Woke to the Nth: Feminist Vegan on Meatsogyny

BUCK: Is wokeness a form of madness?

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: I mean, an actual…?

CLAY: Yes. (laughing)

BUCK: Clay’s got an answer.

CLAY: The answer is yes. I’m gonna go ahead and say yes. I believe it. Yes.

BUCK: Is wokeness a form of madness? I like to address this one whenever we can. That’s one of the things we do here on this show. We try to give you just looking at things the way they are: Rationality, sanity in an insane world. This is making the rounds right now online and we just have to share it with you. It’s from the November 2021 Oxford Union debate.

So, this is from the U.K. Somehow, this has just started to get a lot of attention. But a feminist vegan advocate activist and author, which sounds like most of the women I end up going on dates with here in New York.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: But anyway…

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: It’s why I’m still unmarried, folks. Anyway…

CLAY: That’s why you need to live in the red states.

BUCK: I know.

CLAY: You need to live in the South.

BUCK: I gotta get out of here.

CLAY: We don’t have a lot of those people here.

BUCK: It’s crazy.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: (impression) “Excuse me? Whooo? What radio show do you do?”

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: I’m like, “Oh, this isn’t gonna go well.” All of a sudden, everyone I’ve ever gone on a date with sounds like Hillary Clinton. “Hello!”

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: Feminist, vegan, advocate, activist, author, sitting there saying, “This house…” The debate is called, “This house would move beyond meat.” We just gotta let you hear this, folks. This is wokeness taken to the Nth degree. Go for it.

BUCK: Clay, you’re hearing that for the first time.

CLAY: I’d not heard that before. You had heard that before. There’s so much insanity unspooling there. Where…? First of all, where are fish sexualized? At what point have you ever heard, “Man, you know what is really hot? When a girl cuts into a salmon!” I don’t ever remember that existing, right? I don’t remember the sexualization of fish eating. (laughing) Oh, well.

BUCK: There was that weird movie that won Best Picture where a woman has an affair with her aquarium pet, if you remember.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: What was that?

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: You know what I’m talking about. Just a few years ago! It was Best Picture. You know what I’m talking about, right? It was a human/fish hybrid. You guys… Into the Water or something it’s called.

CLAY: I didn’t see that one.

BUCK: The Shape of Water! The Shape of Water. Yes.

CLAY: The Shape of…? I don’t see… Look, if it’s not Pixar, Buck, the number of movies that I see now… I used to see every movie under the sun. Last year they had the Oscars, I don’t think I had seen a single Oscar-nominated film for Best Picture. Now, I’ve seen Encanto. I’ve seen all the different… I can’t even remember the different Pixar movies and Disney movies that have come out recently. But that woman, the reaction when she said that they… Look, let me take a step back.

BUCK: Clay, meat eating is sexist, white supremacist, misogynist! She fits everything into meat eating?

CLAY: I don’t even understand how you could argue that meat eating is white supremacy. So, I don’t understand how you can argue that eating fish is sexualized and everything else that she tried to do. But do white supremacists eat more meat than other white people or other…? All the connections here — you can hear my brain almost exploding — I don’t even understand how they’re made, right? There’s not even a thread to connect them.

BUCK: I think the point is the connections are irrelevant. It’s just that you’re willing to make them.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: The point is that you find every ism that is fashionable on the left now to be obsessed with and you find one thing and you say, “Well, this is a representation.” It’d be like sitting on here say, “Clay, honestly alternate side of the street parking in New York City is sexist, racist, misogynist, white supremacy and neo-Nazism” —

CLAY: Right.

BUCK: — and have a room full of academics at Oxford clapping for you. I totally see how alternate side of the street parking is all of those things. This is what happened to the elite academy, right? Not even just in general. This is the place we’re supposed to look to to be intellectual thought leaders.