Human After All
An Interview with Helen Roy
“I think the the free speech debate is a complete distraction right now. I think the real debate should be about free will. We feel it right now because we are being programmed. We're being programmed based on what we say we're interested in, and we are told through these discovery mechanisms what is interesting...[That’s] why these corporations became so large and so valuable is because they solved the discovery problem on the internet.”
That’s how Jack Dorsey, the ex-CEO of Twitter, recently put it.
Algorithms don’t merely find content to match your tastes, they can conform your tastes and opinions to fit the algorithm. And what we’re witnessing is that the simplest solution for maximum engagement is an appeal to, and reshaping around, base instincts. Inflame insecurities, anxieties, and sinful appetites. Play to the least-common-denominator.
While it’s easy enough to recognize when sports highlights or thirst traps or cooking inspo videos have an instinctive attraction, it’s more difficult to tell when you are subtly losing nuance and rigor in your opinions. Our public square, both in production and consumption, is rapidly changing from the domain of idiosyncratic humans to the province of NPCs.
NPC, or non-player character, is a video game term to describe an internet-borne illness. An NPC is a background functionary who operates with absolute predictability and zero agency. They do as they are programmed to do. With a brief amount of information, you can predict their future actions with 100% certainty. While the term typically applies to normies, even public intellectuals can fall prey to audience capture and algorithmic reinforcement, and their popularity can become an ideological straitjacket. They may seem fun at first, but once you get their shtick, it’s boring and you move on.
Out of this NPC nightmare, Helen Roy sticks out as a full-blown human being. She achieves something increasingly rare among the commentariat: she surprises me. As Ted Gioia said, “entertainment gives you exactly what you want. That's the entertainer's job. The artist makes demands on you…The artist expands your mind and takes you places you never would have gone on your own.” By that definition, Helen Roy is an artist. She finds common cause with unlikely people and explanatory insights in unlikely places. When most creators are desperate to niche down and chase clicks, Roy is unafraid to experiment, rebrand, and challenge her audience. She also has an eye for beauty. When asked for some people whose work she loves, she offers Erika Bachiochi (the editor-in-chief of Fairer Disputations) but also Julia Berolzheimer, a woman who has built a traditional but fresh aesthetic that Roy calls a “visual treat.”
For all these reasons and more, I asked Roy if she would sit for an interview. We discussed X versus Substack, the state of “The Right,” and cause for hope despite the grim state of the sex wars. Before I go on, I’d encourage you to subscribe to her Substack. She’s one of the most entertaining, heterodox, fiery writers around.
[Note: the following quotations have been edited for clarity and conciseness.]
Despite hosting an international conference in Budapest, launching the “Girlboss, Interrupted” podcast, and writing as a columnist previously for The American Mind and Blaze Media, Helen Roy doesn’t think of herself as a public figure and definitely not a media personality. The closest she gets to a self-description is “a stay-at-home Mom who writes and does lots of other things.”
She feels that she is in a transitional phase as she witnesses the Right become an increasingly anti-woman and anti-intellectual space. She wants to talk about Tocqueville’s observations on the strength and vigor of American women, but she’s up against this:
When she tries to describe the state of discourse on X and large parts of the Right, she settles on the word “degenerate”:
Really since Elon bought X, the quality of the discourse has degenerated, to a point now where any of the good points that social conservatives would’ve once made to criticize liberal feminism are no longer possible, probable, or even profitable — [profit] is a big part of it.
For my own dignity, I don’t want to lend credibility to a movement that is trying to meme certain ideas into reality that will ultimately hurt people. And that’s why I want to create some distance.
This degeneracy is a regression from a more human, compassionate, principled stance to a vulgar proposition — vulgar both in its appeal to the masses and its crudeness. The necessary nuance and tact is gone. There’s no sophistication. She clarifies that these people aren’t radicals. Citing the Latin radix, which means root, she said radical implies a depth of thinking these people do not have: “I wouldn’t call these people radical at all. They’re just really dumb. Degenerate is a much better adjective. Not just morally degenerate but mentally degenerate. Their minds have degenerated.”
“I have a supernatural faith that what’s meant for me will come to me and fame is not why I do this.”
As a Catholic, she cannot stand by as words like “feminist,” “submission,” “marital debt,” “Western Women,” etc. get deployed without any historical or intellectual grounding. She worries the ideas these grifters on the Right are peddling will hurt people and pardon abusers, and she cannot aid or abet that in any way. Though Roy is quick to laugh and hates complaining, she gets very serious when discussing the abuse she’s seen over the past few years at the hands of bad men (often in “traditional” circles):
We have to be able to recognize the real fears that women have about men. And we have to be able to recognize that men can really f— up women’s lives in ways that are not true in the reverse.
Now having really seen that happen, I’m a little more defensive of women. I think men need to be held to pretty high standards if they want the kind of respect that they seem to want.
…
[As 13 year old girls], we all had experiences of grown a— men saying really dark stuff. And I don’t think men understand what that’s like on the same scale. As a 13 year old girl having one of your parent’s friends say something sexually explicit to you? You actually black it out. You have to black it out.
Having children too, and reflecting on my life as a child, [I thought], “Why do we take this stuff for granted? Like, that’s really sick actually.”
All I’m saying is feminists have a point. They’re not always making the right point, but they certainly have a point about female vulnerability.
Whereas she once was more defensive of men, now she is more evenhanded in acknowledging the misogyny and misandry present in our culture. But she is not a part of, nor attempting to start, some new movement. She’s just calling it how she sees it. When I ask how she would describe her own positioning she pauses and says, “Catholic…normal plain and simple Catholic is the only thing that feels safe because it’s expansive enough to cover a lot.”
Likewise, when I ask whether she has role models as she breaks away from the more established political camps, she says no one in media could be her role model because she doesn’t know them. Her years in DC taught her that popularity and character often do not go hand in hand. Instead, she says her roles models are her Godmother and Erika Bachiochi and and Catherine Pakaluk. While the latter two are more public, Roy names them because she knows them personally and knows how honorably they conduct themselves with their family, in their community, and in their professional lives as well. She wants to be a pillar in her real-life community with a well-deserved reputation for reliability, honesty, and generosity. She does not want to ever be the object or subject of a parasocial relationship. She is not trying to become famous:
I have a supernatural faith that what’s meant for me will come to me and fame is not why I do this. If notoriety or popularity is what comes out of this, great, but if it’s not meant to be, it’s not meant to be, and that’s not gonna hurt me.
Indeed, the biggest theme in our conversation is how her real life keeps disrupting her internet persona. While many people far less prominent than Roy are obsessive about their personal brand — what Freya India calls packaging their personality to fit into an Instagram grid — Roy is refreshingly human. She is reflexively contrarian, and that leads her to “counter-signal” her audience rather than pander to them. When the algorithms compress opinions into narrow chutes, Roy steps back and questions her priors. In college, that meant doubting the liberal platitudes and hysteria over Donald Trump. Now, it looks like questioning whether the Right’s lack of nuance is making their critiques ineffective and ultimately harmful. Roy abhors a herd mentality:
I’m just trying to say what’s true. A lot of being a vigilante will rely on context. In a more traditional Catholic circle, where I often find myself, I’m feeling the need to be defensive of women because there are things that are being said that are sick.
In another context, like with my secular, liberal college friends who are saying men are trash — actually, none of them are saying that first of all. Everybody wants to get married. There are a lot of narratives that circulate about liberal white women in their late 20s that are simply not true.
But I’m imagining a context in which people are saying marriage sucks, in that context, I would be highly defensive of marriage, because it is awesome, and it is great, and it is foundational for civilization. So that’s contextual I’d say.
I pressed Roy on all the change she’s undergone these past few years. Her Substack’s gone from “Ladies’ Late Rome Journal” to “Roy House in Budapest” to “Helen Roy.” She shut down her popular “Girlboss, Interrupted” podcast and signed off from writing columns for The American Mind and Blaze Media. So not only is she shifting her intellectual positions and distancing herself from more established camps, she’s leaving well-established brands to start something new. She explains that her publication being self-titled isn’t about a content strategy, it’s about keeping her from getting pigeon-holed. And she’s not playing 4-D Chess with her Marketing Plan. She’s following her gut:
I’m going to sound pretty cheesy, but if I don’t feel integrity in my heart about something, I can’t abide. I have to leave the room. Frankly, because I’ve had too many situations in life where I didn’t listen to my intuition, and I got completely burned by that. The journey of the past couple of years has been tuning back into my intuition, and maybe being a little messy in the process.
I don’t really live or die by my reputation. I guess I’ve always felt, “People who mind don’t matter and people who matter don’t mind.” That’s never really held me back when I want to scrap and start something new.
Maybe this betrays an extremity in my character, where I feel like I have to run away from versions of myself that I no longer like.
In a world where everyone is talking about data-driven decisions, human biases, and outsourcing to AI, Roy’s creative process inspires me. Despite the changes in her positions or publication, she feels her foundation has remained the same throughout her career:
I have been operating from a place of intellectual curiosity, even if there was a lot I was taking for granted in the early years. I was willing to be iconoclastic, that’s always been true. And, healing the relationship between the sexes. I think that is absolutely fundamental.
So I asked what she sees as the biggest impediment to both men and women coming together. She framed it in terms of the NPD and the BPD spectrum — men’s degeneracies tend toward Narcissistic Personality Disorder while women’s tend toward Borderline Personality Disorder. For men on the NPD spectrum, that looks like:
Totally self-centered, dominating, viewing other people as objects to be instrumentalized for their pleasure and gain and really not seeing other people as human and all the ways that manifests: rape, violence, child abuse, alcoholism, gambling, sports gambling, pornography.
And then for women, on the other side, the BPD thing, is about instrumentalizing people in a different way — through passive aggression and manipulation and gossip, and it’s all about validation essentially.
Rather than, for the NPD person, it’d be about objective achievement or advancement…for the BPD female, it’s more about personal validation and a sense of status.
In the same way that people run into that male degeneracy all the time, they run into that female degeneracy all the time. These things are why misandry and misogyny are plausible.
She’s reticent to credit these social changes in gender relations to monocausal explanations about “the pendulum swinging back.” Yes, you can see ways in which liberal feminism’s excesses may have conjured up the manosphere, but these reductionist explanations actually emasculate men. They strip them of agency by claiming that “They’re just reacting to feminism! There’s nobody else to choose from!” Roy doesn’t buy that: “Tim Tebow has always existed. Andrew Tate speaks to specific evils and degeneracies that appeal to low-status men.” And the same goes for plenty of women too. We have to be honest about sins men and women commit rather than chalking everything up to cultural forces.
Unlike most gender commentators, Roy isn’t trying to put her thumb on the scale. She’s not trying to be anti-misandrist or anti-misogynist, so I wanted to ask her about her positive message, the hope she has for her future work on healing the rift between men and women. Here she smiles and has a ready answer: while X has been overrun by degenerates — those whose humanity has degraded into a lower form — she has seen firsthand how love is “generative.” Love shows that life is not a zero-sum game because it expands your life in ways you didn’t realize were possible:
Men and women can absolutely bring out the best in one another. Love heals all wounds. There’s so much hidden beauty in the mutual submission of will and self-interest that happens in a truly loving relationship. It’s profoundly healing and profoundly generative, in more ways than one. Obviously, children are a natural generation of that relationship, a physical manifestation.
But I also think — and this is where a lot of the feminist people and manosphere people get really, really mixed up: Manosphere guys are like, “Oh, men who are distracted by their families aren’t productive.”… Same thing for women, “Oh, you can’t simultaneously have kids and any kind of commercial life or public life.” I think both of these things are untrue.
Love is effusive, not subtractive.
In her own experience, Roy has built a life with her husband, and everything has improved — their relationships, their careers, their social capital. And she’s seen that same pattern in the people she most admires. Once again, Roy takes her cues from real life role models, not graphs, memes, and influencers. While so many people seem to treat their offline lives as mere grist for the online content mill, I sense that Roy’s public persona is only the tip of the iceberg.
So what’s next for Roy?
Who’s to say.
That’s the difference between an artist and an entertainer, between a true intellectual and an NPC. The entertainer gives you what you want, but the artist gives you what you didn’t know you wanted. The NPC gives you what you expect, but the intellectual gives you the truth. In other words, if you want more of the same predictable engagement farming and AI slop, stick to the algorithms. If you want to watch an artist at work, keep an eye on Helen Roy.
Ben, it was an honor and joy to sit with you. Thank you!
A lovely interview!