Where Feminism Went Wrong: The 342nd Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
September 4, 2026
AI Summary
5 min readWhere Feminism Went Wrong
In 1995, Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein—then graduate students in biology at the University of Michigan—went to see Gloria Steinem speak in Ann Arbor. They were fans. Heying had been a subscriber to Ms. Magazine since 1989. Steinem had exposed the exploitation of Playboy Bunnies, fought for editorial independence from advertisers, and helped create a feminism that seemed to say: you can be a woman, a scientist, anything, without pretending you aren't what you are. But that night, Steinem said something that changed Heying's view permanently: she called the scientific method "a project of the patriarchy."
"That was such a letdown," Heying recalls. "I never thought the same of her after hearing her say that."
The Two Feminisms in Ms. Magazine
Steinem's Ms. Magazine went ad-free in 1990, a principled stand Heying admired. She saved every issue from that era—a heavy bin she has moved from place to place ever since. Those magazines represented a feminism that was serious, analytical, and genuinely liberating. They covered topics like silicone implant cover-ups, the choice to marry or not, and the global politics of breastfeeding—without the soft-focus consumerism of Cosmopolitan or Vogue.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:04) **Episode Opening & Grief Processing** - The hosts open with a personal reflection on the loss of their dog, Maddie, and how grief has shifted their perspective.
- 2 (14:09) **Introduction: The Death of Gloria Steinem** - The main topic begins with the death of feminist icon Gloria Steinem at age 92, prompting a critical re-evaluation of her legacy.
- 3 (23:11) **Steinem’s Early Work: The Playboy Bunny Exposé** - Heather highlights Steinem’s 1963 undercover investigation as a Playboy Bunny as a key early piece of feminist journalism.
- 4 (30:30) **The Founding of Ms. Magazine and the Fight with Advertisers** - The conversation moves to Steinem’s founding of Ms. Magazine and her battle against the editorial control exerted by advertisers.
- 5 (40:00) **The Pill, Abortion, and a Biological Revolution** - Bret places second-wave feminism in an evolutionary context, linking it to the uncoupling of sex from reproduction via the pill and legal abortion.
- 6 (43:23) **The Rot Within: Anti-Woman Essays from Early Ms. Magazine** - Heather pivots to a critical examination of the ideas published within Ms., revealing a strain of thought she finds deeply problematic.
- 7 (56:36) **Ecofeminism and the Failure of Postmodernism** - Heather finds a 1989 piece on ecofeminism in Ms. that embodies a naive, postmodern worldview.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Guests on this episode
Show Notes
On this, our 342nd Evolutionary Lens livestream, we discuss men, women, and feminism; and the love of our pets. Gloria Steinem died at 92 this week. She exposed working conditions at Playboy clubs in the 1960s by going undercover as a bunny; founded Ms. Magazine in the 1970s; took Ms. ad free in the 1990s, and became a feminist icon. We discuss her legacy, both good and bad. Then: cats, dogs, and the differences between them.
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Music: "Marble Machine" by Wintergatan
This track can be downloaded for free at www.wintergatan.net
Free License to use this track in your video can be downloaded at www.wintergatan.net
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Mentioned in this episode:
NYT obit of Steinem: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/03/us/politics/gloria-steinem-dead.html
A Bunny’s Tale: https://archive.org/details/a-bunnys-tale/page/n15/mode/2up
Heying 2022: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-021-02278-0
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