I once saw a clip of an interview with Joanna Angel (a porn creator) about whether or not pornography is misogynist. She said that everything is a product of culture, and we live in a misogynist culture, so most porn is going to be misogynist, but that’s not an inherent feature of films of people having sex.
Here I am seeing the same thing discussed with NPR shows. Are they good, are they bad? They are a product of a culture that still hasn’t found it’s way out of the darkness of neo-liberalism/neo-conservativism. “There is no such thing as society” is a pervasive cultural attitude, so it’s no wonder that micro-level brain stuff is seen as the cause of things instead of macro-level social stuff.
I don’t listen to these shows and I don’t know how valid the criticism is. I would have hoped that the people making shows like this would be more conscious of the culture of individualism they exist in and would be making shows specifically to present a different perspective (like I assume from Angel’s comment that she tries to make non-misogynist porn). I feel a little disheartened (well, not by the Freakonomics Radio one, Freakonomics is the poster child for broken products of an individualist society).
