Today’s Fine Feminist Hour with Carlyn Beccia covered fascism, AI, beauty culture, dementia, liberal arts education, the manosphere, vaginal microbiomes, Gen Z boys, authenticity, and whether weirdness might actually become humanity’s competitive advantage.
Carlyn and I started by talking about feminism in 2026 and immediately landed in a much bigger conversation about loneliness, disenfranchised young men, and the danger of leaving entire generations vulnerable to the manosphere pipeline. We talked about the “looksmaxxing” movement, young men literally micro-fracturing their jawbones for masculinity, and the terrifying rise of influencers like Clavicular, who now somehow have the attention of people at the highest levels of politics.
From there, we wandered into beauty culture, Instagram face, and the growing exhaustion of living inside algorithmic femininity. Carlyn made the fascinating point that culture may eventually swing back toward distinctive, imperfect, deeply human faces simply because sameness eventually becomes boring.
I think she’s right. I hope she is, at least.
We spent a long stretch talking about AI—not as a replacement for writers, but as a thinking companion, brainstorming tool, research assistant, and sometimes adversary. Carlyn compared AI to tarot cards: less a fortune teller than a reflective surface that helps reveal patterns and subconscious connections. It was one of the smartest conversations about creative AI use I’ve had publicly.
We also talked about something I’ve been thinking about constantly lately: whether the future belongs not to hyper-specialists, but to people with wide-ranging curiosity and interdisciplinary thinking. Carlyn argued that AI may actually reward Renaissance-style generalists — people who can connect ideas across history, psychology, politics, science, art, and culture in uniquely human ways. As a fellow Gen X multi-hyphenate, I found that oddly comforting.
And then we got into the darker stuff.
Trump’s cognitive decline. The congressional record now containing statements from 36 physicians raising alarms about his fitness. What authoritarian collapse actually looks like historically. The moral exhaustion of modern America. The difference between democracy dying dramatically versus slowly through paperwork and normalization.
But maybe the most unexpectedly moving part of the conversation was the quieter parenting thread running underneath all of it.
Both Carlyn and I are raising daughters who are about to leave home and enter a profoundly unstable world. And beneath all the talk about AI and fascism and beauty culture was a much more human question:
How do you raise kids to remain authentic in a world constantly trying to optimize, monetize, manipulate, and flatten them?
We had a deeply smart, weird, funny, unsettling conversation in the best possible way.
Thank you Cat: Poli-Psych, 💨Ashley Schmitt™️, LeftieProf, Courtney, Noble Blend, and many others for tuning in, and to the wonderful Karen Marie Shelton and Yanni Hamburger for moderating.
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