers, what some people have described as Munchausen by Internet. What happens when your identity becomes illness? Because how are you ever incentivized to get well? If your community identification is defined by how ill you are, then a status hierarchy is going to begin to form based on illness. And people being people, they are going to have a motivation to.

Malcolm Collins
To exaggerate their illness. Would you like to know more? Okay. I am so, so, so excited for our special guest here today. Easily our favorite writer is on the show today.

This is Suzy Weiss. We mentioned her in a number of episodes as just a writer who we really respect and does really, really interesting, deep based pieces that explore subcultures that are weird, which is like our favorite thing. Today we are going to do the first piece of hers that we really got into where I was like, oh, this changes my thinking on a number of things. About how, like, memetic viruses can form within current online environments and how we're. Going to raise our teenage daughters.

Simone Collins
Like it completely. It gave us a new model for female adolescents. This was, it was a game changer. Oh, and where we should send people. So the snoozy Weiss is her Twitter account, so go subscribe there.

Malcolm Collins
Although that never really converts YouTube to Twitter. But what I can say is the free press, her sister, Barry Weiss runs it, and she is a writer there, and that's where you can find her stuff. So you should definitely go and subscribe to that. Yeah. Thank you guys so much for having me.

Suzy Weiss
I feel like when we discovered each other, it was like there are others. I'm so happy. And then, of course, I included you on a story I did about tech messiahs who wanted to live forever, which I loved your contribution because you were like, anti live forever, which I think is like a weird. Whatever. We can get into that later.

Malcolm Collins
Did you end up talking to that other girl we introduced you to for that story? She. I never talked to her because she just, I think, yeah, she was intense. She recently did a post where she bragged about how she convinced a woman to break up with her husband for another woman and get an abortion on her three months term fetus. And this was like a huge win for her.

Is talking someone into an abortion. That's pretty late stage, right. It's on the older side of fairly reasonable. Horrifying. We were trying to get the perspective of an extremist antinatalist.

Suzy Weiss
Oh, yeah, she was. Yeah, she's a major antinatalist. Yeah, I guess that's a win. Take the ones where you can get them. So the the full post she wrote went, one of the grossest and most failocentric types of misogyny to me is males who are fine with or even encourage their wives or girlfriends having sex with other women.

D
Porn, sick bros with harem fetishes. It's an ugly and very clear mask off on how they see women. They feel so superior that a girl fucking their wife doesn't even count as sex and thus cheating. Lesbians are just girls having fun that we do to please their stinky cheese cocks. And few things are as satisfying as seeing their wives realize they can do better, divorcing them for their girlfriends and living happily ever after without a sexist leech in their life.

Two months ago, I convinced a girl who just married and was actually three months pregnant to get an abortion and divorce and continue dating her girlfriend, who the male picked for her, but who she fell in love with. They are engaged, and I am so for it. Heart. In case you can't tell, she is. A lesbian, maybe even a political lesbian and an extremist feminist, as well as an antinatalist.

Simone Collins
Yeah, she's in favor, I think, of even post term abortions, as she puts it. So murder. Yeah. So, yes, yes. But baby murder.

So it's baby murder. It's murder. It's Mudda. Yes.

Malcolm Collins
Anyway, so spoonies, go. I am so excited to dig into this. Yeah. Well, first off, what made you decide. To explore this world?

Simone Collins
How did you even learn? The audience needs to know what they are first. So I'm letting her describe that. Questions like this. Okay, so what is a spoonie?

Suzy Weiss
A spoonie is a member of a community of chronic illness sufferers. They're mostly women. From what I could observe, they're mostly white women. The term comes from, I believe it was like, a 2013 or 2014 blog post by this lupus blogger. And she had a, well, friend who asked her, what is it like to be sick?

And she took all the spoons. I just reread the post last night because I wanted to be reminded of it. And it's strangely, like, cinematic. She's like, with tears in my eyes. I held the bouquet of spoons, and I don't not believe her, but just interestingly written.

And. And she describes that, like, normal people have unlimited spoons. People who are sick have a fixed number of spoons. So let's say you or I, we could get up and shower and make ourselves breakfast and go to work, and we don't have to think about it. Someone with, let's say, six spoons has to portion them out.

So two spoons to wake up and get dressed, one spoon to make lunch. Do you have enough spoons to work? And I think it is, like, an effective way for people to think about other people who have limited resources. But since then, it's been co opted into a cottage industry, a world, a community of people who suffer from these sort of amorphous and hard to pin down illnesses. So Ehlers Danlos syndrome, Potts autoimmune diseases, ulcerative colitis, you name it.

Simone Collins
And they're called pots is included in that. I have pots. That's crazy. Yeah. Spoony.

Suzy Weiss
Yeah. You could be a spoonie, and you would find a lot of like minded spoonies out there, and you could buy different products with your spoonie codes and learn how to lie to a doctor, which is apparently like a moral thing in this world. So, yeah, I was interested in what some people have described as Munchausen by Internet, like this, where the psychosomatic. I guess what I was really interested is what happens when your identity becomes illness? Because how are you ever incentivized to get well?

And I spoke to a lot of people and doctors, and that's the story that you're. So I want to talk about that. But before we go further, I'm going to take and just word this a little differently. Essentially, what happened and what created the spoonies is that if you have a either a chronic illness condition or a short term illness condition, where you are frequently going into a medical setting, of course you are going to tweet about this and find other like minded people. Now, like any social community, hierarchy within a community is often determined by things that differentiate you from mainstream society and make you more aligned with that community within a goth circle.

Malcolm Collins
If I'm meeting a goth I haven't met, the more gothy they dress, the higher status I assume they are, because they are othering themselves from mainstream society in a way that shows dedication to a community. Well, if your community identification is defined by how ill you are, like, if that's what correlates the community, then a status hierarchy is going to begin to form based on illness. And people being people, they are going to have a motivation to exaggerate their illness, find ways to get on more visible forms of treatment. Yeah, a lot of it is about externalizing, because a lot of these illnesses that I listed, they're invisible illnesses. See them.

Suzy Weiss
So a lot of these women will use crutches casts tourniquet. Not tourniquets, but, like, you got, like, ways to show. To pick lines, like food, feeding tubes to show that they're sick. So I think it's really interesting. And it.

Yeah, sorry. Yeah, well, and then doctors will say, well, you don't actually have these illnesses. And so then they need to make the doctors for the community the villains. Right? Wasn't there, like, a word that they used, like zebra something?

Yes. So that's an old medical adage. If you hear hooves, think horses, not zebras. So if someone's coming, it's like the real world is not an episode of House. Not everyone has the, like, deep cut, weird disease that you can own that no one's seen a case of in a hundred years.

But the spoony mantra might be, I am the zebra. I am this rare thing, and it has to do, I think. And you brought up teenage girls, like, kind of this need to be special. I was thinking about it this morning. Eight or nine years ago, there were these movies like me or on the dying girl fault in our stars, like, that sort of romanticized illness and being sick and dying.

So there's a lot that goes into it. And what you were saying about, like, hierarchies and structures, I think a lot of the spoony world dovetailed with the me too movement that kind of became really suspicious of, let's say, male dominated hierarchies and created a world in which patients were being victimized by doctors. It's left wing QAnon, and they're trying to take away your agency and power. I see a lot of overlap. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins
Well, and it makes sense that something like this would organically form within young female communities that are looking for affirmation. And I think, in a sense, of community, and they get firmed by the community, but then they begin to do things like you talk about in the article, like pill pork, like, mixing pills, and there's, like, special status if you need tubes, and there's. And if they up your feed, that's, like, a bad thing because it means you're getting better and that you might one day get off the tube. And, like, I want to be clear, like. And this was a really hard subject to write about.

Suzy Weiss
I think these girls are actually feeling pain. I don't think they go into their bedrooms and shut the door and jump out of their wheelchair and say, hi, I tricked another doctor today. I do. I'm not sure that their pain is a symptom of what they think it's a symptom of. I think that's the best way to put it.

But, yeah, what you said is correct, of the need to externalize and differentiate and make unique according to your illness. Also, when you're looking at this from the context of young girls who are coming at this, they're beginning to try to find themselves. They're going through puberty a lot of the times. And I think that female sexuality is broadly misunderstood in our society. And I think part of what we're seeing here, when women first go through puberty is a need to be cherished or treated like something special and fragile that is cared for, which this self framing elevates.

Malcolm Collins
So you almost get this perfect storm of hierarchy, affirmation, victimhood, this. And I'm unique to such an extent where when I was reading your piece, I was like, how do I protect my own kids from this? Right? It seems like such an effective package. So I'd love it if you could talk a bit about the people you interviewed, people who got out of it, and what you will be doing for your own kids.

Suzy Weiss
Yeah, it's interesting you bring up teen girls, and this is like a theme I come back to in my writing all the time. Like, I actually think teen girls might be, like, the most, like, if you could harness the energy and, like, the intensity, you could power. Like, cities like that is like the power of the collective of teen girls. And I've done a lot of. I'm not a lot.

I mean, I've done reporting on eating disorders, on cutting. You see the different waves of what that is. I think the conversation about gender dysphoria actually fits into this in a certain way. I think it fits into it in every way. I think we're looking at two very similar phenomenon.

Malcolm Collins
And it's one of the things I point out, I'm like, okay, kids are going through puberty, and there's a community out there that says if you just do this, you will be comfortable with your body. And that affirms you obsessively whenever you're around them. Like, in the same way that the fact that some spoonies are being talked into this or don't have these conditions, that doesn't mean these conditions don't exist. It doesn't mean that pots isn't a real condition, that there aren't really young girls who have chronic medical conditions. But when you create a community that affirms them around this, you have the potentiality of the psychological exasperation of, you know, prodromal or low level tendencies in these individuals, which I think you see within different youth communities with gender dysphoria.

And I should point out, not just on the far left, but also on the far right, these Andrew Tate following guys, a lot of them seem to have a form of gender dysphoria where they want to define who they are based on their gender identity. I also think there's, like, kind of a reflex to categorize everything. Like, you can't just be tired. You have to have chronic fatigue syndrome. And, like, to answer your earlier question about how you protect against this, I'm one of four girls, and, like, female puberty is brutal and your body betrays you, and it's really confusing.

Suzy Weiss
And I think, and you see this with anorexia, and maybe there's, like, an aspect of this with the spoonies. It's the want not to grow up, to have your mother take care of you, to go to zero, to not be so wide. And I think as much as we can encourage people and accept, when someone says, you know what, I'm really. I'm feeling lazy, I'm feeling down, I'm feeling tired. And not be like, you should go to the doctor and get a pill for that.

That is something that must be categorized and medicated and more deeply understood because it's a pathology of some sort. I think that's one thing to do. But teenage girls, the Internet did not invent, like, teenage girls cracking up around the age of 14 or 15, that that is going to be forever. But the Internet does do it. Amplifies it and incentivizes it in ways that I find interesting.

Simone Collins
Well, to your earlier point, too, the suffering that many of these young women feel is real, even if they don't technically have the actual condition they may think that they have, right? That a lot of it, then they psychosomatically give themselves that condition. And the same can happen with therapy culture. Or this is controversial, but we would argue with gender dysphoria as well, where you may not actually be trans or you may not actually have post traumatic stress or, sorry, post traumatic trauma. Just generally, trauma in general is a community, a large one that is, I'd say, adjacent to the spoony community, but still distinct from it, where the hierarchy is based around a trauma or something traumatic that happened to them in their childhood.

Malcolm Collins
And they begin to create these communities where there is a huge incentive to imagine trauma that didn't happen, but then. That creates real pain, that trauma, like you are making it worse by leaning into it. But then also, you end up in these communities where people use that to your point as well, to virtue signal. And they. It's bad because you turn to it naturally as a solution.

Simone Collins
This is a problem I want to solve. I don't want this. This is bad, and I need to get through it. But then you subconsciously, especially if you're a teenage girl, get sucked into the social dynamics, and then you're in this, like, status hierarchy game, fighting for higher status without even knowing it because of the way your brain is wired at the time. Right.

Suzy Weiss
And I'm sure you were a young girl, I was obsessed with Holocaust books, and I didn't understand trauma or horrible things happening. And so there's this want of to go on chat roulette and see someone masturbating. Even though you're scared of it, you also want to see it. Cause you want to know what's happening, and you're afraid if you don't see it, someone's gonna make you watch it. It's so confusing and intense.

And to your earlier point of or, I don't. I think a lot of how we got here in terms of the conversation about everyone's traumatized. Every. I think it has to do with the spectruming of life. So sexuality's on a spectrum.

McKinsey scale, I can get behind that. But now aggression is on a spectrum. Microaggression, macro aggression. Autism's on a spectrum. So it's.

If everything's a spectrum and we're all on it, we're all sick, because sickness is a spectrum. Yeah. So I think as right as I think a lot of nuance is in terms of sickness, in terms of sexuality, in terms of a lot of these human experiences. I think for an undeveloped brain, it can also trick you into believing that you've been a victim of something and you're never not gonna be a victim of that thing, if that makes sense. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins
And something that we have an episode on that we've filmed, it hasn't gone live yet, is on the idea of how our grandparents generation essentially lived in a teen dystopian. And because, like, their boyfriends went off to war and stuff. Well, no. I recently read my grandmother's autobiography during the occupation of Paris when she lived there. And she's describing, like, fleeing Paris while the Nazis are coming in, the roads are being bombed, she is driving her car across bridges that are actively being.

Caught in the episode. For this topic. Yeah, there's no food, but it gives us the impression there's maybe this need to have difficulty in life, that the hardship is also part of a good upbringing, and we don't have it now, so we crave it. And we read these teen dystopias and we subject ourselves to these stresses and we try to find something that's wrong because we need something that's wrong. But the point being is that I think people undersell, if you go back to our grandparents generation or earlier, how insanely, quote unquote in modern standards, traumatic the average human life was, serious.

And that the anaphylbum now is people living in environments where there is not genuine scarcity. And because of that, I think it's causing sort of psychological haywireness almost to the extent of being, like, raised in a cage or something like that, where they are seeking out forms of self victimization and trauma, where that is a thing of status and allure. And they read about it and they fantasize about it, which is just really fascinating. And I don't think that we expected humans to be like this. Right.

Suzy Weiss
And then for us to put ourselves in the cages, it's, let me sedate myself and let me come up with a justification for watching cartoons all day as, like, a grown woman. You know what I mean? Yeah. Your herkle dirl story. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. It all comes back. It all comes back to her called. But, yeah, it's, it's amazing because it's very understandable. Wants being, I think, manifesting in a sort of.

What am I trying to say? It's manifesting in a way that it's self sabotaging ultimately. And that's what's sad. But I think it's so interesting. Abigail Schreier has just such a brilliant book out called.

Oh, God, what's it called? I feel like we have it here. It's about therapy culture, and it's just really interesting and how therapy is, it's a medical treatment, and hundreds and millions of kids are getting this medical treatment through their schools, through online, kind of unbeknownst to the parents. And it's shifting who the parents are. Is it the state?

Is it the school? Is it your mom and dad? And you see this? I won't ruin it. We talk about this a lot in other episodes.

Malcolm Collins
The cult of therapy and how it's transformed. It's building dependency with his patients and it's training them. One of my favorite lines that I just keep repeating, there was a popular online youtuber that was like, don't people know about the number of young people with mental health issues? This is because we don't have enough therapists and they're not inexpensive enough. Oh, my God.

Do you think that our grandparents generation had therapists? Do you think in the old west there were therapists running around to kids, especially being like, oh, ten year old, we need to talk about your feelings. Do you think that maybe that could be the problem, this correlation you're seeing here? And they're like, no, you don't understand. I'm traumatized.

It's like, no, you don't understand. All of Europe, like, all of our grandparents generation who was in Europe, went through a form of trauma that you can't even begin to conceptualize outside of fantasies. Right. And they didn't go to psychologists about it. They didn't.

It's wild. Yeah. Which isn't to say they aren't traumatized. And I think the thing with kids is, like, as an adult, and Abigail talks about this, you can push back on a therapist, you could say when she says this, hey, it's enough talking about my mother in law as a child, you want to please the adult that you're in the room with. You don't understand that there's, like, a service being offered.

Suzy Weiss
You think you're in trouble. And I think therapy on adults and therapy on kids are very different propositions. Oh, yeah. Especially the state sanctioned, almost ubiquitous thing that's happening now. And I would strongly recommend parents not send their kids to therapy.

Malcolm Collins
I've gotten to the point it's not that therapy is bad. It is very useful for some people. But the, I think that the vast proportion of therapy that's being practiced on kids these days is not of the safe variety. And so it will likely, on average, make things worse rather than better. Or even if it's a minority of cases where it's making things worse, it makes them so much worse that it's not worth medicalizing the rest of your kid's life over.

But I want to talk about some of the interviews you did, some of the spoonies you got to know, what were they like? Describe these experiences. It's interesting. They were so open with me, first of all, which is always something, I'm so grateful I'm a stranger on the Internet that I'm reaching out, and I'm like, and you said this ruined your sex life. Can you talk a little bit?

Suzy Weiss
It's crazy. But one of them, this quote that really struck me was that someone had asked what this girl who had this really rich life in college is, who she is outside of being sick. And she said, my jaw hit the floor. I didn't know what to say. And that's someone who was able to go to college, was able to leave the house, and then, oh, it all goes backwards, and everything is in reverse, which I thought was interesting.

Oh, my God. It was so long ago. Who else did I talk to? Well, the main girl I talked to, Morgan, she described opening up an Instagram page wanting to be, like, a spoony influencer. I have a piece coming out that I'm editing about unwellness influencers.

We all know wellness influencers with their ayurvedic smoothies and whatever. But what about the unwellness influencers? That just encourages you to hurkle and everything else. But this girl, Morgan, she was in a hospital bed. I think she had been there for months.

She had to gain weight, but she wasn't gaining weight. She had a Picc line. She had mouths. Nothing was working. She had stomach pains every time she ate, which got worse from the feeding tube.

And then her mom came in and plucked her cell phone out of her hand. And that became. That was the moment that she started to get better. When her mom cut her off from a community of people that she believed to be her friends, and I'm sure they were her friends, it was a Snapchat group that she had, like, in a thousand day streak with or whatever it was. And it.

And it gives you this sense of being understood, but you don't realize that there are, like, weights on your ankles while this is happening. It's like when you freeze to death. You feel warm at the last second or something. But yet she was really interesting. And she described.

She didn't say, oh, I made it up, and I don't think she did, but she was able to have awareness about how this community has a really dark side and a side that. That doesn't encourage you to get better. Well, one thing also that I think is really interesting, and I was mentioning this before we started recording, is how pervasive spoony language is, even if people don't know what the community is. I had heard before I read your article about spoons. And then we were like, oh, this friend is a spoony, and this friend is a spoonie.

Simone Collins
And some of them have even used these analogies with us, and we just didn't realize it. And then once we read your article, we started seeing this culture and bits of it everywhere. What scares me is that I think a lot of people fall into it without knowing what it is. And I think most spoonies fall into without knowing what it is. When you discovered it, because you really.

You write about it as a cohesive thing. And from this very sober minded perspective of an outsider, how did you manage to not just immediately fall right into it and fall for it like, I think most people do, even people who are like. Otherwise we'll say very critical of maybe we'll say, like, therapy culture or trans culture or anything. I think a lot of people still totally fall for this. Right.

Is there anything that. Yeah. Because it's such a taboo thing to doubt someone's lived experience of their illness. Yeah. That.

Suzy Weiss
That horrible thing that I had to do. It's a good question. I think everyone always says, follow the money. And when you have someone saying, hey, if you wear compression socks and you have to drink salt water all the time and your doctor says, do you faint? Even if you haven't fainted, maybe just tell them you fainted and also buy these $40 blue light glasses.

I really have no problem getting into it when I feel that there is, like, quackery and people wasting their money on things that are ultimately harmful to them. Not to say that every person who identifies as a spoony is trying to sell you, like, weird electrolyte tinctures, but I think that's part of it. And then I think throughout the whole Internet, there is this, like, trauma porn or horror porn masquerading as raising awareness the two most abused words in the english language. And I don't know, I call bullshit. I love because I'm thinking about this in a historic context.

Malcolm Collins
Like, this historically, just would have been described as hysteria. Like, why is it that these women have this affirmed in them? And what you said at the beginning is why this has been allowed to get out of control. Like, this is doubting someone's lived experience is a sin within the shadow religion, or whatever you want to call it, this alternative religious and theological system that exists within our society, because there's no reason for that to be an intrinsically wrong thing. I call B's on what you're telling me.

It sounds self indulgent, but you're not allowed to say that. But that's like a totally reasonable thing in a historic context to say to a teenage girl, I think you're being a bit of a drama queen. Go back to Jane Austen novels and, like a common feature in them, like a common trope. Like, the gay best friend of its time was the sickly mother or something, who was just always had taken to her beds and swoons. That was a thing.

Simone Collins
They were totally spoonies. There was a spoony flare up during Regency era England among wealthy people. And again, it was wealthy white women doing it, too, which is hilarious. Yeah. But I want to elevate something else you said that I thought was really interesting, which was the thing that broke her out of it, is, what is your identity outside of being sick?

Malcolm Collins
And I think that this is where what you discovered in the story, I think is so useful to people even, who would never be at risk of becoming a spoonie, because as our society has moved to a secular place or a post religious place, when people think about who they are, we are not given a good framework for determining that within our educational system. And so some individuals, like Simone, I yourself probably thought a lot about, who am I? What do I want to be in the world? Like, how do I define which actions I take versus which actions I don't take? Like, I built some sort of, like, core moral framework that I'm living around.

But some people, if they just walk into this without thinking, it's very easy to accidentally say, who am I? Like, how do I define good action? I guess I'm this illness because this is what I get affirmed for in my community. Or I guess I'm a woman, right? And therefore, this intertate thing, like you were pointing out earlier.

Simone Collins
Right? I'm just a manly man. I'm a manly man, and I be myself by being a manly man. But this can also be political parties. A person decides I am a conservative, and therefore, all the opinions I hold, everything I do during the day.

Malcolm Collins
And while not all of these communities are intrinsically as damaging to an individual as a spoony community, they fall into very similar psychological loops, which we are all susceptible to if we don't take time to have a firm understanding of what heuristics we are using to make decisions in our lives and choose a self identity. Well, this is why I love you guys so much and love talking to you so much, because you're one of the few people who actually believe things. And I know it sounds silly and are willing to say what you believe. And it's like, we believe in having lots of kids. You may not, but that is the thing we.

Suzy Weiss
And it's. You're not trying to say you're both. And I think a lot of these communities, like the Andrew Tate Manley men, they're defining themselves based on what they believe the culture has done to them. It's a grievance culture. And same thing with spoonies.

And you brought up like that, this is whatever filling the God shaped hole in all of our hearts. I do think there's a spiritual aspect of. There is badness. It has migrated to within me. I am dirty.

I am sick. I must be cleansed. But none of it's my fault. It's, like, a little confused, but, yeah, I think defining yourself based on lack, based on the fact that it's harder for you to run a mile because of your condition, is not a recipe for a good life. Well, it's interesting that you mentioned the spiritual part, because one of the things that I often say is these evolved religious traditions.

Malcolm Collins
They came with a lot of malware, but they were the only memetic antivirus we as a species had. They were a bad antivirus. They were a heavy antivirus. They were like, old school McAfee, Norton. Where it slowed down your computer by 60%.

Suzy Weiss
Right. But it still fought the viruses. And when you completely remove it, you get these very simplistic, memetic viruses that certain people are just incredibly susceptible to. Right. And certain people who, I would argue, are very sensitive and open.

I don't think they're, like, necessarily maladjusted. I just think we've taken all the guardrails off, and here's what happens. I think a lot of these women might have been in a committed relationship if men could get it together. So there are a lot of factors that make it spin out of control. Yeah, well, if men could get it together, and this is interesting, is that in a post scarcity world, finding your purpose, and I want to go back to this state because most of the developed world, and especially the people who become spoonies, are living post scarcity lives.

Malcolm Collins
Middle class white women, most of them. That is a post scarcity lifestyle. You're not really going to starve or anything like that. There are things you want that you can't have, but those things are primarily status symbols that you primarily want, because they have generated value based on the fact that a lot of people want them and therefore you can't have them. A nice car.

What's an example like a nice car or designer clothes. Nothing intrinsic about them. You can get clothes if you want clothes. The reason why nice clothes are something you can't get is the very reason you want them. Like, they wouldn't be a status symbol if you could trivially get them.

If you want a computer, you can get a computer from two years ago that costs, like, $200, right? The things are always accessible to people. Smartphones are accessible to everyone, I think. What is it? Like, 89% of homeless people have a smartphone now we are in an extremely.

Housing is probably the only thing of real scarcity in our society. Yeah. But we suspected, as we transitioned to a post scarcity ecosystem, that people would begin to indulge in hedonism, and instead, what they indulged in was self victimization, which allowed the removal of personal responsibility, which is, in a way, one avenue is spoonism. But indulging in self victimization doesn't feel like indulging in self victimization to the individual. It feels like highlighting the parts of themselves that differentiate them from society and thus make them special.

And I think that you see this even within communities that I consider myself, like, I'm a pretty big supporter of the gay community, for example. And what was really InterestinG is ONe of the things we mentioned is gay men. We've mentioned this before. 45% of gay men voted for Trump in the last election. Like, the gay Male community has changed.

Suzy Weiss
45. 45%. Yeah. So much since I was a kid. When I was a kid, you had this HierArchy within the gay male community, where you would act like more of a gay male to move up within this hierarchy.

Malcolm Collins
And so you had these very flamboyant gay men that have disappeared as part of our culture, because being a gay male, especially a gay white male, no longer really others you in our society in the way it used to. So there is no longer a reason to build your identity around it in the way that MinI young MId did when I was growing up. Right. I think. I think about this all the time.

Suzy Weiss
Like, I'm the first woman in my generation, or I'm the first generation of my family, as a woman who got to move to New York City, got my own apartment, got my own job, had my own money, not because the woman before me, they were smarter than me, they were totally capable, but it just wasn't done. They got married early, they had kids. They had probably a better life than me. But, like, the liberation happens so quickly. And I think with gay male culture, everyone was dying.

35 years ago, everyone was dying. And now, literally under basically a genocide. It was the craziest thing in the world. And then it's. You shoot to the top of culture in this way that's almost.

It's incredible. It's a miracle. But it also, I think, induces some sort of, like, cultural vertigo of, okay, where do we stand now? Who are we? It's taken over by marginal portions of the lgbt community.

Malcolm Collins
And now you are the oppressor, right, exactly. But even, like a. Let's just say, like, a gay guy 25 years ago, wouldn't really dream of having a husband and kids in a white picket fence. My. The gay dudes of my generation, that's exactly what they want.

Suzy Weiss
They're getting married before me. Even a ten year difference. Yeah. Has totally changed what was, what's possible, and therefore changed how, what behavior you model. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins
Yeah. It really messes up the way adults are interacting with culture. Like, even us. We did an episode we were talking about. I grew up, we're gay men.

We're genuinely impressed, oppressed, beaten up. If they were found out, like, it was very rare that someone would come out. One of our listeners who was a Gen alpha person was like, it's so weird to hear you say that, because when I was growing up, being gay was a status symbol. Oh, yeah. It was in school, and it gave you special protection from teachers.

It gave you special access to things. And, yeah, it just means you're, like, vicious and fun. Yeah. And that the older population doesn't realize how much the pendulum has swung. And so they think that they are affirming an oppressed group without realizing they are pedestalizing the group that is at the top of the status hierarchy, which is really fascinating.

Suzy Weiss
Right. And then, of course, with Gen Z, who are having way less sex. Queer just means, like, straight with weird hair, like, straight with the right politics or whatever it is. Like, it's the whole decoupling your sexual identity from what kind of sex you have, I think is really interesting because you no longer have to have gay sex to be gay. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins
We always point out that we are technically trans by lgbt ideology, because we are agender. I don't care what gender I am. If I woke up a woman tomorrow, it would not genuinely affect my life that much. He'd work it. You're just.

Suzy Weiss
You're just a brain and a head, right? I'm just a brain and a head. And that makes me agender from the perspective of trans ideology. Well, being agender is a form of genderqueer. Genderqueer is a form of trans.

Malcolm Collins
So we are not incorrect in saying that we are fully trans within a trans moral architecture. And they'd say, well, no, you're not. And it's. Well, then why no, am I not? And it's because your politics aren't trans, because we have turned these into political identities.

Suzy Weiss
It's interesting, too, because this almost goes back to the spoony thing, because it's like, these are invisible illnesses. I don't need to look sick to be sick. I don't need to tell you my diagnosis to be sick. I can self diagnose and be sick. I don't even need to go to a professional.

Similarly, with gender ideology, you don't have to present as a woman to be a woman. So it's all internal, but there's still this need to, like, signal to everyone else, but you don't need to do that because that has nothing to do with it. And it's. It's. I don't know, I think there's some sort of connection there where it's, yes, you a trans man, a trans person, and me like a deathly sick person, even though observably none of those things are true.

Yeah. You're treated the same with society. In both cases, society doubts your and the supposed authorities within various professions doubt your lived experiences. And so you can come together under this umbrella of never doubt. What I say is true about my experiences of reality.

Who coined. We have to find who. Who out. Who coined lived experience. Yes.

It is like the trick of the century. Well, this has been such an engaging conversation. I almost feel like you could be a third host of this show. You are. I get along with you so well.

Malcolm Collins
And for our fans who say that there are not unmarried, like, super, super eligible women, now she, I think she's dating and stuff like that now, but she doesn't have a ring on it yet. And this means you should be sending applications because attractive based and super intelligent. Okay, last one, ladies and gentlemen. Getting kids. And so I don't care how that happens.

My kids need people to marry. I always say this. That's the, that's amazing. So this call has been absolutely fantastic. Please check out her stuff.

Create a Google alert with her name if you want. Do you have a Google alert with her name, Simone? No, because I just subscribed to the Free Press. Yeah, subscribe to the free Press. That's the best thing to do.

Suzy Weiss
Go to the fP.com, subscribe. All the content's really good, but Susie's is the best. And you, man, I want to see more. Every time I see the free press, I'm like, is it Susie? And not enough?

Simone Collins
Come on, man. All right, awesome. Thank you guys so much.

Suzy Weiss
Thank you guys so much.

How the Internet Turned Illness Into Status for Privileged Women with Suzy Weiss

Primary Topic

Episode Summary

Main Takeaways

Episode Chapters

1: Introduction

2: The Spoonie Phenomenon

3: Cultural and Psychological Dynamics

4: Interviews and Insights

5: Conclusion

Actionable Advice

About This Episode

People

Guest Name(s):

Content Warnings:

Transcript