Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - September 07, 2022


Ep 674 | Secular Feminist: 'Bring Back Christian Sexual Ethics' | Guest: Louise Perry


Episode Stats


Length

55 minutes

Words per minute

168.1651

Word count

9,371

Sentence count

418

Harmful content

Misogyny

37

sentences flagged

Hate speech

36

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Author Louise Perry argues from a secular feminist perspective that abandoning Christian regulations on marriage and sex has gotten us here, and she s got some fascinating advice on how we can recover from the brokenness caused by sexual liberalism. This episode is brought to you by our friends at GoodRanchers.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 The sexual revolution lied to us, promising liberation, satisfaction, and happiness. 0.90
00:00:06.340 It has only delivered pain, confusion, and destruction. Author Louise Perry argues from
00:00:11.660 a secular feminist perspective that abandoning Christian regulations on marriage and sex has 1.00
00:00:17.840 gotten us here. And she's got some fascinating advice on how we can recover from the brokenness
00:00:23.200 caused by sexual liberalism. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers.
00:00:28.860 Go to GoodRanchers.com slash Allie. That's GoodRanchers.com slash Allie.
00:00:41.820 Louise, thank you so much for joining us. Before we get started, can you tell us who you are and what
00:00:46.380 you do? I'm Louise Perry. I'm a journalist and author based in London, UK. And you wrote a book,
00:00:55.140 The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century. Before we get into the
00:01:02.180 content of the book, can you first just set us up, why did you write it?
00:01:09.040 I mean, it's kind of a decade's work, even though I wrote it pretty quickly. I wrote it basically
00:01:15.780 between learning I was pregnant with my son and him being six months old, which wasn't very clever.
00:01:22.120 I reckon anyone listening who's considering writing a book at the same time as having a baby,
00:01:26.020 I would advise against it. But this was, I mean, my first job out of university was working in a
00:01:32.980 rape crisis centre. And I've since worked as a campaigner on sexual violence and the law.
00:01:40.700 And a lot of my journalism has been focused around this topic in all sorts of different ways. So it was
00:01:45.240 something I've been thinking about for a really long time. And having a lot of conversations with
00:01:50.140 young women, all of whom are saying the same things, you know, there is something deeply,
00:01:55.800 deeply wrong with our sexual culture. And that the standard narratives available to us,
00:02:02.580 the progressive narrative about the sexual revolution, which says that this was
00:02:06.040 all for women's sake, you know, that it was, it was all about maximising our freedom,
00:02:11.020 and that we should be grateful for it. I think actually, if you look at how young women are 0.99
00:02:16.680 actually experiencing the post-sexual revolution era, I just don't think it stacks up at all. So
00:02:21.020 this book is a, it's an interrogation of that narrative. Tell us what the sexual revolution
00:02:28.440 is. How would you define it? So it's sort of, I think it's sort of two things. One is the,
00:02:34.960 the material aspect of it, the fact that you have the pill arriving in the end of the 1950s into the
00:02:41.920 1960s, and just completely transforming sex and the link with reproduction, right? For the first
00:02:49.580 time in the history of the world, it suddenly becomes possible for women to suspend their fertility 0.97
00:02:54.680 in a way that they can control, and that is kind of invisible, right? And it's that important that
00:03:00.920 we call it the pill with capital letters, you know, everyone knows what you're talking about when
00:03:04.660 you're talking about the pill, because of its incredible importance. It's not the only material
00:03:09.500 change that brings us here, but I think it is the most, the most significant one. And it's where I
00:03:13.340 date the beginning of the sexual revolution. But then there's also all of the ideological stuff that
00:03:19.140 comes along with that, as well, because this is coming out of the 1960s, and the sort of,
00:03:23.780 excuse me, ferment of the post Second World War era. And you've got this really strong push
00:03:29.240 urge to sort of tear down everything that's come before, and to question everything that's
00:03:34.280 come before. And there's this real kind of anti-establishment urge, which also applies to
00:03:41.260 sexuality. And, you know, what we've basically been left with post-sexual revolution is that
00:03:50.980 all of the old sexual norms are now suspect, particularly anything associated with, with
00:03:59.380 religion. I mean, this is, this really should be understood, the whole of the post-60s era really
00:04:04.180 needs to be understood as a reaction against Christianity, right? It's a kind of a second
00:04:07.820 reformation in that sense. And what's the only principle that's left standing is the principle
00:04:15.400 of consent, right? As long as, as long as everyone is capable of consenting, and they,
00:04:20.780 and they enthusiastically consent that everything's fine, everything is on the table, you know. And my
00:04:26.700 argument is that actually, the consent framework doesn't work, it is completely pitiful, right,
00:04:33.600 as a means of actually trying to regulate relationships between men and women, which are far more
00:04:38.820 complex and difficult and high stakes than the consent framework permits.
00:04:43.720 Yes. We've talked about that before. When consent is your only determinant of what is virtuous and
00:04:51.060 what is not, then, as you said, a lot of things that are actually immoral and exploitative are on
00:04:59.240 the table. Consent is a part of determining what is good and what is not, what is acceptable and what
00:05:07.140 is not, but it's really the bare minimum. It is not the only standard. And that's how you kind of get
00:05:13.020 these maxims of the sexual revolution, or what I would call maxims of the sexual revolution, which is
00:05:18.720 sex work is work, or there's such a thing as ethical pornography, or who cares if these women are 1.00
00:05:26.540 singing about these things, doing these things, if they're objectifying themselves, it's okay,
00:05:31.540 because they are consenting to that objectification. Tell us a little bit more about the consequences
00:05:38.420 of this consent as the only standard of decency culture that the sexual revolution has created.
00:05:47.840 The term that I use in the book is sexual disenchantment, the idea that sex used to have
00:05:54.340 some sort of special status, some actual sacred status, right? Not just in Christianity,
00:05:59.380 all religious traditions have some kind of sacredness surrounding sex and rules about when you can do
00:06:06.160 it and with who and so forth. But what sexual disenchantment as an idea does is it says that
00:06:13.220 actually no, sex needn't be any more significant than any other kind of social interaction. It can be
00:06:19.880 completely morally neutral. If people want to invest meaning in it, they can, but they don't have to.
00:06:24.080 It can just be like shaking hands or whatever other kind of neutral thing you want to imagine,
00:06:29.280 which means, of course, that you can buy it, you can sell it, you can objectify yourself as much as
00:06:36.380 you like, that's fine. The problem with sexual disenchantment, I mean, there are two problems with
00:06:41.600 it. One is that if you really are serious about saying that sex is no different from other kinds of
00:06:47.460 social interaction, then you can't continue to have a special status for rape, for instance,
00:06:53.320 or for sexual harassment, or for any of these things, which we know viscerally feel deeply
00:06:59.360 different from, say, theft. And the law recognises that, and all of our social institutions recognise
00:07:05.340 that. But if you really want to say that sex actually doesn't have any special status, then
00:07:08.900 how can you possibly argue that rape should have a special status? And this is, I think, the problem
00:07:13.000 with sexual disenchantment that if you follow it through to its logical conclusions, it actually
00:07:17.540 has horrible, horrible outcomes, which is why basically no one does. No one actually lives as
00:07:22.760 if sexual disenchantment was true. People might say that they do, and they might rhetorically kind
00:07:27.600 of appeal to it. So you get phrases like, as you say, sex work is work, which is designed to kind
00:07:34.880 of challenge us to say, but what is different about sex? When it comes down to it, isn't it just like
00:07:40.180 working in McDonald's? Isn't it just like selling any other kind of labour? And the problem you get
00:07:45.000 down to in those arguments is that the differentness of sex, the specialness of sex is quite hard to
00:07:51.380 articulate. It's not something that can easily be packaged up in a sort of rational argument,
00:07:56.300 because it's not really to do with rationality, it's to do with emotion, feeling, and the kind of gut
00:08:01.520 level response that we have as human beings to sexual interaction. And I think particularly
00:08:06.400 for women, I mean, one of the ways that men and women differ on average in terms of sexuality,
00:08:13.120 there are all sorts of them, but one which is interesting and important, is that women have 0.98
00:08:17.500 a much lower sexual disgust threshold than men, which is one of those things that you can measure
00:08:22.300 quite objectively by things like sweating and heart rate and things like that. When we feel disgusted,
00:08:28.540 we have all these involuntary physical responses, which you can test for. And women's threshold for 1.00
00:08:35.060 feeling sexual disgust is a lot lower than men's, we get what is called colloquially getting the
00:08:39.920 ick, when you like really just kind of feel horribly repulsed. And I think, yeah, yeah. And
00:08:46.680 particularly, I think when it's associated with any kind of like sexual aggression, there's that fear
00:08:51.880 combined with disgust, which I don't think there's a word for. I mentioned in the book that I've every
00:08:57.180 woman I've spoken to says, I completely understand that, that feeling. I know that you feel it like in
00:09:02.100 your bones. It's that strong. Right. But there isn't, isn't a word for it. And it's something
00:09:07.540 that men are much less likely to, to experience. And it all comes down to the fact that, you know,
00:09:12.560 one, the fact that women are just physically vulnerable in a way that men aren't because
00:09:15.380 we're smaller and we're weaker than men are. But also that we're evolved to have quite different
00:09:23.160 kinds of sexuality and quite different responses to things like choosing partners. You know,
00:09:28.020 the nature of getting pregnant is that sex is hugely consequential for women potentially, 1.00
00:09:34.420 because you've got a long pregnancy, you've got dangerous labor, you've got many, many years of
00:09:40.020 childcare. That's really important. That matters, right? It's no wonder we're evolved to be picky
00:09:47.060 about who we want to have sex with, because that's, those are the potential consequences. You don't want
00:09:50.540 to be choosing the wrong man. He's not going to stick around or whatever. Whereas in theory,
00:09:54.640 men can have, men can reproduce every time they have sex with basically no like physical risk to
00:10:00.680 themselves, which means, which doesn't mean that men like are always focused on just having as many
00:10:07.100 partners as possible. Not at all. Like male sexuality is very flexible. I talk in the book about cad and dad
00:10:12.540 mode. So dad mode is obviously all focused towards marriage and family and stability and really like
00:10:18.960 investing in your, in, in, in, in your, in your genetic line. Right. Whereas cad mode is all about
00:10:25.600 sowing your wild oats. Um, that's a phrase that's used in America. Yes. Yes. Yeah. We don't say cad as
00:10:33.300 much, but I think that we know what you mean. So in your wild oats, definitely familiar. Yeah. Um, and men can,
00:10:40.360 you know, some men are more drawn to one sort of mode than the other, but most men are capable of
00:10:47.840 both. And it's about, and it depends on context and it depends on incentives and what kind of social
00:10:54.180 structures are in place to, to, to motivate men to behave in one or other ways. And I think what's
00:11:00.100 happened per sexual evolution that we've, we've got rid of so many of the structures that used to exist
00:11:05.060 to regulate sexual relationships, which were oppressive, right? In a sense in, I mean, this
00:11:11.840 is often the, the argument, the feminist argument that's made against marriage is that marriage 1.00
00:11:16.580 oppresses women to which I say, yeah, it does, but you know, it oppresses men as well. And it also
00:11:22.900 protects the interests of women and it also protects the interests of men. The whole point of marriage
00:11:27.560 is that it is a restriction. You know, you stand up in front of everyone and you, and you promise to be
00:11:32.500 with this person forever and to be faithful to them and to, and to support them financially,
00:11:36.340 emotionally, socially, everything. And you sign a piece of paper to that effect, which places
00:11:41.900 restrictions on your behavior on both of you. That's the point. But it also means that you,
00:11:47.580 it provides a stable basis to form your life together and to have children together. And if you're,
00:11:52.780 if you're tearing down those kinds of institutions that are in place to encourage men into dad mode,
00:11:59.160 essentially, we shouldn't be surprised to discover that actually like male sexual misbehavior is,
00:12:06.420 is, is so much, so much easier and so much less punished now. Yeah. Without those structures in
00:12:13.080 place. Cause as you, as you're saying, consent just isn't enough. There is so much terrible behavior,
00:12:17.200 which jumps over that very, very low bar, the consent bar.
00:12:22.460 Gosh, I have so much to say and so many thoughts based on what you just said, starting at the end,
00:12:38.920 talking about marriage being oppressive. What you mean when you say marriage is oppressive is kind of
00:12:45.020 what you explained that it's oppressive in the sense that it is restrictive. It is,
00:12:50.160 it's supposed to be a structure that inhibits you from engaging in certain kinds of behavior and
00:12:56.580 stops you from doing some things that you may want to do, but are unhealthy, both for the relationship,
00:13:02.500 for your kids, also for society in general. I would probably say that it is more than like repressive
00:13:11.360 than oppressive. I guess when I think of oppressive, I think of unjustly holding someone down,
00:13:17.620 whereas repressive might just be holding something back for better or for worse. I would say that
00:13:22.920 marriage, you know, the institution of marriage anyway, is repressive in a healthy way that yes,
00:13:31.240 it is holding people back as you explained so well from things that are not supposed to be acceptable
00:13:37.900 in the bounds of marriage. Now, what I'm interested to hear, are you,
00:13:43.380 um, are you religious? Do you consider yourself religious?
00:13:47.560 No, I'm coming at this from a kind of secular perspective. I mean, I'm, I'm religious in the sense that I,
00:13:53.200 um, I think actually all of us are, um,
00:13:57.200 I think that Christian morality is actually deeply, deeply baked in to Western societies, right? Like
00:14:06.360 2000 years of Christian tradition didn't end suddenly in the 1960s. So I think that a lot of
00:14:14.300 what I'm writing about in the book, and I think one of the reasons that the book has appealed to
00:14:17.920 a Christian audience as well as secular audience are Christian virtues, which are universally recognized,
00:14:25.040 even if they're not acknowledged as being Christian, if that makes sense. So things like
00:14:28.800 defense of the week, humility, um, these are not actually universal virtues, right? And they certainly
00:14:37.620 weren't considered so in the first century Roman world, right? These are, these are Christian virtues,
00:14:42.320 which I think still resonate. Yes. Um, which is a complicated way of saying sort of. Yes. So
00:14:48.580 this is your question. Yes. And this is a, I mean, I'm a Christian, this is a Christian podcast,
00:14:53.040 and that is part of why this is so interesting. And one thing that you said that really struck me
00:14:57.980 as absolutely true, but also troublesome. Maybe you could even argue like this is the entire
00:15:04.340 problem is that sex cannot be rationally explained as special as something different than shaking your
00:15:13.320 hands. But as you said, everyone, whether they say so or not, acknowledges that it is in their
00:15:19.720 repulsion to something like rape, or I would say the vast majority of people, they would not say
00:15:26.000 that there should be the same punishment for someone coming up and slapping you on the face versus
00:15:31.120 someone raping you. They know that there is a difference, even if they say something ridiculous,
00:15:35.740 like sex work is work. And it doesn't matter how many sexual partners that you have. It's just
00:15:40.120 liberating and great. They understand that sex is different than, you know, your normal interaction,
00:15:45.740 negative or positive. It really can't be explained though, why that is, as you like kind of briefly
00:15:53.620 touched on, you said without talking about like the mental and emotional, the feeling part of it. But
00:15:59.460 of course, from my perspective, I'm saying, no, it's a spiritual, it's the spiritual part of it that I
00:16:05.700 would argue it is because there is something deep and almost intangible in all of us because we are
00:16:12.540 made in God's image, because he made us male and female, because he made us for the kind of sexual 0.62
00:16:19.660 intimacy that is only really practiced in a healthy and productive and fruitful way in the boundaries
00:16:26.560 of monogamous marriage. That is why somehow innately we know and have suppressed through our sexual,
00:16:34.960 you know, revolution mores. We have suppressed what I believe God placed in all of us, that we
00:16:41.780 understand that sex is special, that sex is for commitment, it is for covenant, that it is a reflection
00:16:50.800 of something much bigger and much deeper and much more eternal than we can actually give word to.
00:16:57.980 And I think our disgust, even the secular person's disgust of things like rape and things like
00:17:04.820 pedophilia, I think it speaks to how God made us, that God placed something in us. And so as you
00:17:12.280 already mentioned, even from a secular perspective, if post-1960s is a backlash against Christian
00:17:18.780 morality, specifically Christian sexual morality, then of course, it would make sense that our thoughts
00:17:27.640 about sex have gone in the direction that it has. Because Christianity, as you mentioned, 0.97
00:17:33.600 for the last 2,000 years, totally disrupted the pagan Roman world and how they viewed sex also 0.52
00:17:39.340 is just something that you do. People are just people that you use, children doesn't matter.
00:17:45.000 Christianity disrupted that. And now that we have kind of rejected it, we're going back to the pagan 0.99
00:17:51.140 era and how they viewed bodies and how they viewed sex. So anyway, I just kind of wanted to give my
00:17:56.020 Christian perspective on that. But I'm curious, just kind of what you think about that.
00:18:02.080 I mean, yeah, I think that the, yeah, I don't think it can be underestimated quite how, like,
00:18:09.420 appalling sexual ethics were in antiquity, right? And if you're looking at the first century Christian 0.92
00:18:16.980 introduction of the new kind of sexual ethics, they are radically transformative.
00:18:23.080 And I think that is really worth bearing in mind when thinking about modern feminism, 1.00
00:18:30.240 which is often, which is often set up as being in direct opposition to Christianity and to other
00:18:36.580 religious traditions too, but particularly like in an American and British context, we're primarily
00:18:41.200 talking about Christianity. And I think that's a mistake because I think, I mean, there are a lot of 1.00
00:18:47.180 different strains of feminism. And clearly there are all sorts of internal discussions within feminism,
00:18:52.720 which are, you know, worth having. But, you know, when it comes down to it, a lot of basic feminist 0.50
00:18:58.040 ideals, which I think basically everyone can agree with, regardless of whether or not they call
00:19:02.300 themselves feminists, you know, the idea that women's interests ought to be protected, that women's
00:19:10.320 emotional lives matter, that women's distress matters, you know, all this kind of stuff,
00:19:14.940 which is not taken as read in, say, the Roman world, right? Those ideas about equality and the
00:19:23.900 protection of the weak and so on are originally Christian ideas, even if they're now somewhat
00:19:30.480 divorced from the actual theology. And I think it is an error to see feminism and Christianity as
00:19:37.980 necessarily in opposition, even if there might be points of debate, as there always have been,
00:19:43.180 you know, across the last 2,000 years, there have always been internal disputes and so forth.
00:19:49.080 I think it is a terrible error of feminists, some feminists, to think that tearing down
00:19:56.020 the old sexual morality would necessarily lead to women's lives improving in any way. Because 1.00
00:20:06.100 actually, there are a lot of alternative systems of sexual ethics to the Christian ones, and a lot of
00:20:11.440 them are a hell of a lot worse than what prevailed until recently in our society. You know, one of the
00:20:18.680 arguments I make in favour of marriage, you know, writing for a secular audience who are not necessarily
00:20:25.200 going to be persuaded by the religious arguments, right? But I say, look, if we look at this rationally,
00:20:30.180 we look at the data, there's a lot of data on this. Polygamous systems are much worse for women and 1.00
00:20:38.780 children than our monogamous systems of marriage, right? Polygamous systems are, in some sense, our kind of
00:20:44.220 natural state. Most societies on the anthropological record have been polygynous, so permitting men to take 0.98
00:20:51.920 multiple wives. Our closest primate ancestors are also polygynous. This seems to be, to some extent,
00:20:58.980 our default that we drift towards. And actually, you'll see on things like dating apps, which offers
00:21:03.240 like a wealth of data on this, you will see that left to our own devices without that kind of monogamous
00:21:09.020 restriction coming externally, people do tend to drift back towards a kind of polygynous system where you
00:21:14.280 have the high status men accumulating lots of wives, girlfriends, and low status men having none at all.
00:21:23.400 The problem with that kind of society is it tends to produce a lot more domestic violence,
00:21:31.340 because households with lots of co-wives tend to produce a lot of conflict, a lot more child abuse,
00:21:39.400 more crime, because you have this massive unmarried men who are frustrated and don't have any reason 1.00
00:21:48.520 really to tame themselves, because that's very often what marriage and having children does to
00:21:54.220 men. I mean, literally, we can measure it. It reduces testosterone in men when they have a child
00:21:59.680 at home and they're involved in that child's care. Their testosterone levels drop.
00:22:02.800 In a good way. In a good way. Yeah. And that it's a it's a it's a softening of kind of
00:22:08.100 male aggression, particularly youthful male aggression. Whereas in a monogamous system,
00:22:14.980 crime rates drop, domestic violence rates drop, child abuse drops, you know, it's in some sense not
00:22:21.800 a natural system, because it's not the one that we kind of tend to do towards by default. And it is
00:22:28.160 the group of people that it places real restrictions on other high status men, right,
00:22:32.700 who want to take on multiple wives if they have the opportunity to. It's why anthropologists call
00:22:37.920 this the puzzle of monogamous marriage, why monogamous marriage would have been ever become
00:22:42.560 as successful as it has, and as widespread as it is nowadays. And the answer is that yes, it restricts
00:22:51.140 the high status men who are not, you know, in general setting the terms. But it has so many
00:22:57.460 other benefits for society that it tends to produce stable societies, which survive and expand. So
00:23:05.500 I think that you can end up through the more kind of rational data driven arguments at some of the
00:23:14.780 same conclusions that have been reached by old religious traditions. With the exception, as you say,
00:23:21.840 I think of, of the, of the, the argument against sexual disenchantment, which really does come down
00:23:26.720 to emotion. But then, you know, we, we are, we are human animals, right, in the sense that we are,
00:23:35.300 we are, we are driven by our emotions. And I think to say that we should be kind of,
00:23:42.300 I think that a lot of what a lot of the reason that young women are experiencing a lot of distress
00:23:46.900 in a culture of casual sex and porn and all that, you know, all the stuff that I'm describing
00:23:50.980 is because what they're being asked to do is basically suppress their instincts,
00:23:56.940 that their instincts towards wanting to have emotional attachment in sexual relationships,
00:24:01.420 towards feeling anxious about being with men that they don't know, all of the kind of red flags,
00:24:10.220 which instinctively crop up that feeling of disgust and fear, you know, these are very,
00:24:14.800 very deeply ingrained instincts in us. And they're there for a reason that, that, you know,
00:24:18.920 they are self-protective. And one of the things that I reject about sex positive feminism is even 1.00
00:24:26.060 though in theory, it's supposed to be all about kind of promoting people's sexual wellbeing and so on.
00:24:31.680 What I think it does in practice is it actually encourages women in particular to
00:24:39.840 ignore their instincts and to try and retrain themselves to be more like men, to have sex like
00:24:45.740 men, to see this as a liberatory goal, rather than saying, no, female sexuality is actually fine 0.98
00:24:51.620 as it is, right? It's actually good to, you know, to want to combine love with sex. It's good to want
00:25:00.120 to commit to one person and so on. These are not bad instincts that women should be trained out of.
00:25:04.980 One of the phrases I, I hate so much that is, um, has become popular this century and you see it in
00:25:10.620 the media and so on is catching feelings. The idea that if you're having a sexual relationship with
00:25:14.960 someone and you start feeling emotional attachment, this is some sort of disease that you've caught
00:25:19.220 that you need to be avoiding. And you get these horrific guides in women's mags and so on, um,
00:25:26.120 advising, um, I mean, it's, it's presented in a gender neutral way, but we all know what's really
00:25:31.540 going on, right? They're advising young women who find themselves in a culture of casual sex,
00:25:36.620 don't like it, are feeling unhappy, but also feel as though this is compulsory. They have to go through
00:25:42.780 this. Um, advising them things like don't make eye contact with your sexual partner, um, take drugs
00:25:50.140 before you have sex to soften your emotional responses, all this kind of, you know, encouraging
00:25:55.880 these women to emotionally mutilate themselves. And my question is for what purpose, right?
00:26:00.700 To serve, to serve the male libido basically, I think is, is what it comes down to. I don't think
00:26:06.720 it's this serving women's interests in the least.
00:26:08.920 I've heard from a lot of young women, in particular, those who call themselves de-transitioners. This
00:26:27.840 seems to be a common theme in their backgrounds, in the stories that I have read, and also the ones
00:26:33.900 that I've personally spoken to is that especially those who are young, like, you know, 10 years
00:26:39.120 younger than me. And so they really grew up coming of age during the social media era. And they felt
00:26:46.580 as young women, very over-sexualized and felt a pressure at a very young age to be sexual,
00:26:54.680 not just sexually active, but dress sexually, talk sexually, dance sexually on social media,
00:27:01.100 send pictures to boys. And I'm sure that pressure to some extent has always been there for young
00:27:07.240 women to try to perform in some way to gain the satisfaction and approval of young men. But with 0.99
00:27:14.000 social media and just kind of our media and pop culture as it is, it seems like the pressure is
00:27:19.880 stronger, more ubiquitous. And so a lot of these women, what I find interesting, who transitioned so 0.99
00:27:25.840 called into being a man, a common theme that I find is that they were uncomfortable as a 12,
00:27:32.980 13-year-old with the pressure to be sexual, with always feeling like a sexual object, feeling like
00:27:40.020 prey, and feeling vulnerable because of that, and felt that if they transitioned or they started
00:27:47.740 being more masculine, that made them less vulnerable. There was less pressure.
00:27:52.380 And it's sad because, I mean, puberty involves a lot of discomfort for girls and boys and always has.
00:28:01.040 And so, of course, sexuality and the discovery of all of that at teenage years is already awkward
00:28:05.540 and difficult. But it seems like objectification and the sexualization of young people, especially
00:28:11.180 young girls, is more. It's bigger than it has been before. I don't think it's just leading to
00:28:18.520 confusion about gender and that kind of thing. I think it's leading to a lot of, as you said,
00:28:24.340 disenchantment, self-hatred, self-resentment, just a lot of confusion about what sex is supposed to be,
00:28:32.800 what the body is, who they are, how the mind and the heart and the body all work together
00:28:37.300 and how it's supposed to. Is that something that you've seen? What do you think about that?
00:28:42.180 I completely agree that that must be a motivation of, well, I mean, so many de-transitioners say 0.65
00:28:48.160 that it was a very explicit motivation. They were, that, you know, it's always alarming to some
00:28:54.420 degree to come to encounter puberty and suddenly inhabit the body of a woman and having to negotiate 0.94
00:29:02.060 sexual interests and so on. Always difficult. But doing so in a hyper-sexualized culture,
00:29:08.480 super pornified, you know, with the expectation that you've got, you've got young boys in particular,
00:29:14.680 but young girls too, being exposed to porn from really young ages. We're giving children smartphones
00:29:19.660 into which, you know, these multi-billion dollar global corporations are beaming the most
00:29:27.260 extraordinarily violent, aggressive, horrible sexual images, right, which they're going to be
00:29:33.600 exposed to from a really young age. I mean, one of the things I write about in one chapter on BDSM,
00:29:38.460 is the extent to which just the sexual script has become so much more aggressive, right? Just
00:29:47.480 things like one survey in the UK, which found that half of young women in the UK aged 18 to 24 had
00:29:56.460 been choked by a partner during sex. This was not considered to be a normal part of sex, even 10 years
00:30:02.260 ago, 20 years ago. This was like a weird niche thing that most people would never even, would never
00:30:09.420 even occur to them to do now. But, but now we have every porn platform in the world has choking images
00:30:16.660 on the front page. This is completely mainstream. You can even expect to see it on Instagram, on Facebook
00:30:21.060 and all these platforms that are supposed to be appropriate for, for adolescents. No wonder you have
00:30:27.300 some of these girls, you know, arriving in this kind of sexual culture and saying, oh, I want out. 1.00
00:30:32.080 And one way of getting out is to not identify as a woman anymore, or to do things like identify as 0.52
00:30:39.320 asexual or demisexual. Demisexual makes me laugh a little bit because what demisexual is defined as is
00:30:46.300 basically when you, you only want to have sex with someone who you're emotionally attached to. And this is,
00:30:50.700 this is presented as being, um, a kind of weird and wonderful special identity under the, whatever.
00:30:58.440 And I was like, no, this is just normal female sexuality that you're describing and creating a 1.00
00:31:03.180 new term. I mean, I kind of, I sort of have some respect for girls in the sense of, you know, having,
00:31:09.080 having the confidence almost, almost to assert this, you know, this is my identity. Like, you know,
00:31:15.100 there's nothing wrong with it, um, is good, you know, better to identify as demisexual than to, than to 0.99
00:31:21.260 kind of go along with the mainstream against your instincts. But equally, you shouldn't have to be
00:31:26.200 coming up with some sort of special identity that permits you to opt out of a culture that is really
00:31:31.300 not geared towards women's interests.
00:31:34.020 Yeah. Um, I, you've written about this before as all of the different barriers, all of the different
00:31:42.960 mores, restrictions, traditions around sexuality that, as we've talked about, are rooted in
00:31:49.260 Christianity, even if they have become separated from Christian theology, as all of those are
00:31:54.220 knocked down in the name of liberation, in the name of, I don't know, self-discovery and self-fulfillment.
00:32:02.960 I really see a huge crossover between the, like, trendy narcissistic self-love culture and all the
00:32:08.880 sexual revolution. There seems to just be a lot in common there. As all of those, all of those
00:32:14.860 restrictions are knocked down, do you see the normalization of something like pedophilia
00:32:22.980 on the horizon? Or do you think that's just a slippery slope argument that, you know, Christian 1.00
00:32:29.800 conservatives are putting out there to try to scare people about LGBTQ people?
00:32:35.000 I think it's hard for those principles not to end up as a pedophilia apologism as eventually.
00:32:43.960 And this has happened post-sexual revolution and has to some extent been memory hold. You
00:32:48.480 have in, say, the 1970s, a push among all sorts of very, very prominent, um, post-mom theorists
00:32:56.160 like Foucault and signing. Yes. Yes. Yes. Signing petitions, you know, for the decriminalization
00:33:03.460 of pedophilia, writing very explicitly in defense of it. And what they said, it's important to
00:33:08.420 remember this, is that they didn't say that it was okay to violently assault children. What
00:33:14.100 they said was that the consent principle stood, you know, consent was important, and that some
00:33:21.140 children were capable of consenting to sex with adults. And I think this is the, this
00:33:27.380 is the problem with the consent framework, because actually it's, it is open to, um, to
00:33:34.180 manipulation. The fact that we've set the legal bar at 16 in the UK, you know, other similar
00:33:42.300 kind of thresholds across the world is to some extent arbitrary. We know that, you know, a 15
00:33:48.420 year old on the night before her 16th birthday is not radically different from how she is
00:33:53.240 the next day. We have to draw a line in the sand legally and say, this is the point at which
00:33:57.100 you can consent to sex. And we know historically that that line has been set at very different
00:34:01.420 points, you know, sometimes really very young. Um, the argument from, from some of the sexual
00:34:08.280 revolutionaries was just that we should nudge it a little lower and it would still completely
00:34:12.300 in keeping with, with, with their, with their principles of protecting consent. And it becomes,
00:34:18.120 you know, there are all sorts of examples, um, like for instance, um, pornography with adults
00:34:27.060 pretending to be children or making themselves look more like children.
00:34:30.700 That's a trend. I mean, that's a trend even on TikTok. I just saw something, um, that, uh,
00:34:35.880 there's like this trend of like older girls wearing, um, like pigtails to get more tips
00:34:42.440 because they look, yeah, they look younger. There's also, and this, I don't want to take us,
00:34:47.460 you know, off of what we're talking about, but just so I don't forget something I've noticed with a lot
00:34:52.780 of men who say that they identify as women is that at least the ones that I'm seeing, you know,
00:34:58.920 online is that they don't dress up like women. They often dress up as little girls. Like there is 0.99
00:35:05.620 this one TikToker, I think his name is, uh, Dylan that he is, he's talking about, oh, this is day
00:35:13.260 whatever of being a girl and literally dress it. I mean, this is a man and he's dressed like a child,
00:35:19.800 like he's dressed like a 12 year old. And this is apparently just acceptable. We're all supposed
00:35:24.480 to celebrate this. I mean, it's hard for me not to see the writing on the wall. It's already getting
00:35:29.980 blurry, right? Mm-hmm. Other example would be, um, like virtual reality porn or cartoon porn or
00:35:38.140 whatever that's designed to look like child porn, but it doesn't actually use children in its
00:35:43.900 production. So it's not directly harming any children, um, or something like Cuties. You
00:35:49.940 remember the Netflix show, um, a couple of years ago, which was supposedly, you know, the defense
00:35:56.660 from the creators was that it was about actually critiquing the sexualization of children. And,
00:36:01.920 you know, the plot in the end, um, sees the protagonist rejecting the kind of hypersexualization,
00:36:07.520 but it also featured a lot of hypersexualization of real children who actually were really young
00:36:12.360 and looked obviously very young. And this is the sort of thing where within the consent framework,
00:36:18.780 what do you say? You know, if an adult wants to put braces and pigtails on and create porn, 0.71
00:36:24.420 and if another adult wants to, wants to consume it or pay for it, you can't really challenge that
00:36:31.260 within the consent framework at all. And yet the vast majority of us feel an instinctive revulsion
00:36:37.920 and know that there's something off about that. And it's very hard to, to explain that feeling
00:36:44.980 if all that you've got to rely on is the consent framework. Whereas if you, if you're interested in
00:36:51.260 virtue, you know, if you, if you say that actually there are certain, um, there are certain virtues
00:36:57.440 on which our sexual ethics should be based. And one of those includes, um, the protection of the
00:37:04.340 vulnerable and the recognition that actually any kind of sexual attraction to children is wrong and
00:37:11.020 should be repressed. And if, and if anyone sort of discovers it in, discovers it in themselves,
00:37:15.420 it is, they are, they are obliged to repress those instincts because they're not, they're not
00:37:22.040 virtuous. You know, these are the kind of arguments that I think most people do instinctively feel
00:37:29.040 drawn towards, but which the new kind of ethical framework just cannot possibly accommodate, which
00:37:35.140 is why I think we end up inevitably with pedophilia apologism and have done since the 1960s at various
00:37:42.220 points. And I fear we, we are slipping back towards that again.
00:37:56.040 I agree with you that it is the natural consequence of, again, kind of a backlash to
00:38:02.120 Christianity. Of course, from my vantage point, I'm like, all of this is a rejection of what was kind of
00:38:11.020 the dominant philosophy, which was Christian theology. There's a fascinating book about the
00:38:16.720 invention of children and how Christianity really invented children as a protected category, which
00:38:23.780 again, as we've already kind of mentioned in the pagan world in which Christianity was birthed, there was
00:38:30.960 no idea of children being a protected class. They not only could be used for all kinds of labor,
00:38:37.160 but also for sexual exploitation. Really, the person who stood in the center of society was the adult
00:38:45.120 free male. Everyone else kind of was free for subjugation. Then Christianity universalized this 0.95
00:38:52.320 Old Testament idea that, hang on, all people have souls. All people are made in the image of God.
00:38:58.260 There is a consequence for rape. There's a consequence for murder. There's a consequence
00:39:02.000 for abuse. And then also brought in the gospel, which said, okay, everyone is dead in sin apart
00:39:08.860 from Christ. Everyone is alive in Christ by grace through faith in him. That is a radical equality of
00:39:15.600 worth that the gospel of Jesus Christ brought into the pagan world. And that is what revolutionized the 0.89
00:39:23.920 West. Still today, in the non-Christian world, there is nothing perverse. They see nothing perverse in marrying a 0.89
00:39:32.960 child. Still today, probably in a large portion of the world, in the non-Christian world, it has never been seen as
00:39:39.940 any kind of paraphilia, any kind of predation. It is because of Christianity and the spread of Christian virtues that we
00:39:48.680 have a rightful revulsion to pedophilia. That's not a universal value today. So to me, this is just another
00:39:56.960 consequence, inevitable consequence, of rejecting Christian theology. I don't think we even realize, none of us,
00:40:06.080 Christian or not, realize what is on the other side of a fully post-Christian world. I mean, I think history tells us 0.95
00:40:15.340 that I don't think, though, we in the West who take for granted all of those traditions and all of those
00:40:21.980 moral principles, I don't think that we can even begin to recognize what that's going to look like.
00:40:30.560 Yeah. I wrote an article for a compact magazine a few weeks ago about, you know, Andrew Tate,
00:40:36.540 have you come across him?
00:40:37.320 I just recently discovered who he was, like, in the past few weeks.
00:40:41.640 Along with all of us, I think. Yeah, yeah, me too. But he is apparently a phenomenon. Anyone who's not familiar,
00:40:47.980 he's a British American kickboxer who has become a bit of a TikTok star. And he is, I think he is a really good
00:40:57.420 reminder of the fact that just because he is opposed to Christian sexual morality does not mean by any
00:41:07.340 means that he is feminist. You know, that dichotomy is completely false. Because what Tate
00:41:14.640 is invested in, in his own personal morality, is basically consumption, display, you know, being,
00:41:25.000 he's hugely status driven. He loves his, like, fancy watches, cars, whatever. This is what he
00:41:31.140 lives for. And he sees women as being consumables in exactly the same way. And he has said that he
00:41:36.480 wants to have, he wants to have multiple partners, you know, children, but by as many women as he 0.84
00:41:41.780 possibly can. He's completely unconcerned with the idea of monogamous marriage. And of course,
00:41:47.940 he can now do that. I mean, we don't actually legally permit polygamy. But in practice,
00:41:53.320 you can live in a polygamous way with absolutely no restriction in a legal sense, and very little
00:42:00.480 social censure either. So he is, he's able to basically live the life of a kind of, you know,
00:42:07.580 high class Roman male who, and in the Roman world, absolutely no one would have judged him for it at
00:42:13.100 all. You know, Harvey Weinstein is completely unremarkable in a world that doesn't recognize
00:42:18.420 the, that the violation of the bodies of women and children, particularly low class women and 0.97
00:42:25.280 children matters. Yeah. Jeffrey Epstein is an, for looking at all of history, his behavior and
00:42:32.900 what he did for most of history in most places in the world would not have been seen as problematic.
00:42:37.100 Yeah, completely typical. And obviously it has also, you know, within the Christian world,
00:42:43.160 there have been many Jeffrey Epsteins. But I think the point is that they're not,
00:42:48.460 it is possible to critique them within a, within a sexual morality, which says that actually the
00:42:54.200 sexual exploitation of, of the weak is wrong. And that high status men should not automatically
00:42:59.140 assume that they have sexual access to their social inferiors, right? That is a radical thing to
00:43:04.040 say. And it remains a radical thing to say. And I think that actually, you know, in many ways,
00:43:09.920 feminists and Christians are on the same page about that, even if we, even if we don't always 1.00
00:43:15.360 recognize that fact. Well, there's certainly a lot of things that I've realized since the
00:43:19.720 revolution has come for the dichotomy of male and female, and has decided to try to kind of like
00:43:24.660 obliterate that, which you talk about in your book. But I realized, you know, there's a lot that
00:43:30.560 I end up linking, you know, I link arms with a lot of feminists on what I would say, 1.00
00:43:37.740 because I understand certainly from a secular perspective, why you look at history,
00:43:41.800 and you look at the plight of women, and you say feminism is necessary and has accomplished good
00:43:45.680 things. Again, from my vantage point, kind of like what I would say is just as Christianity 0.77
00:43:51.500 revolutionized the idea and the perspective of children. So it also revolutionized the perspective
00:44:00.100 on women, not just through the gospel and that kind of radical equality that it brings as like
00:44:04.780 sinners and saints. But also, like if you look at a passage like Ephesians 5, which a lot of people
00:44:09.720 who identify as Christian feminists today hate, because it says wives submit to your husbands as 1.00
00:44:14.600 to the Lord. And of course, we're like, oh my goodness, submission. But I think the radical part
00:44:19.120 of that, or what would have been considered a radical part of that, which was not normal for the
00:44:23.380 culture at the time, is when Paul says, husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church. And
00:44:30.560 basically, he goes on to say, just as Christ sacrificed himself for you, so sacrifice yourself
00:44:35.300 for your wife. Talks about monogamy, the importance of being a husband of just one wife, 0.78
00:44:41.080 of not provoking your children to anger, but caring for them. That all, not the submission to
00:44:46.260 your husband part, that probably wouldn't have been radical at the time. The radical part was
00:44:50.120 you're not free to do whatever you want to do. You're not free to sow your wild oats. You are to
00:44:55.520 be monogamous. You are to care and compassion for your wife and for your children. Again, and I think
00:45:03.000 like that perspective on women as people to be cared for, people whose interests actually matter,
00:45:08.320 who have a soul, who aren't just bodies, who aren't just bearing children, although that of course is so
00:45:14.500 important. Like again, a Christian idea and ideal, that over time really changed how society saw women. 0.78
00:45:23.440 I see feminism in my, in my opinion, as getting more wrong than right, and actually helping create 1.00
00:45:30.560 someone like Andrew Tate, because feminism told women that, hey, like, just get on birth control and 1.00
00:45:39.100 do whatever you want with your body. And that is liberation. And that is good. And that is virtuous.
00:45:44.820 And that is great. All you need is sexual satisfaction, just like a man can get. I mean, 0.98
00:45:49.180 people like Andrew Tate are loving that side of feminism. So like, to me, that kind of created the 1.00
00:45:54.400 issue. I think that the era that liberal feminism made, bearing in mind, there have always been
00:46:00.000 different strains, right? But liberal feminism is by far, I'd say the most dominant now is kind of the, 1.00
00:46:04.660 the girl boss feminism, the whatever, you know, this is what we see in, in Cosmo and whatever. 1.00
00:46:12.020 The era that liberal feminism makes is that it assumes that freedom is the most important goal, 1.00
00:46:18.280 that it is the preeminent virtue, and that all other virtues need to fall by the wayside. And so
00:46:22.680 of course, you know, you say, well, men have always had the freedom to behave like libertines. Why
00:46:27.940 shouldn't women have that freedom to, why shouldn't women have the freedom to participate in public life in 1.00
00:46:33.160 the same way that men's, you know, all of this. And, and, and it's, it's true up to a point. But the
00:46:38.840 problem is that the kind of radical freedom project doesn't work when we come up against the brick wall
00:46:49.960 of biological difference. And the fact that there is a, there is sexual asymmetry that is never going
00:46:56.020 to go away. The fact that women are the ones who get pregnant, women's, we are much smaller and 1.00
00:47:00.900 weaker, more physically vulnerable than men are. We have all these psychological differences, 0.98
00:47:04.680 like the fact that male and female sexuality is, on average, quite distinct. That's not going
00:47:12.660 anywhere. And I think that what we've seen, and that, you know, the negative consequences of the
00:47:17.600 sexual revolution that have played out now, you know, we've done the experiment, what happens if
00:47:21.740 you, if you tear it all down and try and start from from scratch again? Well, we've seen it.
00:47:26.460 Um, what happens is that, um, you throw freedom at a society, I think in denial about the existence of
00:47:36.260 sexual asymmetry that is, tries very hard. I mean, even in the most recent iteration,
00:47:41.680 tries to deny the existence of men and women as such. I think that we cannot possibly cope
00:47:49.640 with the, this new kind of free for all, given, given the existence of sexual asymmetry. And given
00:47:56.780 that, um, I mean, this is the sort of thing that anyone with, you know, anyone on the left who has a,
00:48:02.840 has any kind of critique of capitalism will recognize this when it comes to free markets.
00:48:07.620 And we'll say, well, if you just, you know, throw freedom, right? Like remove all say, um,
00:48:12.940 labor restrictions or, you know, any, anything, any kind of, um, effort on imposing structure and
00:48:20.580 control on a system and just kind of have at it. Anyone on the left will say, well, no, because
00:48:26.180 there's not an even playing field, right? There are, there are, there are the rich bosses,
00:48:30.580 there are, there are poor workers. If you say, as you know, remove the obligation to honor the
00:48:36.720 Sabbath, to give one example, of course, you're going to end up with poor workers then having to work
00:48:41.580 seven days a week and being, um, you know, miserably exploited. And of course, the bosses
00:48:47.620 are going to profit from that, you know, and I feel like we've done the same thing when it comes
00:48:51.640 to the sexual marketplace, that we've basically imposed a kind of free market ideology and said,
00:48:56.180 everyone should be free without recognizing the fact that there are inherent inequalities,
00:49:02.460 which mean that different people will experience that freedom differently. The phrase I use in the
00:49:05.800 book is, um, freedom for the pike is death for the minnows. 0.99
00:49:11.580 It just doesn't seem like it has delivered on its promises. Not, I mean, sure, maybe liberation,
00:49:26.120 if liberation is, you can just do whatever you want. If liberation and libertinism are the same
00:49:31.180 thing, which I mean, you could argue for or against that, but it doesn't seem like it's led to
00:49:36.400 satisfaction. I mean, aren't we more, especially young girls, it seems more depressed than ever,
00:49:41.820 more anxious than ever, even more suicidal than ever. And there are a lot of different factors,
00:49:46.280 I think, um, that play into that. I mean, in an age when we are constantly told, I mean,
00:49:52.720 young women especially are berated on social media with just love yourself, just love yourself, 1.00
00:49:57.100 just love yourself, just discover yourself. You are your own truth. You're enough for yourself.
00:50:01.200 You would think that in an age where that kind of message is primary for women, that we would be 0.83
00:50:06.360 happier if that were the solution. If the solution was just do what makes you happy and do what feels
00:50:12.600 good, don't care about, you know, standards or rules or restrictions, just be authentically you
00:50:18.200 24 seven, no matter what that means, no matter how much that might hurt you and hurt other people.
00:50:23.400 If that were the way to go, it seems like we would be a lot happier right now,
00:50:27.500 but actually it seems like we're a lot more depressed than we've ever been.
00:50:30.880 So at what point do people realize, okay, we need to like, it needs to swing back in the other
00:50:37.440 direction. We need some kind of like exit strategy here. This ain't working. We need to turn around
00:50:44.740 a little bit. Like, do you, do you see that happening or do you think like we're just headed
00:50:49.720 towards rock bottom? I think it is starting to happen. I mean, I think it's a bit of a complicated
00:50:55.920 picture because you've got, um, among Gen Z, for instance, you've got a combination of
00:51:02.100 some members of Gen Z who are really into the sex positive stuff. And then you've also got some who
00:51:07.940 are, who are, I think, reacting against it. And there is a bit of a sexual counterrevolution
00:51:11.460 brewing. Um, it's not always happening in the way that you might want or the way you expect.
00:51:16.440 So for instance, there are a lot of young men who are reacting against porn and who are swearing off
00:51:21.100 using porn at all. They generally are not doing so out of any kind of ethical motivation at all,
00:51:28.920 you know, in terms of concerned about the women who are involved in its production or whatever, 0.87
00:51:33.920 they're normally doing it because of, they recognize the fact that porn is really destructive
00:51:38.860 for the consumer. And it tends to have really negative impact on your own, your mind, your sexuality,
00:51:45.220 think, you know, problems like erectile dysfunction are very, very common, um, for, for, for men who
00:51:50.640 are using porn frequently. So normally it's coming out of a more sort of self-interested instinct,
00:51:55.740 but it's happening.
00:51:57.440 It's all connected though. I mean, it's all connected when something is like bad for society,
00:52:03.020 it tends to be bad for the individual and vice versa. Um, and so to me, it just is another,
00:52:08.800 like, it's another piece of evidence as you kind of have argued, even from a secular perspective,
00:52:13.920 that the like mind and the heart and the soul and the body are connected. It causes sexual
00:52:18.360 dysfunction, not just because it's bad for you physically, but also because it's bad for your
00:52:22.420 mind. It's bad for women. It's bad for society and families and children in general. Um, so yeah, 1.00
00:52:28.520 I mean, it might be self-interested, but as you said, the consequences are good of that kind of
00:52:34.300 self-control. Yeah. Yeah. And young women, many of them are coming to the same kind of conclusions as
00:52:40.260 well. You go on Tik Tok, you know, Twitter, wherever, it's really easy to come across young
00:52:45.200 women who are saying exactly these things that the sexual evolution was a, was a con basically. 1.00
00:52:50.580 Um, I mean, some of them are reacting as we discussed earlier by doing things like identifying
00:52:55.960 as, as trans or as non-binary or demisexuals or whatever it might be. So they're trying to kind
00:53:01.540 of react against it within the liberal framework. Um, others are, um, just for swearing sexual
00:53:10.200 relationships at all. Um, like fem cells as the counterpart to incels is a growing online phenomenon 0.79
00:53:16.720 women who are basically swearing to celibacy because they don't want to participate in this 1.00
00:53:20.160 culture. Um, but then, I mean, the point that I make in the book is that actually there is also a
00:53:26.920 lot to be learned from my, my last chapter is called listen to your mother, where I argue that
00:53:31.840 actually some of the old sexual norms were there for a reason. And actually there is a lot to be,
00:53:42.120 that we can learn from them in a critical way. Um, things like marriage, you know, things like
00:53:47.580 recognizing that actually, um, men and women have got to get along, right. If we're going to have a
00:53:54.200 future and that, you know, we very often do many women have, have, have loving, you know,
00:54:00.380 most people, their most important loving relationship in their lives is a member of
00:54:05.140 the opposite sex. You know, most straight people, um, we are perfectly capable of having these loving
00:54:10.280 relationships. The problem is that we don't have the cultural structure in place that encourages
00:54:15.100 their creation and their, and their perseverance. But we, we could, you know, these things do the,
00:54:21.580 this option does remain available. Still, we can still choose to be counter-cultural
00:54:26.620 and to, and to adopt some of the old ideas, which actually had a lot of wisdom to them. So that's,
00:54:32.720 that's the advice I ended up giving readers by the end of the book.
00:54:36.800 Wow. Well, this is fascinating and I've loved following you and I just appreciate your perspective,
00:54:41.460 even though we're coming from different places. That's kind of what I appreciate about it is
00:54:46.920 because you're not coming from necessarily my same theological point, which is what makes it
00:54:52.760 so interesting. Um, so thank you so much for writing this book, for taking the time to come on.
00:54:58.120 I hope that everyone goes out and buys it. Um, where can people buy it? How can they support you,
00:55:03.520 follow you?
00:55:05.800 So it, it was literally published in the U S yesterday.
00:55:09.060 Oh, this is perfect timing. I don't think I even realized that. Okay. Awesome.
00:55:12.880 Um, it's been out in the UK for a few months and it's had a, it's, it's made quite a big splash
00:55:17.680 in the UK. Um, but yeah, so it's now available in the U S in, in all good bookshops, I hope and
00:55:24.260 assume. Um, and otherwise, um, I'm on Twitter at, um, at Louise underscore M underscore Perry.
00:55:31.360 Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Louise. I really appreciate you taking the time to come on. I know
00:55:37.020 people are going to love this and again, just encourage people to go out and get your book. So
00:55:40.640 thank you so much. Thank you so much. Take care.