331. The Case Against the Sexual Revolution ｜ Louise Perry [1000599404185]
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, 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 error of a life of hedonistic urges in the midst of the upheaval of traditional marital concepts.
Transcript
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Hello everyone. 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, 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 error of a life of hedonistic urges 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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Hello, Louise. 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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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
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and, you know, sexual activity between consenting adults,
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all free of other entanglements, 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
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and with a fair bit of success, 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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even though, of course, yeah, Monroe died young and Hefner lived well into his 90s.
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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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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 has a shelf life,
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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 base your career, base 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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Your book makes a moral case, 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 might be interested in knowing
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is that 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 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 who tend to pursue short-term mating strategies
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Now, a long-term mating strategy would be accompanied by the formulation
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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 that is associated with criminality,
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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 and multiple sexual partners,
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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 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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and that involves Machiavellianism, which is manipulative,
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narcissistic, which is virtue-free attention-seeking.
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and sadism, which is positive delight in harm to other people.
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are associated with a striking proclivity for short-term mating.
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And that brings up the stark realization that it's a form of exploitation.
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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 up to fully embodied being,
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the female is almost inevitably the sex that pours more resources into reproduction.
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So that means that women bear a higher cost for sexual reproduction
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in case anyone's still too stupid to actually understand that.
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And what that also means is that 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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And it's enticing for young women to believe, I suppose,
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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 for others,
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but also for yourself, then that's not a very good game.
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And, you know, the point you were making was that
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Maryland was playing a particularly short game.
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gain, he was still pretty damn pathetic by the time he hit,
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I watched one of his late TV shows where he was touring Europe
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with his three blonde bimbos who were not the world's,
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they weren't the sharpest knives in the drawer, let's put it that way.
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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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if you had looked at that with a cold eye a few decades later,
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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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and also the first naked centerfold in the first issue of Playboy.
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But the naked photos were acquired without her consent.
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She'd taken them, well, she'd had them taken many years before
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when she was much younger for very little money
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at the cemetery in Los Angeles where they're both buried.
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So this whole kind of relationship between the two of them
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And, I mean, this is the point that I want to make
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multiple forms of exploitation by lots of people,
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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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And part of the reason, it's hard to say exactly why.
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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's right, there's a whole underground economy
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that it would take a hacker with a supercomputer
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whenever I'm traveling or working from a coffee shop.
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and personal data are shielded from prying eyes.
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That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash Jordan
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and then people would just be attracted to her like mad.
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You know, given that backstory for female sexual icons
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and this is often the case for girls who get dragged
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or who agree to participate in the pornography industry
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who have a history of fractured relationships and abuse.
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You know that girls without fathers hit puberty one year earlier.
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So imagine that you're bereft of male companionship
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And maybe that's because your culture doesn't have enough men.
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Sometimes that happens after wars, for example.
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Or maybe you're just in an economic niche or social niche
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So now why would you develop a year early from a puberty perspective?
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Well, the answer is one of the ways that women can attract male attention,
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obviously, and therefore, in principle, companionship, protection, productivity,
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all of that that might come along with a real relationship
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And so if there's a dearth of males in the local environment,
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then early puberty could easily be a way of increasing the probability
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of catching a mate early enough so you don't starve to death, let's say.
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Okay, so then imagine that there's a psychological equivalent to that.
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And this is where that waif-like femme fatale archetype might kick in.
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And so if you're appealingly, vulnerably beautiful and available,
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and then you have that magic that can go along with that
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when it's transformed into something truly archetypal,
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You know, there's a bit of a little girl about her.
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She had a very girly voice, and that's how she sang.
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And she had a kind of innocent, naive provocativeness
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that was amplified paradoxically by her overt sexuality.
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And so she had some of the appeal of a helpless child
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and some of the appeal of a truly mature woman.
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And I think the fact that it's a deadly combination
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might turn to that pattern of seductive behavior
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because if they turn on the charm full throttle in that manner,
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it increases the probability that even in their desperate economic straits,
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And of course, with Marilyn, that was elevated right to the point
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where she became literally the poster girl for that approach.
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You know, and then I mentioned Madonna a little earlier.
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And when Madonna first came on the scene, I thought,
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She seems to be taking this Marilyn-like archetype,
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You know, she was a businesswoman, pretty canny.
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She seemed to be in charge of her own image, you know.
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And I thought maybe she had a grip on the archetype,
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but it isn't obvious to me at all that she did.
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You know, Madonna's life has been characterized
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by a continual pattern of sexual attention-seeking.
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And she's also, I would say, turned into her own parody.
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Even in her, I think she's in her late 60s now,
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that are leveraging pornographic attractiveness.
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And I mean, that requires a lot of maintenance and makeup
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And that's the problem with short-term mating strategy,
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You can't play it with other people continually.
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And it's not a good pattern for your whole life course.
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That's partly what makes it both immoral and unwise,
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I decided to call my podcast Maiden Mother Matriarch
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of women desperate to remain in maiden mode permanently.
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to accept progressing from maiden to matriarch.
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a role that you can't spend your entire life in.
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they don't necessarily attain a commensurate status,
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And maybe that's because the women are competing.
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and so the maidens might take exception to that
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when teenagers started to develop disposable income.
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So that's sort of a perfect storm in some sense.
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the development of the relationship across time.
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that men and women are fundamentally different.
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that the fundamental biological differentiator,
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the ones that you might be attracted to and you
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is there a response for responsible for her own
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actions and the answer is a little a column a and
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issue of consent extraordinarily complex you know
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if you consent well drunk and you regret it the
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next day is that true consent and of course that's
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being fought out in legal minefields all across
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north america and i think the reason it's being
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thought out fought out is because it's actually a
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consent how old do you have to be like if you have
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well maybe you couldn't for a medical procedure could
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you if you had one drink well i studied the effects of
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alcohol for years on cognitive ability and function and
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it's a highly disinhibiting drug which is why people like
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it because it it removes the regulatory constraint from
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slots of fun and it it uh amplifies sociability for many
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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
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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
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well what the hell is consent and then one answer is well you have to
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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
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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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informed consent and it's the only form of full informed consent
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all things being equal given how dangerous sex is in the most
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fundamental sense given how socially destabilizing it is given how difficult
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it is to integrate into a full personality across time
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given how much is at risk for children and women in particular
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that the the issue of consent is so important that it basically devolves into
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the i agree the only proviso i would place on that is that one of the i would say
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one of the really profound successes of 20th century feminism was in
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reconceptualizing rape which in most traditional legal systems is understood
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reconceptualizing it as a crime against the woman herself
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explicable in a way that it isn't in the old model it clearly is the case that it is
01:08:49.480
possible to to be to be raped within marriage i think it's also absolutely the case that any
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we are forced to draw bright lines when it comes to the law we're forced to say that you know the
01:09:01.500
age of consent is 16 that x the amount of alcohol in the bloodstream constitutes you know above the
01:09:08.080
legal driving limit etc etc we're forced to draw bright lines we have to also recognize and we all
01:09:12.520
know intuitively that those bright lines are fallible and that there is a huge amount of gray space
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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
01:09:28.940
minimum is it becomes impossible to talk about that gray space and what you often find actually is
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women particularly during me too women who would talk about distressing sexual experiences which
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actually normally didn't meet the legal threshold for being criminal but which they nevertheless
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experienced as upsetting as as disturbing as whatever often involving alcohol as you say
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briefly on that point one of the things a lot of people don't know is that there's a cognitive bias
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in men where they tend to overestimate a woman's sexual interest in them and that it and it's not the
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other way around and that bias is is exaggerated by alcohol so you have men who are very drunk and who
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really do read signs of sexual interest from women who are in fact not sexually interested in them
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and who are incapacitated by alcohol and it all ends up being and are off you know we're talking about
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teenagers who have raised on porn and have you know it's a complete disaster like the whole cauldron
01:10:23.020
mix is basically perfectly designed to produce these scenarios and often you have women who are coming
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out of these scenarios feeling really distressed but they they don't have the moral language to talk
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about it because they don't want to talk about they don't want to use terms like chivalrous they don't want to
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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 and we tell
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them in words of one syllable don't rape each other but of course we know that's not how social
01:11:08.640
interactions work that's not actually a kind of intervention that's really going to make a difference
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because the would-be rapists aren't listening for one thing and also because that's you know the
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complexity of sexual relationships are just so so too difficult to sum up in that kind of simple message
01:11:22.440
but that's all we've got and so and so this emphasis is just on reiterating and reiterating
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if you start talking about unwanted sexual advance as a failure of something like chivalry you sound
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like a transplant from the 13th century but it's it's definitely the case it's also definitely the
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case that unsophisticated males are not very good at reading what would you say anything but explicit
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signals of no right sophisticated people can tell by a polite glance let's say whether or not
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interest is being manifested and then they play a very slow incremental game which is romance by the
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way checking each other out for consent at every stage and you cannot replace that with a rule
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governed system the attempt to do that is first of all going to be intrusive and tyrannical and awkward
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and second it's putting the cart before the horse the the unsophisticated people aren't going to be
01:12:26.780
able to use that system anyways and then you have like three people you have a crowd in the bedroom
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you have the young man and you have the young woman and you have the whole idiot phalanx of DEI
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bureaucrats they're trying to mediate the social relationship and that's just not going to work at all
01:12:44.240
and here's another thing I've been thinking about I talked to my wife who I know you talk to on her
01:12:49.160
podcast about this quite a bit so here's an interesting idea so males compete for status and
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the essential dimension of competition that differentiates them from women I would say is
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something like productive economic generosity it's something like that now it's not like women aren't
01:13:11.280
productive and it's not like they're not generous but the ground rules are different women are looking
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to equalize the economic disparity that's attendant upon differential uh uh cost for reproduction
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and so men are evaluated on the basis of their potential for economic 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 and the higher
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the status a woman has the higher the man the status of the mate that she can obtain now that brings up a
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question which is what gives women status and that's a really hard question because first of all we know
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that economic viability is not one of those things so male economic viability and sexual success are
01:14:08.960
correlated insanely highly it's like 0.6 0.7 crazily high one of the most powerful single variable
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relationships that you can find in all of the social sciences far higher than the relationship between
01:14:22.320
intelligence and life success for example but the correlation between female economic viability and
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sexual attractiveness is lower than zero so it's actually slightly negative so it's a massive sexual
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dimorphism so then you ask well what gives female status and well one of the answers is obviously
01:14:41.940
associated with beauty and reproductive capacity and and sexual attractiveness those things all tangled
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together extraordinarily tightly but that's not the only thing i don't think and so this i think is
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really worth thinking about so imagine that you have an attractive girl and a variety of relatively high
01:15:03.260
status men are chasing her now you might ask well how do they evaluate her status and i think they
01:15:11.740
evaluate her status by her ability to say no so imagine you know a high status person offers himself or
01:15:23.020
herself to you and of you if you're of lower status you're going to say yes right away but one marker
01:15:30.360
of higher status is well no i don't need what you're selling yeah but what i'm selling is great yeah but i have
01:15:37.120
so many offers that i'm not inclined to take your offer because i have options and it's no on the part
01:15:44.720
of women that signal i really believe this is the case it's voluntary no on the part of women that
01:15:51.640
signals their status and so i don't think young women know this at all because they want to know how
01:15:57.200
to compete with men let's say in the power game and uh that's a tough question because women are smaller
01:16:03.280
and they're not as physically powerful and economic uh prowess isn't as attractive to them and it doesn't
01:16:10.340
make them more viable on the marketing on the mating market so the whole game that women are playing is
01:16:15.840
way different than the game men is playing so you might say well how do women equalize the battle and
01:16:20.280
i think a huge part of that is by reserving to themselves the right to say no and you see this
01:16:26.820
people are stumbling towards this realization even on the radical leftist front because they keep saying
01:16:33.280
no means no it's like well yeah i wish it was that clear but at a drunken frat party what
01:16:39.820
constitutes no is not self-evident but a clear no on the part of a woman and i also think that there's
01:16:47.360
every reason to think and plenty of evidence that that's also one of the things that makes
01:16:51.620
men desirable in the face that makes women desirable in the eyes of men especially if the men
01:16:58.860
might be enticed into pursuing a long-term mating strategy you know they'll push on women and see
01:17:05.660
well will you say yes right away and if the answer is yes especially true for high status men if the
01:17:11.980
answer is immediately yes then the guy assumes well you're not your status really isn't that high
01:17:17.660
you can't say no to me but if the woman says no even to you the guy thinks oh well you know
01:17:24.860
look at that oh you can imagine there's some narcissism that even though i have everything to offer
01:17:32.040
that i have to offer she's just not falling over you know maybe there's something there that requires
01:17:38.980
further exploration you know and you even see this in female pornography it's so interesting because
01:17:45.000
the classic female pornographic story is uh you know there's this extremely attractive highly productive
01:17:51.960
man who's got a real capacity for aggression he's a pirate or a surgeon or a werewolf or a vampire
01:17:58.660
or a billionaire those are the fundamental female pornographic tropes and he has women at his
01:18:05.880
disposal but this woman is shielded off from him and they dance around each other for a long time
01:18:13.940
which essentially means that she's saying no and he's finally enticed into a relationship with her
01:18:19.220
where he sacrifices all you know his access to all other women and then they have hot steamy sex and so
01:18:25.300
you know most of female pornography is extended foreplay and that's this romantic dance of no
01:18:32.180
followed by you know a very spectacular consummation and that certainly mirrors the
01:18:38.260
well it mirrors the optimal female reproductive pathway obviously because otherwise it wouldn't be
01:18:46.120
the hottest pornographic fantasy but it's based in i really think it's based in reality and so i don't
01:18:51.380
know how it is that you communicate to young women that especially if they are of high female status
01:18:57.140
but even if they're not that the most potent tool they have in their armament with regard to status with
01:19:05.120
regard to being taken seriously is their ability and willingness to say no a question um that i've had a lot
01:19:15.720
since the book was published is um is there a sexual counter-revolution underway
01:19:21.480
my answer to that is a guarded yes a bit i think what's happened is that we've ended up in this
01:19:30.860
very historically unusual situation where female virginity is not prized basically every society
01:19:37.660
hugely praises female virginity and female sexual um restraint the ability to say no for obvious reasons
01:19:44.720
because um illegitimate child is a disaster not only for the woman but for her family for the
01:19:49.740
community there's a you know there's a need to be um to be gatekeeping young women the pill does away
01:19:55.780
the pill the pill does away with that and the pill also occurs at exactly the same time as this huge
01:20:00.660
political shift and technological shift and and we we now have attempted to um reconceptualize women
01:20:08.620
as being sort of like slightly smaller men who basically have the same sexual drives and preferences and
01:20:14.340
we know that this isn't true but we've given a good go and many of the young women who um who've read
01:20:20.940
my book have been raised with this expectation and have attempted to have sex like men and have
01:20:25.940
invariably found that it actually makes them miserable but we also get trapped in this painful
01:20:31.360
strategic impasse where when the expectation is that you will have sex very early on in a relationship
01:20:36.640
and that withholding sex is not socially permissible it's a it's a it's a weird sign it's a sign that
01:20:44.620
you're unusual that you're not playing by the normal rules it puts you at a disadvantage you know if you
01:20:50.040
are a young woman who doesn't want to be putting out on a first second third date you're already
01:20:53.600
disadvantaged in the dating market released up until recently but one of the things that i've noticed
01:20:58.080
going and giving um talks all over the country is i i've often had women come up to me afterwards and
01:21:05.420
say that they they they like my message they agree that they are that they have are implementing this
01:21:10.500
in their own lives that they are not having casual sex that they are not giving into this social
01:21:14.620
pressure and one of the things i've noticed about these women is they tend to be very beautiful
01:21:17.900
and i think that that's not coincidental i think it's because they are the women who have the
01:21:23.740
greatest power within this system and are therefore the ones who can most easily opt out
01:21:30.280
of the current set of expectations and can say no without suffering a penalty for it so i think those
01:21:37.800
women many of them are already do are already doing that because they've gotten onto the fact that
01:21:41.420
this is actually a miserable system which causes them harm and my hope is that that will accelerate
01:21:50.180
as other women imitate them well you know if if it's the beautiful high status women who begin that
01:21:57.640
trend the rest of the women will follow because trends always start in the aristocracy and trend
01:22:02.960
downwards now okay so here's another thought um and this has to do with the built-in antagonism
01:22:10.480
let's say and hopefully eventual cooperation of the sexes on the sexual front so women are checking
01:22:18.360
out men all the time and women have all sorts of tricks for doing that they might be provocative
01:22:24.260
for example because they want to test a man to see if he can control his temper and no one likes to
01:22:29.300
talk about that but any smart woman is going to do that because she wants to find out if her partner
01:22:34.220
she wants someone who has the capacity for aggression but she wants someone who can control it because
01:22:39.940
a man will be provoked by children and if he can't control his temper then he's going to be aggressive
01:22:45.960
and so she has to check that out and you don't check that out by having a formal conversation
01:22:50.500
you check that out the same way children check out their parents which is by harassing them and seeing
01:22:55.980
what happens and so and then men check women out so maybe one of the things a man wants to do if he's
01:23:04.000
going to commit to a long-term relationship is he wants to find out well does this woman have what it
01:23:09.100
takes to actually commit to a long-term relationship and what that means in part is that he has to know
01:23:16.300
that she's capable of controlling her impulsive desires right because otherwise she's going to stray
01:23:22.420
and that's actually a worse problem for men than it is for women and and we should return to this idea
01:23:29.660
that rape is a violation of male property rights in a moment because i want to explore that a bit
01:23:34.760
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one discount per household right i mean it's a way of testing so imagine that you're you're a young guy
01:25:02.320
with plenty to offer and you're a hot young woman and you meet and you're pretty attracted to each other
01:25:07.300
now both of you are going to fall under the sway of short-term temptation obviously now the question is
01:25:16.480
are both of you are either of you capable of being mature in your regard for your iterated future self
01:25:25.860
and the potential of a long-term relationship and the way the man checks that out is by seeing if the
01:25:31.180
girl will say no and maybe he checks that even harder because he does everything he can to seduce her
01:25:37.540
and she still says no you know and it works and he knows she's interested and she still says no well
01:25:43.940
then he can conclude that she's capable of keeping her pants on let's say and that's actually something
01:25:51.600
that you need to conclude if you're going to commit to a long-term partnership obviously on the male front
01:25:57.840
because you want to be assured of paternity and so you know these are very intense games that men and
01:26:04.240
women play with each other and they're no holds barred games because everything's at stake but again
01:26:09.920
it devolves down to this issue of being able to say no even under intense temptation and provocation
01:26:17.520
so i don't know how it is that we start teaching young women well we can just stop start by not lying
01:26:24.600
to them about absolutely everything which is what we do now but i don't know how it is that young women
01:26:30.560
can be taught that the most potent weapon they have is their ability to say no you know and that
01:26:38.360
that's actually a a weapon of formidable force and that it does nothing but confer status upon them
01:26:46.160
you know and the fact that you said already that what you see is that it's the obviously high status
01:26:52.200
high desirable women who are figuring this out first is an indication of that because obviously they're
01:26:58.000
the ones that that are going to be able to wield that power in the most effective possible manner
01:27:04.320
that doesn't mean that it's not useful for women farther down the hierarchy and you know you also
01:27:09.600
said something about women are enjoined to believe they have to be sexually accessible to make themselves
01:27:17.200
successful on the dating market but i don't believe that's true at all i think i think that's a myth i think
01:27:23.560
that you know if you have nothing else to offer at all but immediate sexual access that might be your
01:27:30.520
only game but if you have anything at all to offer and that is what you offer you're actually going to
01:27:35.400
be thrown out of the mating game really quickly because the guys will just be they'll just be turned
01:27:40.200
off and they won't call you back you'll get what do they call that ghosted like in no time flat
01:27:45.000
you know and the girls might ask well you know i gave the guy what he wanted
01:27:48.680
why didn't he call me and the answer is no you gave his impulsive libido what it wanted
01:27:55.440
and that's what you established a relationship with but you completely sacrificed any possibility at
01:28:02.020
all of being attracted of you being attractive to his more mature and potentially you know long-term
01:28:10.900
productive and sophisticated self you make yourself attractive to that by saying not on your life
01:28:16.160
joker you know i'm taking myself too seriously for that and my future and my future children and
01:28:22.480
even our future relationship and all that signaled by no and then it's it's complicated too a because
01:28:29.120
you get the prude problem and nietzsche observed century and a half ago that a lot of what passed for
01:28:38.840
morality was nothing but cowardice you know people are afraid to do something afraid to be aggressive
01:28:43.980
afraid to be sexual and they passed their fear off as morality and prudes are sort of like that is
01:28:50.680
they they don't want to have anything to do with sex but it's not because they've made a moral decision
01:28:54.500
or because they have strength of character it's just because they're afraid and because that's true
01:28:59.120
it's easy to parody women who say no or men for that matter uh as prudes you know as old-fashioned
01:29:07.420
conservative prudes who are just terrified of sex and you know sometimes that is true but
01:29:12.260
but you can be sophisticated as hell and say no and i don't think there's anything more attractive
01:29:18.780
to a man than a sophisticated woman who knows how to say no like that's that's top of the stack as far
01:29:26.120
as men are concerned and they'll do any they'll do everything to test the the what would you call the
01:29:33.800
thickness of that boundary so i don't know how you tell that to young women i don't even think men can
01:29:40.400
probably it's because the pill disrupts it all right because the pill it doesn't reduce to zero
01:29:47.640
but it does massively reduce the risks associated with sex the physical risks not the psychological
01:29:52.660
risks and so with those physical risks removed i mean i have a fascinating quote from a woman who was
01:30:00.360
who was um in her 20s in the 1960s when the pill arrived and she said that the the advent of the pill
01:30:07.240
meant that it suddenly became so much more difficult to say no to men because what you used
01:30:11.580
to be able to say was no no no we can't because of because i might get pregnant with that no longer
01:30:18.140
available and what we're dealing with here of course is the agreeability gap between men and women
01:30:22.120
women find it difficult to be assertive and if they can't call on that kind of very clear risk
01:30:28.760
as an as an appeal then what are they left with no i just don't want to have sex with you
01:30:33.180
and so and that's a really painful thing to say that it wouldn't hurt feelings there's also i think
01:30:37.480
an element of women being slightly physically frightened right well it boils down to personal
01:30:41.180
rejection then hey yeah yeah which is which is a painful right because that's the only excuse you
01:30:47.140
have left yeah absolutely well here's something else that's that's worth pondering you know you talked
01:30:53.900
about one of the advantages of the sexual revolution was the transformation of the idea that rape was a
01:30:59.920
property crime let's say into a crime against the woman herself and i would say look i have plenty
01:31:06.920
of sympathy for that perspective and i think it's fundamentally true but but i'm going to push back
01:31:12.920
because you know all this is all very complicated you know it isn't obvious to me that that offers women
01:31:20.440
enough defense you know and so the counter argument might be if untrammeled sexual access to a young
01:31:29.800
woman is a crime in order for that to be recognized as a crime properly it has to be viewed as
01:31:40.500
something that will bring the males on her side to her defense in principle now maybe not right because
01:31:48.640
you could say well maybe we could set up a society where merely quote transgressing the rights of a
01:31:55.180
woman to say no is sufficient but it's not obvious to me that that's sufficient like maybe sufficient
01:32:00.520
means not only do you violate the integrity of the woman in a fundamental sense but you enrage all of her male
01:32:09.140
protectors and then that's enough of a barrier because god only knows how much barrier we need and
01:32:17.920
obviously well you just laid out a bunch of problems especially now that the pill introduces
01:32:22.960
and we should stress that the problem that women have in saying no once they're on the pill is that
01:32:27.620
it's instantly personal and that means the woman has to deliver a pretty hard blow and that's especially
01:32:34.180
problematic if she's somewhat potentially interested in the guy right how do i say no without hurting his
01:32:41.300
feelings alienating him making him into an enemy looking like a prude and i mean when you're 16
01:32:46.680
how you don't know the answer to any of those questions like you're not sophisticated enough to
01:32:51.500
and i saw this in my clinical practice all the time you know i had lots of women in my clinical
01:32:57.160
practice who were abused serially and you know they were generally stunningly unsophisticated in their
01:33:04.840
conduct and i'm not trying to blame the victim i'm just saying that sophisticated women and those are
01:33:11.240
often those who've been they've had a lot of good relationships with men brothers and fathers in
01:33:17.100
particular sophisticated women signal to men who are getting a little pushy in no uncertain terms
01:33:24.620
very early in the pushing game that no is the answer right and they do that if you do that really early on in
01:33:33.200
the investigation you don't have to use much force but unsophisticated women they can't do that at all
01:33:40.420
they don't know how and then what happens is they they run into an unsophisticated guy he's too dumb to
01:33:46.080
pick up any clues and then by the time she really wants to say no she's already on the bed i'll give
01:33:51.560
you an example of this you know i had one client who uh was coerced in her account into a sexual
01:34:00.080
encounter by a door-to-door salesman you know typical pornographic fantasy setup so this young guy is
01:34:07.780
going around door-to-door selling whatever he's selling so he's not one of the world's high status
01:34:12.380
males let's put it that way and uh you know and i suppose he's probably got all sorts of fantasies
01:34:19.380
running through his pornography pornography addled brain and so he comes to the door and she's in the
01:34:25.920
house and she's a reasonably attractive young woman and he's friendly and well the first thing she does is
01:34:31.580
invite him in now that's stupid she's alone she doesn't know who he is at all and she invites him in
01:34:38.920
well he thinks oh my god what is she you know maybe she really likes me and you already said that men
01:34:46.160
and this is especially true if they're narcissistic and immature radically overestimate the degree to
01:34:51.200
which a woman's attention is signaling sexual availability for obvious reasons and so he's thinking
01:34:56.900
oh my god this is my big chance and so then he starts to press her and she has no tools at her
01:35:02.940
disposal at all because she has no idea how to signal no and let's say she's agreeable and neurotic
01:35:08.720
with a bit of a history of abuse and the next thing she knows she finds herself on the couch you know
01:35:14.420
three quarters undressed and then the question is well is that rape and well then that's the question
01:35:21.360
that's when the police come in and the lawyers come in and you know you spend the next three years
01:35:25.280
trying to figure out whether or not that's rape but it's a so so my point with all that is that
01:35:32.380
it's an open question how much protection women need from the males around them and then it's an open
01:35:38.680
question exactly how to construe the crime of irresponsible access to a young woman woman from
01:35:47.220
a psychological and legal and social perspective like maybe it's not just maybe it's not just a crime
01:35:52.640
against the woman you know maybe it's a crime against the broader community and i don't like
01:35:57.520
i it's not like i'm saying i know how to adjudicate that because i don't but it's hard to get all the
01:36:05.020
necessary barriers in place and if that wasn't true we wouldn't have this huge debate about consent on
01:36:10.600
campuses um i have a slightly um unusual view of the relationship between christianity and feminism
01:36:19.120
in general um feminists modern feminists set themselves up in opposition to christianity
01:36:25.940
particularly on the issue of abortion the handmaid's tale kind of neo-puritan outfit being
01:36:31.620
the the the uniform now of of american feminists and so on i am of the view though that actually
01:36:38.640
feminism is an outgrowth of christianity and that the fundamental idea in christianity which is so
01:36:45.220
different from other religious traditions that weakness is strength that the first shall be last
01:36:50.640
that there is something valuable about being small and vulnerable rather than something
01:36:55.680
um despicable about it i think that feminism completely relies on that idea which is by no
01:37:02.200
means shared by all cultures and certainly wasn't shared by the ancient roman culture that that
01:37:06.380
from which christianity sprung and so if you're operating in say an ancient roman culture which which
01:37:12.640
doesn't see women as inherently vulnerable which actually sees female um vulnerability as uh
01:37:20.780
something to be despised potentially and which sees prostituted slave women as entirely available for male
01:37:26.820
sexual consumption that cannot really conceptualize the idea of a slave woman having being able to be
01:37:32.480
sexually violated you know it's just not kind of within the moral system it's not it's not understandable
01:37:36.620
into that comes the christian idea of sexual equality at least at the spiritual level
01:37:43.120
and the idea therefore that actually even a woman who doesn't have male kin available to defend her
01:37:50.200
against sexual violation which of course a slave doesn't she is nevertheless worthy of that protection
01:37:55.800
it kind of socializes this may be the wrong word but it it shares that duty of protection
01:38:01.700
among the community and among women i think that's basically what feminism is
01:38:07.200
and says that actually we should we should be bestowing on these friendless women
01:38:12.560
the same protection that a woman with high connected male kin has it's a very difficult system to enforce
01:38:19.420
to some extent we we try and use police criminal justice system whatever to do that job it's a hard job to do
01:38:24.420
but that is basically the modern project and i think it is born out of christian morality
01:38:27.780
right right well yeah yeah i mean i think i think that's right is that what what you're attempting
01:38:33.520
to do is to replicate the protection that a very well constituted family and community system would have
01:38:41.740
for a woman who's highly functioning you're trying to replicate that in abstraction in the entire social
01:38:48.440
structure and so that's why you have a legal structure that says well women have the right to bodily
01:38:53.000
integrity you're really trying to replace that protective structure with the force of law
01:38:58.760
yeah and i think that's an entirely laudable exercise the question that we have to wrestle with
01:39:03.740
is the question that you brought up at the end of that which is that if a woman is unfortunate enough
01:39:08.640
not to have you know let's say close male associates brothers friends fathers available to her
01:39:18.460
to what degree is it even possible for the more abstract state and the body of laws to replace
01:39:25.020
that might be a goal but it's very difficult to realize in practical terms is there anything else
01:39:32.460
that that's rattling around in the back of your mind that you think might be worth making a case for
01:39:39.300
at the moment i suppose that the um if there's one unifying idea um within the book it's probably
01:39:48.780
summed up in the um in the epilogue which i called listen to your mother i didn't crucially call it
01:39:53.940
obey your mother i called it listen to your mother i you know give your mother the opportunity to
01:39:58.040
present her view of things because i think that basically everything that's in the book actually is
01:40:03.640
incredibly obvious and ought to be incredibly obvious and it only isn't because we we live in a
01:40:09.540
very strange time which has constructed some very strange ideas about sexual politics and actually
01:40:15.220
in order to i think to navigate these waters effectively simply listening to women who've lived
01:40:21.020
it already and who have your best interests at heart if there's anyone in the world who is likely
01:40:25.680
to have your best interests at heart it is probably your mother simply listening to that woman
01:40:31.060
is really the only piece of advice that ought to be needed um because all of this is really just
01:40:39.860
about rediscovering some of the i would say eternal truths about men and women which we've
01:40:47.240
well i'm kind of i'm kind of hoping that um the women that you describe as post maidens so let's say
01:40:54.400
mothers and matriarchs could seize the reins on the social media front
01:41:00.160
and start educating young women who are both motherless and fatherless in the most fundamental
01:41:06.020
sense about some of these truths you know my wife has been tammy has been starting to do that with
01:41:10.700
her podcast inquiring into the nature of the divine feminine let's say and speaking to people like
01:41:16.820
janice fiamengo who's a real scholar of bitter and resentful feminism let's say but also trying to have
01:41:24.040
an intelligent discussion among older women who have a bit of wisdom often hard won about what a viable
01:41:32.200
long-term life path might look like like you sketched it out a bit you know this transition
01:41:37.320
in terms of narrative role let's say from maiden to mother to matriarch but that's you know that's a
01:41:45.000
very vague this is not a criticism but a three-word description is very vague and it isn't obvious at all
01:41:51.880
that our culture is good at providing an image of like what does it mean to be a mother in the highest
01:41:59.520
sense and it's really complicated you know because one of the problems a lot of my female clients had
01:42:04.860
was they were very productive economically and very brilliant and it's clearly the case that cultures get
01:42:11.060
much richer and children are much more well educated if women have access to educational resources
01:42:18.120
and if society can tap into their broad economic productivity that seems like a net good right but
01:42:25.780
then it puts women in the uncomfortable situation of well how do you devote enough attention to your
01:42:30.740
husband and your children probably in the reverse order and how do you handle your career and that
01:42:38.120
needs a lot of discussion the answer seems to be that most of the women that i've seen who've had
01:42:43.600
viable lives is that they don't make career advancement their number one goal and one of the
01:42:50.100
things you see emerging as a consequence of that is that women are pretty likely to start small
01:42:54.660
businesses but they generally do them part-time and they're generally not as hyper successful as a
01:43:00.820
minority of men but the reason they're doing that is because they're trying to balance marriage and
01:43:06.200
children with economic productivity and that's that's challenging and presents lots of opportunity
01:43:14.120
but it's not straightforward to conceptualize and women have only been able to do that in some real
01:43:20.180
sense for about 60 years right since we had reliable birth control so it's not surprising that there has
01:43:25.920
to be a discussion and then so that's on the mother front and then on the matriarch front well i think the
01:43:30.520
problem's even worse is like well what's it like to be a grandmother who's had a life you know a family
01:43:37.240
a relationship a career who's been productive at that who's now entering into the you know final third
01:43:44.780
of life let's say what does that look like if it's rich and fulfilling in terms of social role and and
01:43:53.020
personal relationship and sexual behavior and like there's an absolute dearth of conversation on those
01:44:00.360
fronts and you know you're obviously spearheading uh what the rectification of that in some real
01:44:08.580
sense but it would be lovely to see a lot more of that anyways people who are listening louise perry's
01:44:15.080
book is the case against the sexual revolution uh very you know punchy title and one of the things louise
01:44:22.140
said today that was interesting is that her books actually uh being met with a lot of positive responses
01:44:28.680
you know and so that's it's pretty interesting you know i feel the tide is turning in many ways this
01:44:35.160
might be a cardinal pivoting year 2023 because a lot of these things you say your books about the
01:44:41.160
painfully obvious in some sense it's like well you know society is pretty unstable when the painfully
01:44:46.100
obvious is now both debatable and even objected to but your book is definitely shot in the opposite
01:44:55.000
direction so thank you very much for talking to me today thank you so much and uh to all of you bet
01:45:01.720
you bet and uh hopefully we can meet when i come to the uk that would be good that'd be fantastic and
01:45:06.960
uh to all those who are listening and watching thank you very much for your time and attention
01:45:11.140
to the daily wire plus crew for facilitating this and the camera people who are here in austin texas is
01:45:17.400
where i am today thank you for helping us do this and uh and well we'll we'll continue this conversation
01:45:25.480
on the daily wire plus platform thanks again louise hello everyone i would encourage you to continue
01:45:32.920
listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com