How the Internet Turned Illness Into Status for Privileged Women with Suzy Weiss

In this captivating conversation, Malcolm and Simone Collins sit down with journalist Suzy Weiss to discuss her in-depth article on the Spoonie community, a group of chronic illness sufferers who have created a unique online subculture. Weiss shares her insights on how the Spoonie movement has evolved, the potential dangers of building an identity around illness, and the parallels between this phenomenon and other youth subcultures. The hosts and guest also delve into the broader implications of a society that increasingly valorizes victimhood and self-diagnosis, and the challenges of protecting vulnerable individuals from harmful online communities.

Suzy Weiss: [00:00:00] A Spoonie is a member of a community of chronic illness sufferers.

What some people have described as Munchausen by internet what happens when your identity becomes illness, because how are you ever incentivized to get well?

Malcolm Collins: , if your community identification is defined by How ill you are then a status hierarchy is going to begin to form based on illness and people being people, they are going to have a motivation. To exaggerate their illness

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: I am so, so, so excited for our special guest here today. Um, easily our favorite writer. It's on the show today. This is Susie Weiss. We mentioned her in a number of episodes as just a writer who we really respect and does really, really interesting, deep based pieces that explore subcultures that are weird, which is like our [00:01:00] favorite thing.

Today we are going to do the first piece of hers that we really got into where I was like, Oh this changes my thinking on a number of things About how like memetic viruses can form was in current online environments and how we're gonna raise

Simone Collins: our teenage daughters Like it completely like it gave us a new model for female adolescence.

This was it was a game changer

Malcolm Collins: Oh, and where we should send people so this snoozy weiss. It's her twitter account. So go subscribe there. Although that You That never really converts as YouTube to Twitter, but what I can say is the Free Press her sister, Barry Weiss, runs it and she is a writer there and that's where you can find her stuff, so you should definitely go and subscribe to that.

Suzy Weiss: Thank you guys so much for having me. I feel like when we discovered each other, it was like, There are others. I'm so happy. And then, of course, I included you on a story I did about tech messiahs who wanted to live forever, which I loved your contribution because you were like anti live forever, which I think is like a weird, whatever.

We can get into that later, but I love that. Did you end up

Malcolm Collins: talking [00:02:00] to that other girl we introduced

Suzy Weiss: you to for that story? She, I never talked to her because she just I think yeah, she was intense. She

Malcolm Collins: recently did a post where she bragged about how she convinced a woman to break up with her husband for another woman and get an abortion on her three months pregnant.

term fetus. And this was like a huge win for her is talking someone into an abortion. That's pretty late stage, right? Or that early

Simone Collins: is it's on the older side of fairly

Malcolm Collins: horrifying. We were trying to get the perspective of an extremist antinatalist. Oh yeah. She

Suzy Weiss: was, yeah. She's a major antinatal.

Yeah. I guess that's a win. Take the ones where you can get them.

So the F the full post she wrote went one of the grossest and most faileo centric types of misogyny to me is males who are fine with, or even encourage their wives or girlfriends having sex with other women. Porn sick bros was Heron fetishes. It's an ugly and very clear mask off on how they see women.

They [00:03:00] feel so superior that a girl f*****g, their wife doesn't even count as sex. And that's cheating. Lesbians are just quote unquote girls having fun. That we do to please their stinky cheese Cox. And few things are, as satisfying is seeing their wives realize they can do better, divorcing them for their girlfriends and living happily ever after without a sexist leach in their life.

Two months ago, I convinced a girl who just married and with actually three months pregnant to get an abortion and divorce and continue dating her girlfriend, who the male picked for her, but who she fell in love with. They are engaged and I am so for it, heart. Uh, in case you can't tell she is, uh, a lesbian, maybe even a political lesbian.

Um, and an extremist feminist, as well as an anti natalist.

Simone Collins: Yeah. She's in favor, I think of even post term abortions as she puts it. Some murder. Yeah, some murder. Yes. Yes. But baby murder. So it's

All: baby.

Simone Collins: It's murder.

Suzy Weiss: It's murder. It's

All: [00:04:00] murder. Yes.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway, so, Spoonies. Spoonies. Spoonies. Go. I am so excited to dig into this.

Yeah. Well,

Simone Collins: first off, what made you decide? Explore this world. How did you even learn? Sorry,

Malcolm Collins: the audience needs to know what they are first. So I'm letting her describe that before we go into questions like this.

Suzy Weiss: Okay, so what is a Spoonie? A Spoonie is a member of a community of chronic illness sufferers.

They're mostly women. From what I could observe. They're mostly white women. The term comes from, I believe it was like a 2013 or 2014 blog posts by this lupus blogger. And she had a well friend who asked her, what is it like to be sick? And she took all the spoons. I just reread the post last night.

Cause I wanted to be reminded of it. And it's strangely like cinematic. She's like with tears in my eyes, I held the bouquet of spoons. And I don't not believe her, but it's just interestingly written. And she describes that like normal people have unlimited spoons, people who are sick have a fixed number of [00:05:00] spoons.

So, let's say you or I, we could, get up and shower and make ourselves breakfast and go to work and we don't have to think about it. Someone with, let's say, six spoons has to portion them out. So two spoons to wake up and get dressed. One spoon to make lunch. Do you have enough spoons to work?

And I think it is like an effective way for people to think about other people who have limited resources. But since then it's been co opted into a cottage industry, a world, a community of people who suffer from these sort of amorphous and hard to pin down illnesses. So Ehlers Danlos syndrome POTS autoimmune diseases, ulcerative colitis.

You name it. And they're called

Simone Collins: pots is included in that. I have pots. That's crazy. Yeah. Well,

Suzy Weiss: Spoonie. Yeah. You could be a Spoonie and you would find a lot of like minded Spoonies out there and you could, buy different products with your Spoonie codes and learn how to. lie to a doctor which is apparently like a moral thing in this world.

So yeah I was interested in what some people have described as Munchausen by [00:06:00] internet and like this, where the psychosomatic, I guess what I was really interested is what happens when your identity becomes illness, because how are you ever incentivized to get well? And I spoke to a lot of people and doctors and that's the story that you're reading.

Malcolm Collins: