331. The Case Against the Sexual Revolution ｜ Louise Perry
Summary
Louise Perry is a UK-based journalist, author, and columnist writing on the topics of sexual freedom and the current state of feminism and the feminine. Her recent book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, published in 2022, notes the emergence of a widespread disillusionment with sex, particularly among the young, male and female alike, and discusses the long-term psychological and social era of a life of hedonistic urges in the midst of the upheaval of traditional marital concepts. She is also the Director of The Other Half, a new non-partisan feminist think tank, and the host of Maiden Mother Matriarch, a podcast about sexual politics. In this episode, Louise talks about her new book, and her relationship with Marilyn Monroe and Hugh Hefner, the two most influential men in American history who helped define the sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s. She also explains why she chose to write about them, and why she thinks they were not born in exactly the same year as her great-great-grandmother. This message comes from Viking, committed to exploring the world in comfort, a journey through the heart of Europe on an elegant Viking longship with thoughtful service, destination-focused dining, and cultural enrichment on board and on shore. Discover more at Viking.me/VikingLongship and every Viking voyage is all-inclusive with no children, no casinos, and no casinos. Viking is all inclusive, with no kids? Discover more on Viking, a Viking voyage, all inclusive with no casinos! This message from Viking is committed to exploration, all inclusivity, and a voyage to explore the world, in comfort and a place of cultural enrichment . by Viking, the Viking Voyages and a message about sex and the female experience in this episode is by Viking s mission to help you become a better version of yourself, the good old days. by The Good Lady . by viking, the Good Lady, the Bad Lady, The Bad Lady by the Good Lord, The Good Feminist, the Queen, The Queen, and The Bad Lord, the Lady of the Good God, The Lady of Good Vibes, the Great Old Lady, and so you can be a better woman The Queen of Good Luck, the One and the Queen of the Bad Girl, The Real Good Lady. By Viking, Viking, Inc., and The Good Girl, the Righteous Lady, by Viking.
Transcript
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This message comes from Viking, committed to exploring the world in comfort.
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Journey through the heart of Europe on an elegant Viking longship with thoughtful service,
00:00:11.900
destination-focused dining, and cultural enrichment on board and on shore.
00:00:17.460
And every Viking voyage is all-inclusive with no children and no casinos.
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I'm happy today to be able to talk to Louise Perry.
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We'll have an interesting conversation about sexual dynamics and the relative role of women and men.
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Louise Perry, my guest today, is a UK-based journalist, author, and columnist,
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writing on the topics of sexual freedom and the current state of feminism and the feminine.
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Her recent book is The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, published in 2022, so a new book.
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It notes the emergence of a widespread disillusionment with sex, particularly among the young, male and female alike,
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and discusses the long-term psychological and social era of a life of hedonistic urges
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in the midst of the upheaval of traditional marital concepts.
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Louise is also the director of The Other Half, a new non-partisan feminist think tank,
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and the host of Maiden Mother Matriarch, a developmental progression, a podcast about sexual politics.
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Thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today.
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You wrote a rather controversial book recently.
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I'm just going to walk through the chapters and give everybody a preview of where we're heading.
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Consent is not enough, and people are not products.
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Well, if you were trying to pick a fight in today's society,
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particularly with those on the left, I would say,
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you couldn't have picked six more contentious titles for chapters,
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with the possible exception of people are not products.
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I suppose most people on the left, even the radicals, would agree with that statement.
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But the rest of it pretty much runs counter to, I would say,
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I was interested today, I was going through your book again,
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and I noticed once again that you started with the story of Marilyn Monroe and Hugh Hefner.
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And I was just talking to my wife about that the other day.
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I think it was probably in a conversation motivated by the fact that this podcast was coming up,
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and we talked about the emergence of pornography during our lifetime, you know,
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and when both of us are around 60, and when we were young,
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the standard pornographic recourse, you might say, was Playboy.
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But that soon multiplied like a hydra, and first of all, there was Playboy.
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And it had some pretensions to something like culture,
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and there was a certain style associated with it,
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and a certain, what would you call it, veneer of sophistication.
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You know, it was all jazz and penthouses and New York and freedom and youth and, you know,
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sexual activity between consenting adults, all free of other entanglements,
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but completely conscious of what they were doing.
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And there were highbrow interviews and, you know, sort of in-jokes.
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And so Playboy was quite effective at generating a kind of late rat pack cool around itself.
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But then the next iteration of the pornographic ascent was Penthouse,
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And then Hustler hit after that, and everybody knew at that point,
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no matter what their attitude was toward Playboy,
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that we'd stepped into a new sort of swamp of monstrosity.
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And then, of course, it wasn't long after that, 15 years maybe, something like that,
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that porn hit the internet, and then away we went.
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So let's start talking about Marilyn Monroe and her.
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I mean, she embodied this feminine archetype of the sex kitten, I guess,
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the femme fatale tube, but she's more on the sex kitten end of things.
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And she's an icon that even gave rise to figures such as Madonna, I would say,
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because Madonna played with the Marilyn Monroe image a lot and with a fair bit of success.
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But it's not like Marilyn exactly had a good time with it.
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Why don't you tell a little bit more of her story?
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Yeah, she had a fairly miserable life from start to finish.
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One of the reasons I decided to open the book by talking about Marilyn Monroe and Hugh Hefner
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is partly because, just through good luck from my perspective as a writer,
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they were born in exactly the same year, even though, of course, yeah, Monroe died young
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And they were both these incredible icons of the sexual revolution.
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Marilyn for her beauty and Hefner for his success for Playboy magazine.
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But they lived extraordinarily different lives.
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And they experienced sexual liberation, so-called, in completely different ways.
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You know, Marilyn Monroe grew up in foster homes, was a victim of child sexual abuse
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and of domestic violence as an adult, and, as you say, died by her own hand,
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I mean, I do think that, actually, by the time Hefner grew old,
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he had lost the glamour that he had as a younger man.
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I think that he is evidence of the fact that even the most successful playboy
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has a shelf life, not as short a shelf life as the sexually liberated woman does.
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I mean, really, in reality, with a modern Western lifespan,
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which is why I think it's risky to place all of your self-esteem on that value
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or, indeed, to best your career, best your life around being sexually desirable,
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Well, you know, that's a good place to take a slight detour.
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You know, a lot of your book makes a moral case,
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and moral cases aren't particularly popular now,
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but there are some interesting ways of discussing morality technically
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So, one of the things that people who are watching and listening
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people pursue different mating strategies, so to speak.
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That's how evolutionary psychologists or biologists describe it,
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and you can make the same case in the animal kingdom to some degree.
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and that would be associated with an ethos of the glorification, let's say,
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or the practice of casual sex, so sex without relationship.
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And one of the questions that you might ask is,
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are there pronounced differences between people
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who tend to pursue short-term mating strategies
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Now, a long-term mating strategy would be accompanied
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by the formulation of a relationship of mutual support.
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And the answer is, well, yeah, there are marked differences.
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One of the hallmarks of antisocial personality,
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and so that's the personality characteristic set
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is a proclivity towards short-term mating strategies,
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and that is associated with early onset of sexual activity
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a predatory or parasitical lifestyle in relationship to sex.
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And so that has been elaborated more recently into the analysis
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of so-called dark tetrad personality characteristics.
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That's an emerging model of the malevolent and pathological personality,
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which is positive delight in harm to other people.
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And it's fundamentally the exploitation of women,
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since we don't know how to do that in our society anymore.
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and this is true all the way from sperm and egg
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in case anyone's still too stupid to actually understand that.
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if there's exploitation going on in a sexual relationship,
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the male who has less at stake exploiting the female,
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I suppose, if they want to pursue hedonic pleasure,
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Then the next element with regard to morality is
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if you're playing a game that only works in the short term
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And, you know, the point you were making was that
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he was still pretty damn pathetic by the time he hit.
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They weren't the sharpest knives in the drawer,
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who was traipsing painfully from faux glamorous restaurant
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engaging in conversations so puerile and painful
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that anyone with any sense would have run away from the table
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no matter how much they might have been enamored
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by his young and hypothetically glamorous self,
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it was looking pretty oldest boy at the frat party.
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It had that whole stench about it, I would say.
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You said that she had a pretty brutal upbringing
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about the famous photographs that launched Playboy.
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But the naked photos were acquired without her consent.
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when she was much younger for very little money
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And, I mean, this is the point that I want to make
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which we're supposed to believe was a good thing.
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it is, of course, the case against the sexual revolution.
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I don't think you can paint any huge historical event
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But I think that it has been falsely presented mostly
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by progressives through rose-tinted spectacles.
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Yeah, well, there's no doubt she was an iconic figure
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you're essentially broadcasting your personal information
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to anyone with a technical know-how to intercept it.
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your personal information could fetch up to $1,000.
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that it would take a hacker with a supercomputer
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that it's very easy for a young beautiful woman
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translate into being very high highly desired on
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the long term track in fact sometimes quite the
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on it's also the fact that there is the internet
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to have been on only fans and actually I mean it is
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clearly the case that female beauty is incredibly
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valuable resource but I think maybe the way in which
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it needs to be understood distinctly from economic
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power is it is to some extent vicarious you can acquire
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enormous power as a beautiful woman through access to
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typically male political and economic power but it
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doesn't last forever if you're able to secure a very
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high status husband for instance and he commits to
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you for life you've translated your beauty into real
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and lasting power if you're not able to do that then
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you will very quickly you know age 35 age 40 age out of
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having any access to that kind of power and then you
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will potentially be paying the cost later down the line so
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there are some women who've become very wealthy and
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only fans but in general I would say that it's very very
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poor strategy and you know as ever it is presented as a
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kind of short-term boon yeah well it suffers from the same
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Pareto distribution problem as any productive enterprise
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creative enterprise which is a small minority of people will
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rake in all the money like a tiny tiny proportion it'll be a
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tenth of one percent they'll make a spectacular amount of
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money and everyone else will strive away in the dirt
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scrabbling way for virtually nothing and then as you said even
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those women who have managed to make that successful are
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dooming themselves in all likelihood to remaining only
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attractive to psychopathic and exploitive males because the
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rest of them won't be particularly happy with that
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background so yeah it's not a good iterating medium to long-term
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strategy let's talk about consent a little bit because that's a
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tricky issue and it ties back to this notion we were discussing
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earlier about the proclivity of the radical left to ensure to
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insist upon something approximating a contract which I do think is
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very comical that you know that's the same as well maybe
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consent means getting married and and actually I think you can make
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a case for that so you know when you see that happening on
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campuses very frequently and we should delve into the details of
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this is that a young man and a young woman will sleep
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together it's usually at a party and it's usually a drunken party and
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maybe because they don't want to is that almost all criminal behavior that
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involves coercion is facilitated by alcohol so half of
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people who are murdered are drunk half of the murderers are drunk there
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would be almost no domestic abuse violent abuse without alcohol it's an
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unbelievable facilitator this is why this is why the temperance movement was in
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many ways a feminist movement I would argue that that's not how it was
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normally expressed but the temperance movement was very much about domestic
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violence this message comes from viking committed to exploring the world and
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01:02:33.260
right right right well and on campuses date rape etc and unwanted social uh sexual advance and alcohol
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go hand in hand but of course you have the libertine culture on campuses sexually and also behaviorally and
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so many campuses are simultaneously hotbeds of you know sexual investigation and trouble and drunken
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dionysian partying and you know i think there's a time and a place for that and that's probably when
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you're young and you know hopefully you manage to wend your way through it but as a basis for a stable
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society it falls uh short but here's here's one of the problems it really brings up so now you have
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women and hypothetically they have control of the reproductive function and uh they can go out and drink and then
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they can find themselves waking up in the morning and not even remembering because alcohol really
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interferes with memory consolidation not even at relatively minor doses not even really remembering
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how the hell they got there now especially if they're women who've been mistreated in the past and
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that's not uncommon there is a real question that emerges about whether or not they consented and
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it's very complicated because it's certainly one of the strategies that desperate young men
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use to entice uh foolish young women into their beds is to get them drunk and anybody who doesn't know
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that is a blind fool and so now and so if you have a party and you're a college student and you're male and
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you invite some women over including the ones that you might be attracted to and you serve copious amounts of alcohol and
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you know perfectly well that if you get a young woman drunk you're more likely to get her into bed
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are you manipulating her or is she an autonomous entity fully capable of making her own sovereign
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decisions who knows the ground rules of the game when she enters the door and is their response for
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responsible for her own actions and the answer is a little of column a and a little of column b and that makes the whole issue of
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consent extraordinarily complex you know if you consent well drunk and you regret it the next day
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is that true consent and of course that's being fought out in legal minefields all across north
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america and i think the reason it's being thought out fought out is because it's actually a complicated
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question what does it mean to give consent how old do you have to be like if you have three drinks can you give
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informed consent or maybe you couldn't for a medical procedure could you if you had one drink well
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i studied the effects of alcohol for years on cognitive ability and function and it's a highly
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disinhibiting drug which is why people like it because it it removes the regulatory constraint from
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hedonic behavior including aggressive behavior it's lots of fun and it it uh amplifies sociability
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for many people it's got an opiate effect that's pain killing and a stimulant effect that's like cocaine
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and it's an anxiety reducer so it's a killer party drug and so you add some alcohol into the mix and you think well
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did the young woman give consent and the answer to that is well what the hell is consent and then one
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answer is well you have to have a legal document and then you think well you might as well just get
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married then because that's the whole point and but here here's an open question like i really wonder
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i really think this might be true marriage is consent
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that's what marriage means marriage is full informed consent and it's the only form of full
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informed consent all things being equal given how dangerous sex is in the most fundamental sense
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given how socially destabilizing it is given how difficult it is to integrate into a full personality
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across time given how much is at risk for children and women in particular that the the issue of consent
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is so important that it basically devolves into something approximating marriage by necessity
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the i agree the only proviso i would place on that is that one of the i would say one of the really
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profound successes of 20th century feminism was in reconceptualizing rape which in most traditional
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legal systems is understood as a crime against a woman's male kin reconceptualizing it as a crime
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against the woman herself which therefore makes it marriage or rape um uh explicable in a way that it
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isn't in the old model it clearly is the case that it is possible to to be to be raped within marriage
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i think it's also absolutely the case that any we are forced to draw bright lines when it comes to the
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law we're forced to say that you know the age of consent is 16 that x the amount of alcohol in the
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bloodstream constitutes you know above the legal driving limit etc etc we're forced to draw bright
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lines we have to also recognize and we all know intuitively that those bright lines are fallible
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and that there is a huge amount of gray space between what is legally permissible and what is good
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and i think that the problem with basing any kind of system of sexual ethics on consent as a bare minimum
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is it becomes impossible to talk about that gray space and what you often find actually is women
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particularly during me too women who would talk about distressing sexual experiences which actually
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normally didn't meet the legal threshold for being criminal but which they nevertheless experienced as
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upsetting as as disturbing as whatever often involving alcohol as you say briefly on that point one of the
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things a lot of people don't know is that there's a cognitive bias in men where they tend to
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overestimate a woman's sexual interest in them and that it and it's not the other way around and that
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bias is is exaggerated by alcohol so you have men who are very drunk and who really do read signs of
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sexual interest from women who are in fact not sexually interested in them and who are incapacitated by
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alcohol and it all ends up being and a rough you know we're talking about teenagers who have who are
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raised on porn and have you know it's a complete disaster like the whole cauldron mix is basically
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perfectly designed to produce these scenarios and often you have women who are coming out of these
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scenarios feeling really distressed but they they don't have the moral language to talk about it
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because they don't want to talk about they don't want to use terms like chivalrous they don't want
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to talk about gentlemen they don't want to talk even about morality and good and bad what they have in
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their vocabulary toolkit is consent and so you will say that the xyz encounter wasn't consensual whereas
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actually that's not the best way of describing what went wrong and trying to just further embed the
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consent model which often just what consent workshops are really is just they're sort of
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they're attempts at ideological interventions the idea is that we you know we sit kids down
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we tell them in words of one syllable don't rape each other but of course we know that's not how
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social interactions work that's not actually a kind of intervention that's really going to make
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a difference because the would-be rapists aren't listening for one thing and also because that's
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you know the complexity of sexual relationships is just so so too difficult to sum up in that kind of
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simple message but that's all we've got and so and so this emphasis is just on reiterating and
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reiterating if you start talking about unwanted sexual advance as a failure of something like
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chivalry you sound like a transplant from the 13th century but it's it's definitely the case it's also
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definitely the case that unsophisticated males are not very good at reading what would you say
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anything but explicit signals of no right sophisticated people can tell
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by a polite glance let's say whether or not interest is being
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manifested and then they play a very slow incremental game which is romance by the way checking each other
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out for consent at every stage and you cannot replace that with a rule-governed system the attempt
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to do that is first of all going to be intrusive and tyrannical and awkward and second it's putting
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the cart before the horse the the unsophisticated people aren't going to be able to use that system
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anyways and then you have like three people you have a crowd in the bedroom you have the young man and you
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have the young woman and you have the whole idiot uh phalanx of dei bureaucrats they're trying to
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mediate the social relationship and that's just not going to work at all and here's another thing
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i've been thinking about i talked to my wife who i know you talk to on her podcast about this quite a
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bit so here's an interesting idea so um males compete for status and the essential dimension
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of competition that differentiates them from uh women i would say is something like productive
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economic generosity it's something like that now it's not like women aren't productive and it's not
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like they're not generous but the ground rules are different women are looking to equalize the
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economic disparity that's attendant upon differential uh uh cost for reproduction and so men are
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evaluated on the basis of their potential for economic reciprocity reciprocity and generosity
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and that gives them status males and so women peel from the top of that hierarchy basically they
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let males competed out on the economic front and then women select from the top down
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and the higher the status a woman has the higher the man the status of the mate that she can obtain
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now that brings up a question which is what gives women status and that's a really hard question
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because first of all we know that economic viability is not one of those things so male economic viability
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and sexual success are correlated insanely highly it's like 0.6 0.7 crazily high one of the most
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powerful single variable relationships that you can find in all of the social sciences far higher than
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the relationship between intelligence and life success for example but the correlation between
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female economic viability and sexual attractiveness is lower than zero so it's actually slightly negative
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so it's a massive sexual dimorphism so then you ask well what gives female status and well one of the
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the answers is obviously uh associated with beauty and reproductive capacity and and sexual attractiveness
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those things all tangled together extraordinarily tightly but that's not the only thing i don't think
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and so this i think is really worth thinking about so imagine that you have an attractive girl and a
01:13:40.940
variety of relatively high status men are chasing her now you might ask well how do they evaluate her
01:13:48.380
status and i think they evaluate her status by her ability to say no
01:13:56.140
no so imagine you know a high status person offers himself or herself to you and of you if you're of
01:14:05.500
lower status you're going to say yes right away but one marker of higher status is well no i don't need
01:14:12.700
what you're selling yeah but what i'm selling is great yeah but i have so many offers that i'm not inclined to
01:14:18.860
take your offer because i have options and it's no on the part of women that signal i really believe
01:14:26.300
this is the case it's voluntary no on the part of women that signals their status and so i don't think
01:14:33.820
young women know this at all because they want to know how to compete with men let's say in the power
01:14:38.620
game and uh that's a tough question because women are smaller and they're not as physically powerful
01:14:44.700
and economic uh prowess isn't as attractive to them and it doesn't make them more viable on the
01:14:50.940
marketing on the mating market so the whole game that women are playing is way different than the
01:14:56.060
game men is playing so you might say well how do women equalize the battle and i think a huge part of
01:15:00.780
that is by reserving to themselves the right to say no and you see this people are stumbling towards
01:15:08.540
this realization even on the radical leftist front because they keep saying no means no and it's like
01:15:15.580
well yeah i wish it was that clear but at a drunken frat party what constitutes no is not self-evident
01:15:21.660
but a clear no on the part of a woman and i also think that there's every reason to think and plenty
01:15:28.540
of evidence that that's also one of the things that makes men desirable in the face that makes women
01:15:34.780
desirable in the eyes of men especially if the men might be enticed into pursuing a long-term mating
01:15:41.740
strategy you know they'll push on women and see but will you say yes right away and if the answer is
01:15:49.260
yes especially true for high status men if the answer is immediately yes then the guy assumes well
01:15:54.700
you're not your status really isn't that high you can't say no to me but if the woman says no even to
01:16:02.300
you the guy thinks oh well you know look at that oh you can imagine there's some narcissism not even
01:16:10.060
though i have everything to offer that i have to offer she's just not falling over you know maybe
01:16:16.700
there's something there that requires further exploration you know and you even see this in
01:16:22.060
female pornography it's so interesting because the classic female pornographic story is uh you know
01:16:28.860
there's this extremely attractive highly productive man who's got a real capacity for aggression he's
01:16:34.620
a pirate or a surgeon or a werewolf or a vampire or a billionaire those are the fundamental female
01:16:42.380
pornographic tropes and he has women at his disposal but this woman is shielded off from him and they dance
01:16:51.580
around each other for a long time which essentially means that she's saying no and he's finally enticed into a
01:16:57.580
relationship with her where he sacrifices all you know his access to all other women and then they
01:17:03.100
have hot steamy sex and so you know most of female pornography is extended foreplay and that's this romantic
01:17:10.700
dance of no followed by you know a very spectacular consummation and that certainly mirrors the
01:17:18.860
well it mirrors the optimal female reproductive pathway obviously because otherwise it wouldn't be the hottest
01:17:25.980
pornographic fantasy but it's based in i really think it's based in reality and so i don't know how
01:17:31.100
it is that you communicate to young women that especially if they are of high female status but
01:17:36.940
even if they're not that the most potent art tool they have in their armament with regard to status with
01:17:44.540
regard to being taken seriously is their ability and willingness to say no
01:17:50.300
um a question um that i've had a lot since the book was published is um is there a sexual counter
01:17:59.820
revolution underway my answer to that is a guarded yes a bit i think what's happened is that we've
01:18:09.420
ended up in this very historically unusual situation where female virginity is not prized basically every
01:18:16.620
society hugely praises female virginity and female sexual um restraint the ability to say no for
01:18:23.500
obvious reasons because um illegitimate child is a disaster not only for the woman but for her
01:18:28.620
family for the community there's a you know there's a need to be um to be gatekeeping young women
01:18:34.460
the pill does away the pill the pill does away with that and the pill also occurs at exactly the same
01:18:38.780
time as this huge political shift and technological shift and and we we now have attempted to
01:18:45.340
um reconceptualize women as being sort of like slightly smaller men who basically have the same
01:18:52.380
sexual drives and preferences and so on we know that this isn't true but we've given a good go
01:18:56.540
and many of the young women who um who've read my book have been raised with this expectation and have
01:19:03.820
attempted to have sex like men and have invariably found that it actually makes them miserable
01:19:07.740
but we also get trapped in this painful strategic impasse where when the expectation is that you will have
01:19:14.620
sex very early on in a relationship and that withholding sex is not socially permissible
01:19:21.420
it's a it's a it's a weird sign it's a sign that you're unusual that you're not playing by the normal
01:19:26.860
rules it puts you at a disadvantage you know if you are a young woman who doesn't want to be putting
01:19:30.940
out on a first second third date you're already disadvantaged in the dating market released up until
01:19:35.100
recently but one of the things that i've noticed going and giving um talks all over the country is
01:19:41.500
i have often had women come up to me afterwards and say that they they they like my message they
01:19:47.020
agree that they are that they have implementing this in their own lives that they are not having casual
01:19:51.980
sex that they are not giving into this social pressure and one of the things i've noticed about these
01:19:55.900
women is they tend to be very beautiful and i think that that's not coincidental i think it's because
01:20:01.740
they are the women who have the greatest power within this system and are therefore the ones who
01:20:07.980
can most easily opt out of the current set of expectations and can say no without suffering a
01:20:15.260
penalty for it so i think those women many of them are already do are already doing that because they've
01:20:19.980
gotten on to the fact that this is actually a miserable system which causes them harm
01:20:23.260
and my hope is that that will accelerate as other women imitate them well you know if if it's the
01:20:34.300
beautiful high status women who begin that trend the rest of the women will follow because trends always
01:20:40.380
start in the aristocracy and trend downwards now okay so here's another thought um and this has to do with
01:20:47.340
the built-in antagonism let's say and hopefully eventual cooperation of the sexes on the sexual
01:20:55.100
front so women are checking out men all the time and women have all sorts of tricks for doing that
01:21:02.540
they might be provocative for example because they want to test a man to see if he can control his temper
01:21:07.900
and no one likes to talk about that but any smart woman is going to do that because she wants to
01:21:12.540
find out if her partner she wants someone who has the capacity for aggression but she wants someone
01:21:18.060
who can control it because a man will be provoked by children and if he can't control his temper then
01:21:24.060
he's going to be aggressive and so she has to check that out and you don't check that out by having a
01:21:28.860
formal conversation you check that out the same way children check out their parents which is by harassing
01:21:34.860
them and seeing what happens and so and then men check women out so maybe one of the things a man wants
01:21:42.780
to do if he's going to commit to a long-term relationship is he wants to find out well does
01:21:47.340
this woman have what it takes to actually commit to a long-term relationship and what that means in
01:21:54.300
part is that he has to know that she's capable of controlling her impulsive desires right because
01:22:00.380
otherwise she's going to stray and that's actually a worse problem for men than it is for women and
01:22:07.340
and we should return to this idea that rape is a violation of male property rights in a moment
01:22:12.700
because i want to explore that a bit so you can tell a woman has control over her impulses if she can
01:22:18.860
say no this message comes from viking committed to exploring the world in comfort journey through the
01:22:26.140
heart of europe on an elegant viking longship with thoughtful service destination focused dining
01:22:33.340
and cultural enrichment on board and on shore and every viking voyage is all-inclusive with no children
01:22:41.740
and no casinos discover more at viking.com right i mean it's a way of testing so imagine that you're
01:22:51.580
you're a young guy with plenty to offer and you're a hot young woman and you meet and you're
01:22:55.740
you're pretty attracted to each other now both of you are going to fall under the sway of short-term
01:23:03.020
temptation obviously now the question is are both of you or either of you capable of being mature
01:23:13.020
in your regard for your iterated future self and the potential of a long-term relationship and the way
01:23:19.500
the man checks that out is by seeing if the girl will say no and maybe he checks that even harder because
01:23:25.580
he does everything he can to seduce her and she still says no you know and it works and he knows
01:23:31.900
she's interested and she still says no well then he can conclude that she's capable of keeping her pants
01:23:38.620
on let's say and that's actually something that you need to conclude if you're going to commit to a
01:23:44.220
long-term partnership obviously on the male front because you want to be assured of paternity
01:23:51.900
and so you know these are very intense games that men and women play with each other and they're
01:23:56.540
no holds barred games because everything's at stake but again it devolves down to this issue of
01:24:03.180
being able to say no even under intense temptation and provocation so i don't know how it is that we
01:24:10.620
start teaching young women well we can just stop start by not lying to them about absolutely everything
01:24:16.540
which is what we do now but i don't know how it is that young women can be taught that the most potent
01:24:24.620
weapon they have is their ability to say no you know and that that's actually a
01:24:30.300
a weapon of formidable force and that it does nothing but confer status upon them you know and
01:24:36.940
the fact that you said already that what you see is that it's the obviously high status high
01:24:42.780
desirable women who are figuring this out first is an indication of that because obviously they're
01:24:48.300
the ones that that are going to be able to wield that power in the most effective possible manner
01:24:54.940
but that doesn't mean that it's not useful for women farther down the hierarchy and you know you
01:24:59.660
also said something about women are enjoined to believe they have to be sexually accessible to
01:25:06.860
make themselves successful on the dating market but i don't believe that's true at all i think
01:25:12.300
i think that's a myth i think that you know if you have nothing else to offer at all but immediate
01:25:18.780
sexual access that might be your only game but if you have anything at all to offer and that is what
01:25:24.540
you offer you're actually going to be thrown out of the mating game really quickly because the guys
01:25:28.540
will just be they'll just be turned off and they won't call you back you'll get what do they call
01:25:32.700
that ghosted like a no time flat you know and the girls might ask well you know i gave the guy what
01:25:38.540
he wanted why didn't he call me and the answer is no you gave his impulsive libido what it wanted
01:25:46.860
and that's what you established a relationship with but you completely sacrificed any possibility
01:25:52.220
at all of being attracted of you being attractive to his more mature and potentially you know long-term
01:26:01.260
productive and sophisticated self you make yourself attractive to that by saying not on your life
01:26:06.620
joker you know i'm taking myself too seriously for that and my future and my future children and even
01:26:13.100
our future relationship and all that signaled by no and then it's it's complicated too a because
01:26:19.980
you get the prude problem and nietzsche observed century and a half ago that a lot of what
01:26:28.700
passed for morality was nothing but cowardice you know people are afraid to do something afraid to
01:26:33.740
be aggressive afraid to be sexual and they passed their fear off as morality and prudes are sort of like
01:26:40.540
that is they they don't want to have anything to do with sex but it's not because they've made a moral
01:26:44.460
decision or because they have strength of character it's just because they're afraid and because that's
01:26:49.260
true it's easy to parody women who say no or men for that matter uh as prudes you know as old-fashioned
01:26:57.820
conservative prudes who are just terrified of sex and you know sometimes that is true but but you can
01:27:03.980
be sophisticated as hell instead and say no and i don't think there's anything more attractive to a man
01:27:10.540
than a sophisticated woman who knows how to say no like that's that's top of the stack as far as men are
01:27:16.860
concerned and they'll do any they'll do everything to test the the what would you call the thickness of
01:27:24.780
that boundary so i don't know how you tell that to young women i don't even think men can probably
01:27:33.180
it's because the pill disrupts it all right because the pill it doesn't reduce to zero but it does
01:27:38.540
massively reduce the risks associated with sex the physical risks not the psychological risks
01:27:43.500
risks and so with those physical risks removed i mean i have a fascinating quote from a woman who was
01:27:50.700
who was um in her 20s in the 1960s when the pill arrived and she said that the the advent of the pill
01:27:57.740
meant that it suddenly became so much more difficult to say no to men because what you used to be able to
01:28:02.380
say was no no no we can't because of because i might get pregnant with that no longer available and
01:28:09.260
what we're dealing with here of course is the agreeability gap between men and women women find
01:28:13.500
it difficult to be assertive and if they can't call on that kind of very clear risk as an as an appeal
01:28:21.100
then what are they left with no i just don't want to have sex with you and so and that's a really
01:28:25.260
painful thing to say that it wouldn't hurt feelings there's also i think an element of women being
01:28:28.860
slightly physically frightened right well it boils down to personal rejection then hey yeah yeah which is
01:28:34.940
which is a painful thing because that's the only excuse you have left yeah absolutely well here's
01:28:40.540
something else that's that's worth pondering you know you talked about one of the advantages of the
01:28:45.900
sexual revolution was the transformation of the idea that rape was a property crime let's say into
01:28:52.460
a crime against the woman herself and i would say look i have plenty of sympathy for that perspective
01:28:59.820
and i think it's fundamentally true but but i'm going to push back because
01:29:03.980
you know all this is all very complicated you know it isn't obvious to me that that offers women
01:29:10.860
enough defense you know and so the counter argument might be if untrammeled sexual access to a young
01:29:20.140
woman is a crime in order for that to be recognized as a crime properly it has to be viewed as
01:29:31.340
something that will bring the males on her side to her defense in principle
01:29:37.660
now maybe not right because you could say well maybe we could set up a society where
01:29:42.060
merely quote transgressing the rights of a woman to say no is sufficient but it's not obvious to me
01:29:48.540
that that's sufficient like maybe sufficient means not only do you violate the integrity of the woman
01:29:55.900
in a fundamental sense but you enrage all of her male protectors
01:30:02.220
and then that's enough of a barrier because god only knows how much barrier we need and obviously
01:30:09.340
while you just laid out a bunch of problems especially now that the pill introduces and we
01:30:13.900
should stress that the problem that women have in saying no once they're on the pill is that it's
01:30:18.220
instantly personal and that means the woman has to deliver a pretty hard blow and that's especially
01:30:24.540
problematic if she's somewhat potentially interested in the guy right how do i say no without hurting his
01:30:31.660
feelings alienating him making him into an enemy looking like a prude and i mean when you're 16 how
01:30:38.220
you don't know the answer to any of those questions like you're not sophisticated enough to
01:30:41.820
and i saw this in my clinical practice all the time you know i had lots of women in my clinical
01:30:47.580
practice who were abused serially and you know they were generally stunningly unsophisticated in
01:30:54.940
their conduct and i'm not trying to blame the victim i'm just saying that sophisticated women
01:31:00.940
and those are often those who've been they've had a lot of good relationships with men brothers and
01:31:06.780
fathers in particular sophisticated women signal to men who are getting a little pushy in no uncertain
01:31:14.620
terms very early in the pushing game that no is the answer right and they do that if you do that really
01:31:22.620
early on in the investigation you don't have to use much force but unsophisticated women they can't do
01:31:30.220
that at all they don't know how and then what happens is they they run into an unsophisticated guy
01:31:35.500
he's too dumb to pick up any clues and then by the time she really wants to say no she's already on
01:31:40.940
the bed i'll give you an example of this you know i had one client who uh was coerced in her account
01:31:49.420
into a sexual encounter by a door-to-door salesman you know typical pornographic fantasy setup so this
01:31:57.420
young guy is going around door-to-door selling whatever he's selling so he's not one of the world's
01:32:02.060
high status males let's put it that way and uh you know and i suppose he's probably got all
01:32:08.700
sorts of fantasies running through his pornography pornography addled brain and so he comes to the
01:32:15.180
door and she's in the house and she's a reasonably attractive young woman and he's friendly and well
01:32:20.780
the first thing she does is invite him in now that's stupid she's alone she doesn't know who he is at all
01:32:28.060
and she invites him in well he thinks oh my god what is she you know maybe she really likes me and
01:32:34.780
you already said that men and this is especially true if they're narcissistic and immature radically
01:32:39.980
overestimate the degree to which a woman's attention is signaling sexual availability for obvious
01:32:45.900
reasons and so he's thinking oh my god this is my big chance and so then he starts to press her and
01:32:51.660
she has no tools at her disposal at all because she has no idea how to signal no and let's say
01:32:57.580
she's agreeable and neurotic with a bit of a history of abuse and the next thing she knows she finds
01:33:03.420
herself on the couch you know three quarters undressed and then the question is well is that rape and
01:33:10.460
well then that's the question that's when the police come in and the lawyers come in and you know you
01:33:14.460
spend the next three years trying to figure out whether or not that's rape but it's a so so my
01:33:21.340
point with all that is that it's an open question how much protection women need from the males around
01:33:27.420
them and then it's an open question exactly how to construe the crime of irresponsible access to a
01:33:36.220
young woman woman from a psychological and legal and social perspective like maybe it's not just
01:33:41.420
maybe it's not just a crime against the woman you know maybe it's a crime against the broader
01:33:46.300
community and i don't like i it's not like i'm saying i know how to adjudicate that because i don't but
01:33:53.660
it's hard to get all the necessary barriers in place and if that wasn't true we wouldn't have
01:33:59.100
this huge debate about consent on campuses um i have a slightly um unusual view of the relationship
01:34:08.060
between christianity and feminism in general um feminists modern feminists set themselves up in
01:34:15.180
opposition to christianity particularly on the issue of abortion the handmaid's tale kind of
01:34:20.300
neo-puritan outfit being the the the uniform now of of american feminists and so on i am of the view
01:34:27.340
though that actually feminism is an outgrowth of christianity and that the fundamental idea in
01:34:34.540
christianity which is so different from other religious traditions that weakness is strength
01:34:39.660
that the first shall be last that there is something valuable about being small and vulnerable
01:34:45.180
rather than something um despicable about it i think that feminism completely relies on that idea
01:34:51.740
which is by no means shared by all cultures and certainly wasn't shared by the ancient roman
01:34:55.500
culture that that from which christianity sprung and so if you're operating in say an ancient roman
01:35:02.140
culture which which doesn't see women as inherently vulnerable which actually sees female um vulnerability
01:35:09.500
as uh something to be despised potentially and which sees prostituted slave women as entirely
01:35:16.460
available for male sexual consumption that cannot really conceptualize the idea of a slave woman having
01:35:22.220
being able to be sexually violated you know it's just not kind of within the moral system it's not it's not
01:35:26.460
understandable into that comes the christian idea of sexual equality at least at the spiritual level
01:35:35.020
and the idea therefore that actually even a woman who doesn't have male kin available to defend her
01:35:40.540
against sexual violation which of course a slave doesn't she is nevertheless worthy of that protection it
01:35:46.380
kind of socializes this may be the wrong word but it it shares that duty of protection
01:35:52.140
among the community and among women i think that's basically what feminism is
01:35:58.460
and says that actually we should we should be bestowing on these friendless women the same
01:36:04.140
protection that a woman with high connected male kin has it's a very difficult system to enforce to some
01:36:10.380
extent we we try and use police criminal justice system whatever to do that job it's a hard job to do
01:36:15.020
but that is basically the modern project and i think it is born out of christian morality
01:36:18.220
right right well yeah yeah i mean i think i think that's right is that what what you're attempting
01:36:23.900
to do is to replicate the protection that a very well-constituted family and community system would
01:36:31.660
have for a woman who's highly functioning you're trying to replicate that in abstraction in the entire
01:36:38.300
social structure and so that's why you have a legal structure that says well women have the right to
01:36:43.020
bodily integrity you're really trying to replace that protective structure with
01:36:48.140
the force of law yeah and i think that's an entirely laudable exercise the question that we have to
01:36:53.580
wrestle with is the question that you brought up at the end of that which is that if a woman is
01:36:57.980
unfortunate enough not to have you know let's say close male associates brothers friends fathers
01:37:07.820
available to her to what degree is it even possible for the more abstract state and the body
01:37:14.380
of laws to replace that might be a goal but it's very difficult to realize in practical terms is there
01:37:22.140
anything else that that's rattling around in the back of your mind that you think might be worth making
01:37:28.940
a case for at the moment i suppose that the um if there's one unifying idea um within the book it's
01:37:38.780
probably summed up in the um in the epilogue which i called listen to your mother i didn't crucially
01:37:43.980
call it obey your mother i called it listen to your mother i you know give your mother the opportunity
01:37:48.140
to present her her view of things because i think that basically everything that's in the book
01:37:53.420
actually is incredibly obvious and ought to be incredibly obvious and it only isn't because we we
01:37:59.500
live in a very strange time which has constructed some very strange ideas about sexual politics
01:38:05.020
and actually in order to i think to navigate these waters effectively this message comes from viking
01:38:11.420
committed to exploring the world in comfort journey through the heart of europe on an elegant viking
01:38:17.740
longship with thoughtful service destination focused dining and cultural enrichment on board and on
01:38:25.580
shore and every viking voyage is all-inclusive with no children and no casinos discover more at viking.com
01:38:35.020
simply listening to women who've lived it already and who have your best interests at heart if
01:38:41.180
there's anyone in the world who's likely to have your best interests at heart it is probably your
01:38:44.540
mother simply listening to that woman is really the only piece of advice that ought to be needed
01:38:54.620
um because all of this is really just about rediscovering some of the i would say eternal truths
01:39:02.540
about men and women which we've yeah well i'm kind of i'm kind of hoping that um the women that you
01:39:07.900
describe as post maidens so let's say mothers and matriarchs could seize the reins on the social media
01:39:16.620
front and start educating young women who are both motherless and fatherless in the most fundamental
01:39:23.020
sense about some of these truths you know my wife has been tammy has been starting to do that with her
01:39:27.660
podcast inquiring into the nature of the divine feminine let's say and speaking to people like
01:39:33.660
janice fiamengo who's a real scholar of bitter and resentful feminism let's say but also trying to have
01:39:40.860
an intelligent discussion among older women who have a bit of wisdom often hard-won about what a viable
01:39:49.180
long-term life path might look like like you sketched it out a bit you know this transition in terms of
01:39:55.340
narrative role let's say from maiden to mother to matriarch but that's you know that's a very vague
01:40:02.940
this is not a criticism but a three-word description is very vague and it isn't obvious at all that our
01:40:09.020
culture is good at providing an image of like what does it mean to be a mother in the highest sense and
01:40:16.940
it's really complicated you know because one of the problems a lot of my female clients had was they were
01:40:22.380
very productive economically and very brilliant and it's clearly the case that cultures get much richer
01:40:28.940
and children are much more well educated if women have access to educational resources and if society
01:40:36.860
can tap into their broad economic productivity that seems like a net good right but then it puts women
01:40:43.340
in the uncomfortable situation of well how do you devote enough attention to your husband and your
01:40:48.540
children probably in the reverse order and how do you handle your career and that needs a lot of
01:40:55.820
discussion the answer seems to be that most of the women that i've seen who've had viable lives is that
01:41:02.460
they don't make career advancement their number one goal and one of the things you see emerging as a
01:41:08.220
consequence of that is that women are pretty likely to start small businesses but they generally do them part-time
01:41:14.540
and they're generally not as hyper successful as a minority of men but the reason they're doing
01:41:20.060
that is because they're trying to balance marriage and children with economic productivity and that's
01:41:26.220
that's challenging and presents lots of opportunity but it's not straightforward to conceptualize
01:41:34.380
and women have only been able to do that in some real sense for about 60 years right since we had
01:41:39.900
reliable birth control so it's not surprising that there has to be a discussion and then so that's
01:41:44.700
on the mother front and then on the matriarch front well i think the problem's even worse is like
01:41:49.980
well what's it like to be a grandmother who's had a life you know a family a relationship a career
01:41:56.140
who's been productive at that who's now entering into the you know final third of life let's say
01:42:02.620
what does that look like if it's rich and fulfilling in terms of social role and and personal relationship
01:42:11.020
and sexual behavior and like there's an absolute dearth of conversation on those fronts and you know
01:42:18.860
you're obviously spearheading uh what the rectification of that in some real sense but it would be lovely to
01:42:27.340
see a lot more of that anyways people who are listening louise perry's book is the case against
01:42:33.020
the sexual revolution uh very you know punchy title and one of the things louise said today that was
01:42:40.140
interesting is that her books actually uh being met with a lot of positive responses you know and so
01:42:46.460
that's it's pretty interesting you know i feel the tide is turning in many ways this might be a
01:42:52.620
a cardinal pivoting year 2023 because a lot of these things you say your books about the painfully
01:42:58.460
obvious in some sense it's like well you know society is pretty unstable when the painfully obvious
01:43:03.420
is now both debatable and even um objected to but your book is definitely shot in the opposite
01:43:11.900
direction so thank you very much for talking to me today thank you so much and uh to all of you bet
01:43:18.620
you bet you bet and uh hopefully we can meet when i come to the uk that would be good that'd be
01:43:23.100
fantastic and uh to all those who are listening and watching thank you very much for your time and
01:43:27.580
attention to the dailywire plus crew for facilitating this and the camera people who are here in austin
01:43:33.660
texas is where i am today thank you for helping us do this and uh and well we'll we'll continue this
01:43:41.740
conversation on the dailywire plus platform thanks again louise hello everyone i would encourage you
01:43:49.180
to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com
01:43:58.300
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