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

Misogynist Sentences

37

Hate Speech Sentences

36


Summary

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

00:00:00.000 The sexual revolution lied to us, promising liberation, satisfaction, and happiness.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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,
00:17:33.600 for the last 2,000 years, totally disrupted the pagan Roman world and how they viewed sex also
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
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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
00:39:23.920 West. Still today, in the non-Christian world, there is nothing perverse. They see nothing perverse in marrying a
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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,
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.
00:45:23.440 I see feminism in my, in my opinion, as getting more wrong than right, and actually helping create
00:45:30.560 someone like Andrew Tate, because feminism told women that, hey, like, just get on birth control and
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,
00:45:49.180 people like Andrew Tate are loving that side of feminism. So like, to me, that kind of created the
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,
00:46:04.660 the girl boss feminism, the whatever, you know, this is what we see in, in Cosmo and whatever.
00:46:12.020 The era that liberal feminism makes is that it assumes that freedom is the most important goal,
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
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
00:47:00.900 weaker, more physically vulnerable than men are. We have all these psychological differences,
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.
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,
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
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,
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,
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.
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
00:53:16.720 women who are basically swearing to celibacy because they don't want to participate in this
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.