#2460 - Rachel Wilson

What’s up—good to see you; your audiobook wrecked my old, lazy takes on feminism, so walk me through how you ended up writing this wild thing about occult roots and women’s liberation.

I grew up the gifted kid pushed toward college, hated school by the end, and split time between a hustling business‑owner dad and a Marxist feminist mom, which made me question everything and long for a calm, intact family of my own.

I skipped a full‑ride, had a baby at twenty, got shamed to rush back to work, did the math on daycare and taxes, watched my partner bail, and leaned on my Depression‑era grandma who modeled how serious and skilled home life really is.

Housework’s real work, but we pretend an office badge makes it matter more.

When I worked, I ached to be home, and when I was home, I felt guilty about work, which is why I think we give women backward advice about burning fertile years on degrees and careers while birth rates quietly crater.

Cost of living’s brutal now; isn’t that a big reason two incomes feel mandatory?

After the seventies we shoved women into college and jobs, doubled the labor pool by the eighties, flattened men’s wages, and trapped families in a two‑income treadmill that’s hard to step off.

Why did adding women to the workforce keep pay from rising with everything else?

We steered the economy toward female‑heavy fields like HR and psych, rebranded home skills for corporations, taxed the new income stream, and parked kids in state schools where values could be standardized.

It makes you wonder what the world looks like if that pivot never happens.

That’s why I wrote the book—feminism is the fastest social rewrite in human history, and women’s‑studies gatekeepers polished the origin story while scrubbing the messier parts.

The vote is the big symbol—why would women not want it?

Many women feared trading legal protections and male financial duty for formal ‘equality,’ dreaded the draft and grim jury duty, and warned the ballot box would split households and boost divorce, while they’d already won major reforms like Prohibition without votes by leveraging moral authority.

Couldn’t you keep protections and still participate?

History shows they lost leverage once they became just another voting bloc, and the family‑splitting politics they predicted arrived right on time.

We also forget men didn’t long have universal suffrage either.

Exactly—lots of men were barred by taxes, property rules, and tests; in Utah women got and then lost the vote over polygamy, and when Massachusetts let women decide if they wanted suffrage, only about four percent said yes, after which leading suffragists stopped asking.

We’ve canonized Susan B. Anthony; what did your digging change?

Stanton and Anthony wrote the movement’s ‘history’ as PR, downplaying how radicals, socialists, and even polygamists powered it and polishing themselves into saints.

And then there are the male cheerleaders—the white‑knight problem.

Plenty of ringleaders were grifters or occultists like Victoria Woodhull, who mixed free‑love agitprop with spiritualist scams and Wall Street gossip pipelines, while later the Ford crowd and even the CIA helped seed second‑wave media and activism through figures like Gloria Steinem to sell liberal order during the Cold War.

I’ve seen those clips where activists want deported felons brought back—ideology steamrolls facts.

Teacher training is mostly women filtered through women’s‑studies frames where white men are default oppressors and ‘compassion’ means defending anyone coded as victim, which is why I wrote a reality check on the framing itself.

Pop culture finished the job: Stepford Wives cast homemakers as zombies, girlboss branding made contempt for men sexy, and Ms. magazine literally featured the goddess Kali—an icon of vengeance—juggling baby and iron to glamorize revolt against domestic life.

You also see real regret in those viral videos where women say they chased the script and hate the life they got.

I’ve paid a price for saying this, but my inbox is stacked with women in midlife and beyond weeping over careers, no kids, and loneliness they can’t undo.

Even Simone de Beauvoir admitted you can’t ‘offer the choice’ to stay home because most women would take it, which tells you the project needs coercion to work.

Trusting a man is a real risk too; if he collapses, the family does with him.

I’m a tomboy who lifts and teaches firearms, and even I see men overwhelmingly design, build, and fix the dangerous, dirty systems that keep lights on and roads open while women gravitate toward people‑centric work.

Meanwhile raising kids gets dismissed because it doesn’t show up on a balance sheet.

The ‘unpaid labor’ line ignores that Christian civilization honored motherhood—look at Mary—and that a civilization’s first school and hospital is a home that works.

Your occult chapter shocked me; how deep did that vein run?

Deeper than I expected—spiritualism, theosophy, goddess rites, even open Lucifer veneration show up across first‑wave icons, with Stanton rewriting scripture in the Woman’s Bible and Margaret Fuller floating gender‑as‑spectrum ideas in the 1840s.

And today that spectrum talk still pretends biology’s a vibe.

Occult systems prize dissolving male and female to ‘ascend,’ celebrate automatic writing and spirit dictation, and recast Lucifer as a flattering mascot for self‑deification that slides into relativism and, in academia, ‘standpoint’ rules where activists declare which ‘truths’ count.

Occult also means hidden, and the hidden part is this: the promise was safety and freedom, the result is anti‑natal attitudes, two‑income burnout, and a culture cheering self‑worship over the hard, joyful sacrifice that builds tomorrow’s people.

I front-loaded family and now, in my mid-forties with grown kids, I have time for other callings, and I think we’ve steered women wrong by telling them to delay motherhood for careers.

So many write me saying they ache for marriage and children but feel locked into debt, degrees, and expectations.

Feminism didn’t make women or kids safer in my view; marriage is linked to lower domestic violence, and children with married biological parents are approximately 12 times safer across abuse metrics than other arrangements.

Fatherlessness correlates with higher risks from addiction to incarceration, and swapping husbands for the state has left families more exposed.

But how many families today actually need two incomes just to get by?

Change will be slow, but when women truly have a choice, many choose motherhood; in tight budgets we got creative, moved somewhere cheaper, grew food, and I picked up weekend work I could do while my husband was home.

Remote jobs now let some moms shape work around kids and trade shifts at home.

Let’s pivot to Jack Parsons and all that occult chaos, and how it brushed up against feminism.

Parsons broke from Crowley, fell hard for Marjorie Cameron, and they dove into ritual sex magic with drugs because they believed it amped their workings.

Crowley was bisexual and chased shock value, and that energy seeped into their scene.

What did that crew actually feed into feminism?

After Parsons died in a lab blast, Cameron fled to the desert, built a peyote-fueled art cult, and chased moon-children and the Scarlet Woman myth.

She became a counterculture muse, and that rebellious, untethered archetype bled into pop culture as the cool, anti-domestic bad girl.

Because men hold most physical force, women often lean on sexual power and mate choice, which is why status and sex can feel like leverage; even genetics show more women than men reproduced historically.

No wonder fame chases sexy forever and some stars brag about abortions as proof of autonomy.

That story becomes a script, and then every frustration gets pinned on patriarchy or kids instead of personal habits and community.

I see the divorce glow up trend and think, if you did that work inside the marriage, maybe you’d still be building together, though yes, plenty of men are not worth the bet.

Sexual liberation also lowered the pressure on some guys to grow up, so drifting is easy.

Dating apps crank the options to absurd levels; they can spark great matches, but the swipe buffet makes commitment fragile.

I missed apps; I’ve been with Andrew for almost twenty years.

Add constant online performance and filters and kids drown in anxiety chasing feedback from strangers.

With my daughters I show the edits and surgery behind celebrity perfection, and I see boys spiral too, convinced height or looks doom them.

A lot of men report no sex, and a small slice of men draw most of the attention.

I urge young women not to filter out good men because they don’t earn six figures at twenty-two; families can grow a man’s drive, and you can rise together.

Culture trains hypergamy, and it also flatters women with you’re perfect messaging that erases self-work.

Yet many body-positivity voices quietly jumped on Ozempic and similar drugs.

That flip showed the mask; a lot of influencers got very lean the minute a GLP-1 made it easy.

There’s no pill for strength; take the hard road and your mind steadies too.

Lifting through four pregnancies protected me, even when a doctor said I might not walk after a pelvic separation, and I rehabbed anyway.

After my son died, prayer and the gym kept me afloat when nothing else could.

Hard physical effort is a reliable anchor for mental health, for men especially.

When we moved and I missed training, my mood slid until the home gym was up; women benefit too with easier births and stronger aging so kids don’t have to carry them later.

About your book, I listened to the audiobook; the narrator had an odd tone, and I wished you read it.

I want a re-record with my husband narrating, and I’ve hesitated about my own voice, but maybe it’s time.

It’s your story; hearing it in your voice would land even harder.

I don’t hate women; I love women and wrote this because removing accountability while handing out power broke the old balance and left boys policed in school and girls pushed toward OnlyFans and boss-babe scripts.

Women’s drinking and prescriptions are up, big surveys find women less happy now and even less happy than men across cultures, and Marxist strands of feminism openly targeted the family so the state could step in.

You see that in cities where officials want the state to guide kids’ medical choices over parents.

I lay out the sources so women can check me and still choose their path, but at least choose it with eyes open.

It’s a sharp, fascinating book, and I loved this talk; thanks for doing it.

Thank you; I’m glad it resonated.

So many icons in that movement were a mess behind the curtain, which your book exposes; thanks again, everybody, bye.