Kim Kardashian and one of the world s top fashion brands are facing new backlash today over an ad campaign that features young children on beds holding teddy bears wearing S&M style harnesses and thong underwear. The outrage from parents nationwide is only continuing to grow, and one mom, who we recently spoke to on this show, is refusing to allow this controversy to be swept under the rug.
00:00:57.140Did the sexual revolution help or hurt women to this day?
00:01:01.500She'll join us just a bit later in the show, but we begin with this.
00:01:05.220Kim Kardashian and one of the world's top fashion brands facing new backlash today over an ad campaign
00:01:12.120that features young children on beds holding teddy bears wearing S&M-style harnesses, chokers, and thong underwear.
00:01:23.080The outrage from parents nationwide is only continuing to grow.
00:01:28.020And one mom, who we recently spoke to on this show, is refusing to allow this controversy to be swept under the rug and for really good reason.
00:01:38.440Joining me now, the former Miss California 2009, Carrie Prejean Bowler.
00:01:43.120Carrie, thanks for coming back on the show.
00:02:37.940And I want to know, where is the outrage by the left?
00:02:40.880All the people who posted the Black Square during Black Lives Matter and the George Floyd protests, they were quick to post and denounce the, you know, Black Lives Matter, all that.
00:02:50.900But now, all of a sudden, celebrities and elitists are completely silent on this.
00:04:28.520And I'll get to what you've been doing and good on you because it's working.
00:04:31.300But the thing is, this is what they're doing is they're sexualizing little children and in the context of BDSM of, you know, what exactly does that stand for?
00:04:44.740But it's it's basically rough dominatrix, submissive type sex relations, which are inappropriate for children to be featured in in any way, shape or form.
00:05:17.440Somebody puts a bondage teddy bear in my four year old's picture while she's around empty cocktail glasses and grownups in a sexualized set.
00:05:28.520And we are running for the hills out of that photo shoot.
00:06:50.040There's plenty of adult women who would be happy to be featured in a Balenciaga campaign, including the BDSM imagery.
00:06:56.720You don't put a four year old in front of a camera like this.
00:06:59.540So there's a reason why it's been outlawed explicit photos of children.
00:07:04.900And what happened in the Supreme Court jurisprudence was originally the Supreme Court said you can't outlaw ever like even discussions about child sexual abuse photos.
00:07:14.880There's certain things that the law cannot ban because of the First Amendment.
00:07:18.960And then Congress tried to pass a law saying, OK, OK, I guess we failed to do it.
00:07:24.140But now we're going to try to do it properly.
00:07:25.920And that went back up to the Supreme Court.
00:07:27.360So there's been a long line of legal fighting over what how far can these pedophiles go and their discussions.
00:07:33.240And this and one of these cases gets featured by Balenciaga in its ad campaign on the heels of the little girls with the BDSM stuff.
00:08:03.000When people don't stand up and fight back against this, we are seeing now the most despicable act, sexual, sexualizing our kids is now OK.
00:08:12.540What crazy world, sick, demonic world are we living in?
00:08:17.640And they also some several photographs in their campaign include a copy of this book, Fire from the Sun, which is a collection of portraits of naked toddlers with with sinister overtones.
00:08:32.160And some of the children look castrated in the photo.
00:09:34.640It's not good enough for Kim Kardashian, who refuses to disassociate with the brand.
00:09:37.860Even though she's a billionaire, she's a disgusting, shameful billionaire because the money is worth more than her morals and the protection of these children to her.
00:19:58.760She was introduced to the current creative director, with whom the responsibility does ultimately lie, in my view, Dema Vasalia, by her ex Kanye West, along with the couple's daughters, who also like to sport this brand.
00:20:14.940And they were recently spotted, the children carrying four figure bags from Balenciaga.
00:20:33.020First, she comes out with a statement on Sunday saying, well, I've been quiet for the past few days, not because I haven't been shocked and outraged by the campaigns, but I wanted the opportunity to speak to their team to understand for myself how this could have happened.
00:21:27.940Then she says, as for my future with Balenciaga, I'm currently reevaluating my relationship, basing it off their willingness to accept accountability for something that should never happen to begin with.
00:22:44.280Then she invented selfie culture by manipulating herself in gross and distorted and obviously fake ways, then denied it to a generation of little girls who felt less than because they thought this is a beauty standard because she's in the beauty business.
00:22:58.900And yet, unlike I will give kudos to Bethany Frankel, who has been open about talking about the things that she's had done or would like to have done because she says I'm in the beauty business.
00:23:07.280And I think I owe it to my audience, to be honest, exactly the opposite of the Kardashians.
00:23:11.440The country's made her a billionaire and she can't be bothered to do the right thing when the circumstances are staring her dead in the face.
00:23:50.020OK, when we come back, we've got the perfect next guest on this issue.
00:23:53.380Author Louise Perry has been writing about the backlash, the downsides to this sexual revolution that we were all supposed to celebrate and be liberated as a result of.
00:24:03.760She's very critical of the whole BDSM thing when it comes to women and what it actually does, as opposed to what books like Fifty Shades will tell you it does.
00:24:11.440And we're going to get into all of it when Louise Perry comes on the show in two minutes.
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00:25:16.740So I know that you saw the first segment and have been following what's going on with Balenciaga.
00:25:22.200First, just to kick it off, since you are, I don't want to say you're an expert in this, but since you've just written the book on the matter, what exactly does BDSM stand for?
00:25:29.760I know it's like bondage and discipline, but what does it stand for?
00:25:33.920Bondage, domination or discipline and sadomasochism.
00:25:37.760Although I kind of prefer to just call it sadomasochism, which is the slightly more old-fashioned term, but I think actually tells you what it is in the way that the acronym disguises it.
00:25:53.560I have a chapter on it in my book, the extent to which it has just gone from being a really niche, initially really an element of gay male subculture, and then it moves towards straight sexual culture.
00:26:05.240And then with online porn at the turn of the century, it just suddenly becomes incredibly mainstream to the extent now that things like strangulation porn is now on the front page of every porn site in the world in a way that it never used to be.
00:26:21.520So, yeah, so you can see that's where Balenciaga are getting their inspiration.
00:26:26.600Just to kick it off, you know, take a step back because we played some of the old ad campaigns, not old, I mean, with the past couple of years,
00:26:33.200ad campaigns where things are getting darker and darker and they do look very sort of bondage.
00:26:38.840They look straight out of that BDSM type of sexual promotion.
00:26:43.920Very unattractive looking people, looking dark, evil, depressed, angry, prone to they look like they've either been subjected to violence or are prone to violence.
00:27:06.300And now they've graduated full on to let's put the four year old little girls on a couch around leashes and collars and cocktail glasses,
00:27:16.100holding these little bears with what are clearly, you know, leather bondage, inappropriate outfits on them with sad, confused little faces.
00:27:25.720Yeah, I mean, they're trying to shock us, right?
00:27:28.640This is the this is the idea that if they can shock us enough and it will will pay attention, it will be good for the brand.
00:27:33.960I think it's I think it's almost certainly backfiring.
00:27:36.740I think they've definitely pushed it too far.
00:27:38.500But I think one of the features of this new political culture, post-sexual revolution, where everything is permitted, where you can be as hypersexual as you like, as hyper violent as you like, where taboo breaking is seen as a good thing, is actually, you know, a positive revolutionary act.
00:27:58.760Of course, businesses are going to go in that direction because it attracts it attracts eyeballs, even if it's attracting negative attention, they might think that that's worth running the risk.
00:28:07.460And there isn't any more the the moral limits that they used to be.
00:28:13.940And so the only direction that it makes sense to go in for many businesses is more shocking, more extreme in the hope of just driving more and more profits and with no interest in what that does to our to our culture more generally.
00:28:28.660Mm hmm. And now we're seeing it's so extreme.
00:28:32.640We're seeing an actual movement to redefine pedophilia as just a bunch of, quote, minor attracted people.
00:28:41.360They're just, quote, minor dash attracted trying to normalize this as though that's that's another option available to you on the spectrum of sexual choices, as opposed to the most pernicious and evil thing.
00:28:55.400Short of murder one can do to a child.
00:28:57.660Yeah, I mean, one of the things that's kind of been memory hold is the fact that the sexual revolutionaries tried this already in the 1970s.
00:29:05.540There was an amazing degree of acceptance of pedophilia from from theorists like Michel Foucault, who is now taught in every university syllabus across the world.
00:29:16.080Pretty much these incredibly influential theorists who took basically the central principles of the sexual revolutionary spirit, the idea that all of the old bourgeois Christian norms needed to be done away with.
00:29:32.340That we were all being oppressed by these restrictive sexual limits and therefore that taboo breaking was the name of the game.
00:29:41.660They took that principle and they ran with it all the way to the end of the road.
00:29:45.580And that road leads in the end to sexualizing children.
00:29:49.100I think it's impossible to set up a sexual culture which is based on being revolutionary, which is based on boundary breaking and all of this stuff in the name of anti-oppression and not have it lead in that direction inevitably.
00:30:03.940And it's why we've kind of seen this cycle since the sexual revolution, since those ideas entered the mainstream, where you have an amazing degree of permissiveness, say in the 70s, and I think now, and then you have a backlash because people say, actually, no, you can't.
00:30:20.380This taboo is one that you just cannot break.
00:30:24.140But they keep pushing and they keep pushing and, you know, that they are they're right in the end about the fact that these ideas do lead to those conclusions, which is why I argue in the book that I think the ideas are wrong.
00:30:39.080Well, I feel like this is a great example of it's great proof of your whole theory, because the fact that this has been mainstreamed on a, you know, previously stellar brand brand, you know, by a previously stellar brand.
00:30:52.140And clearly okayed by multiple executives at the top levels of the company, it would have to be, not to mention the set designer and even the photographer now is trying to say, oh, you know, I had no responsibility.
00:31:04.960All I did was light the set and take the pictures.
00:31:14.840I don't photograph little four year olds holding BDSM dolls in the midst of a grown up situation or in the midst of another photo shoot that celebrates a child pornography ruling and or also features a book by somebody who has images of what appear to be castrated children.
00:31:47.940And I mean, that goes, I think, for all sorts of extreme sexual imagery that you'll now see.
00:31:56.260I set myself a project of walking down my local high street, which is completely normal high street, and taking note of all of the super sexual imagery that I saw in shop windows, on buses, on posters, on the streetscape or whatever.
00:32:08.860And I realised in doing it that it's everywhere, like to the point that you actually start almost zoning it out because it becomes so normal.
00:32:19.660I don't know if you remember back in the 1990s when the Wonder Bra ad came out with Eva Herzogovina, where she was wearing a black push-up bra.
00:32:29.180And at the time it was considered to be so boundary breaking, and it was apparently causing men to crash their cars because they were so distracted when they were driving.
00:32:36.980And now I look at them, like, that's tame.
00:32:40.360You could use that to, you know, supermarkets or whatever have women in that degree of undress in advertising now.
00:32:46.620It's the, those kind of limits are like a distant spot in the background now, which is why, of course, you've got the likes of Balenciaga who are pushing more and more and more and more.
00:32:57.200Because I think brands have learned that there's, there's, there's normally little to stop them, except, of course, and this is what, of course, your last guest was talking about, except mums.
00:33:06.380I actually think that we are entering a really interesting period in, in feminism right now.
00:33:11.240And I'm using feminism in a very broad kind of way, just to mean, like advocating on behalf of women, whatever, whatever that means politically.
00:33:19.900I think we're entering a really interesting phase where we have so many more mothers involved in campaigning, because it used to be that the nature of having little children is that you can't really go, you know, you can't go to public meetings, you can't go to protests, you can't really participate in public life in the way that you can if you don't have little children.
00:33:40.600But with the internet, you can be breastfeeding with one hand and on your smartphone, you know, tweeting at your congressman or whatever it is with the other hand.
00:33:49.960And so I think we have this influx of women entering online political discussion and online campaigning.
00:33:57.860And they are exactly the sort of people, the mothers of young children who look at this kind of Balenciaga content and say, absolutely not, absolutely not.
00:34:05.880So I think that maybe there's going to be more of a reckoning for this sort of stuff soon.
00:34:09.120Hmm. I hope you're right. I mean, this one's so clear cut. You don't you just stay away from children, stay the hell away from children.
00:34:15.200Anybody who would have the inclination to go to children for anything like this is sick himself.
00:34:19.760I mean, that person needs to be fired just for having the idea. Truly, this is sick.
00:34:22.900Like there's something wrong with this person. No normal person would conjure this up as art or a means of selling handbags.
00:34:30.860Good God. So let's take it up to the adult level, because that's sort of where you began the book and sort of took a look back.
00:34:38.140At the sexual revolution that, you know, my mother lived through, though, not really, because she was married and kind of tame, but she was alive for I should say.
00:34:49.760And that was supposed to liberate us all was supposed to put us on equal footing with men.
00:34:54.840Now we could own our own sexuality. Now women didn't have to feel ashamed about sex anymore.
00:34:59.260Women could have as many sexual partners as they wanted, thanks to birth control and didn't have to feel bad about themselves.
00:35:07.220And yet and yet it wouldn't work out that way.
00:35:12.840Now we've had some 50 years to to look at, to judge how the experiment has gone.
00:35:21.160That it hasn't gone very well. Yeah. So that's the promise. Right.
00:35:25.500That's the and that's the popular narrative, particularly on the left, that the whole the whole project, the sexual revolution, it was done by and for women.
00:35:34.260And it was all about liberating us from the patriarchal tyranny of the past.
00:35:41.360There's I mean, there is a little bit of truth to that.
00:35:43.520I think that it's a really good thing now that we're able to control our reproduction, that women don't necessarily have to spend their whole married lives pregnant or breastfeeding.
00:35:53.360And, you know, the punishing effects on the body are really real, that kind of experience.
00:35:59.300So the fact that women can now limit family size is clearly really good.
00:36:03.700But also, I think I mean, I start from what is a controversial premise, even though it shouldn't be, which is that men and women are really fundamentally different in really important ways.
00:36:14.540And some of those differences are physical.
00:36:17.000There's a sexual asymmetry that is just not going away.
00:36:20.020There is only one sex who gets pregnant and that sex also happens to be a lot smaller, a lot less physically strong than the other, which means that in any heterosexual encounter, women are going to be at a disadvantage.
00:36:33.860The other even more controversial premise that I start from is that there are also psychological differences between men and women and their average psychological differences.
00:36:43.000There are there are there are there are outliers in every direction, but they are also extreme, particularly on some facets.
00:36:51.640So on sexuality, for instance, it shouldn't need saying.
00:36:56.300I think that anyone who sort of lived in the world will have observed this, but there is plenty of data showing this.
00:37:03.340So men are on average more interested in having casual sex than are women and men are also more interested in watching porn and men are also more interested in buying sex and prostitution.
00:37:15.740And basically all of the things that have suddenly become much more socially acceptable post-sexual revolution are things that men are much more likely to want to do than are women.
00:37:25.180And they're things that also come at an expense to women.
00:37:29.660You know, if men are seeking out casual sex or buying sex or buying porn or whatever, they need women to participate in that.
00:37:36.640They need women to be providing that casual sex or providing that that that porn material, whatever it is.
00:37:42.660And I think that the the liberal feminist narrative, which says that this is all a chance for women to sort of revel in their sexual freedom and to to have sex like a man.
00:37:52.200And that's the phrase that's used in Sex and the City in the first episode.
00:37:54.920It's the phrase that I run with in the book.
00:37:57.100It's a good phrase because that is basically what's being described.
00:38:00.000The whole essence of the sexual revolution is about encouraging women to to be more like men in every way, including to have sex like men, to try and imitate male sexuality, to be more casual, to be more emotionless in sexual attachments and so on.
00:38:15.980And, you know, for a few women, that works fine, although there's always the risk that, you know, any kind of casual sexual encounter is always going to be much more risky for the woman than it is for the man because of the risk of violence, because of the risk of pregnancy.
00:38:30.340But some women do really want to do it.
00:38:35.360What's much more common is for women to actually not really be very into casual sex, to do it because they feel like they are obliged, to do it in the hope that it will turn into a real relationship down the track.
00:38:49.200And this is where I think our sexual culture is really misserving women and young women in particular, because there is this feeling that it's not as though having sex like a man is one choice out of many that's now available to them.
00:39:01.400It's that having sex like a man is aspirational, is compulsory even.
00:39:06.040And I think actually, if you look at it in those terms, the only people who've really benefited from the sexual revolution are a minority of men who are really interested in sexual variety and are attractive enough to get it.
00:39:17.680I mean, in reality, most men are actually not reveling in any sexual freedom because most men aren't attractive enough to be attracting loads of partners.
00:39:26.600You've got this small number of men at the very tippy top who are doing really well.
00:39:31.160This reminds me of a discussion I had with Stephen Crowder.
00:39:33.540The rest of them are actually pretty miserable.
00:40:05.600It's a it's a small few on the male side that are able to sort of run around and have as much sex as they want to.
00:40:12.480So women have a lot more opportunity because just men tend to want sex more than women want to have it.
00:40:18.580So it's like if you're somebody who wants to give it, you'll have plenty of opportunity as a woman, even if you're not at the peak, peak, peak of the attractiveness scale.
00:40:25.880But you have an interesting line in your book, which I remember Bridget Phetasy cited in her amazing piece about your book.
00:40:31.540And she's a friend and I love her. And she came on the show.
00:40:33.860We talked all about it. But the line said something effective.
00:40:37.680Women fail to recognize too often that being desired is not the same thing as being held in high esteem.
00:40:44.060And so many women show up at the guy's house after swiping whatever on Tinder and feel like this is going to be an answer for them.
00:40:54.960This is going to make them feel hot or in control or strong by having meaningless casual sex with some hot guy or some rich guy or whatever guy.
00:41:04.780And it's not until maybe the next morning, maybe a few years later, maybe once they're married, maybe once they just had a baby like Bridget did, that they realize that's exactly the opposite of what happened that night.
00:41:17.900Yeah, completely. I mean, one of the things that I think one of the ways in which women are really misserved by us not being honest about the differences between male and female sexuality,
00:41:28.020there is so much effort put into denying those differences, trying to erase those differences, trying to pretend that none of this is biological.
00:41:39.900It's all just negative stereotypes that we absorb from the culture.
00:41:43.580No, I think that this is try as we might. I think that we do eventually sort of hit the biological buffers when we try and erase sex differences.
00:41:54.400And there is an extremely logical reason why male and female sexuality would have evolved to be really different.
00:42:02.440The costs to women of pregnancy are really high. We're talking, you know, particularly in the ancestral environment where you definitely don't have contraception.
00:42:13.160You don't have access to safe abortion. You don't have a welfare state. Right.
00:42:17.620So, and, and, and pregnancy and labor are really dangerous. So you're talking about nine months of labor, painful, dangerous childbirth,
00:42:25.780and then many, many years of infant care. If you're going to raise this, raise this child's adulthood, those costs are vast.
00:42:31.780It means that having sex is one of the most consequential decisions a woman can make in her entire life. Right.
00:42:37.320Whereas for men in theory, they can reproduce every time they orgasm, they can flip from woman to woman.
00:42:44.480You know, most men don't do that because that's actually not sort of the best evolutionary strategy.
00:42:49.360It actually makes sense normally for men to invest in one wife and to, and to maximize the attention he gives to, to, to his family, his children.
00:42:58.240But some men will, might choose the short-term mode where they're trying to just kind of mate with as many women as possible.
00:43:05.820They, you know, they can do that. There is, there's a kind of psychological mode that men can switch into where they can have that, that, that emotion of sex.
00:43:12.740And it doesn't mean anything, but that's just not how women are built with maybe a few very unusual exceptions.
00:43:19.000We're just not built that way. And we can try. I mean, this is the nature of being a human being compared with other animals.
00:43:24.720We, we have our animal instincts. There are ways in which we are evolved that, you know, are not going away, but we also have, we're really intelligent.
00:43:34.140There are ways in which we can try and override those instincts and try and redirect, redirect our behavior.
00:43:42.960And so that's, I mean, that's what Bridget writes about in her, in her amazing essay, right?
00:43:46.800That the years that she spent trying to, trying to have sex like a man, trying to fulfill this aspirational model, seeing it as a way of being free.
00:43:55.200And resisting all of the sort of old stereotypes and stuff. And it just made her miserable.
00:44:00.120And it was only years later that she really like fully acknowledged to herself how miserable it had made her.
00:44:06.940I am, I dedicated my book to, so this is basically the first line when you open it to the women who learned it the hard way.
00:44:15.480And Bridget said that when she first read that, she just burst into tears because she was like, that's me.
00:44:45.600Like I, I always knew I was never going to do that.
00:44:48.060I always, it's not that I didn't have any premarital sex.
00:44:51.320It's that I was extremely selective and I just always knew I was never going to be providing that to anybody who didn't deserve it.
00:44:59.140And, uh, that I would never have sex with somebody that, that didn't respect me or that I didn't feel, I knew I wouldn't feel good about after it was over.
00:45:07.520You know, that I wasn't looking for a meaningless pleasure.
00:45:09.840You can have a meaningless pleasure with, in a glass of wine, you know, with, without any of those very sticky attachments, so to speak.
00:45:17.400Um, so I kind of just knew that at a, at a very young age and that was a gift.
00:45:29.400You know, strong ego for the, for the daughters and understanding who they are and what their sense of self-worth is and praising them for their intellect and not in empty ways.
00:45:39.320No, actually give them challenges that they can meet and then praise them for their accomplishments that speak to their smarts, not just empty words.
00:45:45.920Anyway, there, I think there's a whole different way of approaching getting your daughter to be at a place where she just knows she's not going to do that.
00:45:52.660But what we're doing right now is exactly the opposite.
00:46:15.660I, I am constantly, I'm the mother of a toddler.
00:46:19.720So I'm not yet facing this, like for real, not family yet, but just speaking to other parents and looking around at what's sort of considered normal among liberal Londoners, which is our social circle, basically.
00:46:32.460So, um, the permissiveness is amazing to me.
00:46:39.520They, I mean, this idea that comes out of the 1960s, that, that social guardrails are restrictive, that we shouldn't have default templates, that, that people should be allowed to make their own choices.
00:46:52.320You know, you can, you, you can, you can run with that up to a point.
00:46:56.400I do think that the, the completely removing social guardrails is a mistake.
00:46:59.720I think, honestly, that most people do happiest when they follow the sort of regular templates.
00:47:05.900Um, but with, to extend that to children is madness to think that children can be deciding, you know, absolutely everything about even down to deciding whether or not they're boys or girls from, from infancy is absurd.
00:47:22.720And the idea actually that parents should be, should be setting boundaries and should be telling children, you know, these most basic facts that, that, you know, there are hard limits.
00:47:33.100There are ways in which our biology does, I'm afraid, determine our lives.
00:47:36.740This phrase that was popular in the second wave, biology isn't destiny.
00:47:40.200It's not destiny, but it absolutely sets limits for what real life can be.
00:47:47.640And that's just, that's just the truth.
00:47:49.960And we can learn a lot from people who have had to deal with its reality, uh, for decades and decades and the lessons that they learned the hard way, right?
00:47:57.540It's like that this wisdom is available to us.
00:47:59.520If only we'll be honest about the lessons, as opposed to saying, oh, there's a bunch of Neanderthals who made terrible choices.
00:48:05.760And now you're going to feel really happy if you make the choices I want for you.
00:48:24.120Let's start back at the beginning of the book because you open it in, I think a great way, which I know I will be citing again in the future.
00:48:31.580As soon as I read it, I was like, oh my God, this, this is everything.
00:48:34.160This speaks to me on so many different levels.
00:48:36.420And it is the arc of the sexual revolution.
00:48:40.020When you put someone like Marilyn Monroe through it, it was, you know, a little before her time, but she was one of the leaders of it.
00:49:02.280And for you, this is the perfect metaphor for the way they live their lives with respect to each other and with respect to the opposite sex in general.
00:49:10.620So Hefner and Monroe were actually born, um, in exactly the same year and they spent most of their lives in LA and they're both considered to being the, um, the great icons of the sexual revolution, right?
00:49:24.020But they also had incredibly different experiences of the sexual revolution in that Hefner lived to grow old.
00:49:32.500And as you say, he bought the, the crypt next to Monroe's in his final act of creepiness.
00:49:38.580Uh, he said that, um, I, I can't pass up the chance to spend eternity next to Marilyn or some words to that effect, but, um, they never actually met at any point, but, but Hefner did kind of owe the success of Playboy to Monroe because she was both the first cover star and also the first naked centerfold because he bought images, naked images that she had had taken many years before.
00:50:04.060When she was a much younger woman and desperately in need of the money, she had, um, she'd agreed to do a naked photo shoot and tried her very best to, to, to make it anonymous and to, she, she signed the release with a fake name and so on.
00:50:17.520But Hefner found out about the photos, bought them from the photographer, didn't pay Monroe a cent, didn't ask her consent and printed them anyway.
00:50:26.800And Playboy was a huge success from the very beginning.
00:50:29.240And she said later that she had to go and buy a copy herself.
00:50:33.220So, you know, that when Hefner died, he was fated by some eulogists as being this kind of surprise feminist icon and so on, because Playboy was always pushing for, um, the greater availability of contraception and decriminalization of abortion, uh, long before many other places were doing so.
00:50:54.640So, but, uh, you know, I, I, you kind of got to laugh in a dark way because of course Hefner would want contraception and abortion to be made available to women because all that he was interested in was having sex with as many beautiful young women as possible.
00:51:07.980I mean, right up until his final days, he had a harem of blonde 20-somethings around him at all time, you know, what he was interested in and what other, I would say, um, men who were sort of supporters of the sexual revolution, what they wanted all along was just to make women more sexually available to them.
00:51:25.380Um, and they succeeded in that, whereas Monroe, she, as we all know, died young and suffered from all sorts of mental health issues, substance abuse issues.
00:51:34.380She suffered from domestic violence, from child abuse, you know, the recent biopic, I think really threw into sharp relief exactly how painful her life was at many points and, and she's not alone.
00:51:46.360There are a lot of women who are considered to be, um, sex icons of that period and later, including porn stars who, you know, many of them have become very, very famous, who've experienced exactly the same kind of mental health issues, exactly the same kind of life's cut short.
00:52:04.380I mean, the suicide rate in the porn industry is absolutely amazing because this very often is what, is what that kind of sex symbol status does to women.
00:52:14.800It, it destroys them in a way that it doesn't destroy the likes of Hefner.
00:52:21.420Even, even you, in the case of Monroe and so many other women, they gravitate toward this status for dark reasons in many cases to begin with.
00:52:32.440You mentioned Marilyn's, uh, abuse as a child.
00:52:36.960It's, it's no accident that she wound up becoming the world's greatest sex symbol because this was something that was taught to her from a very young age as an appropriate lane for her to be in, as maybe even the only lane in which she would be recognized and validated and in which she might succeed.
00:52:52.380So, it's almost, I don't, I don't mean to sound harsher on our fellow women than, than this, than I want to be, but it's almost like you have to be a little suspicious when somebody is living in the lane of sexual icon.
00:53:07.960Because you have to ask yourself, what made them gravitate toward that?
00:53:12.240I mean, honestly, to, to, to bring it back to my first discussion, I talked about how Kim Kardashian, she was an adult, but her mother put out her sex tape.
00:53:19.680That is what the, that is what her sex partner on that tape alleges, that he cut a deal with the mother.
00:53:24.620And, and that it was a willing proposition to set, to put out this very graphic sex tape of her daughter.
00:53:30.300And now you have her refusing to stand up for these little girls who are being featured in these ads.
00:53:35.260It's just, I don't know, I'm seeing patterns and it does lead you to question, how did this person get in this role to begin with?
00:53:46.980I mean, Kim Kardashian is so mysterious in this regard, isn't she?
00:53:49.920Because she's on the one hand, she's the most overexposed woman in the world.
00:53:53.820But also, we actually have so little insight into why she does all of this stuff, you know, where, what is the psychological drive behind being famous primarily for your sex tape and your gorgeous body.
00:54:16.360I share this skepticism of, of women who, um, who choose to commodify their sexuality in some way.
00:54:24.000I think like 99 times out of a hundred, you end up finding out at some point that there's some sexual abuse and mental health issues, you know, some kind of really dark drive towards doing that.
00:54:36.200It's not to say that that's always the case, but it's, it's rare to find exceptions.
00:54:42.620And you mentioned, um, some of these porn stars, you write about this in the book, um, on how almost invariably, if you interview one of these women while they're in the midst of the, their stardom, they will defend the porn industry and talk about being liberated and how they are making a lot of money.
00:55:01.640And they're there by choice and don't feel sorry for them.
00:55:06.620The industry is not exploiting them and so on.
00:55:08.980And yet you actually take a deep dive into that and find that in case after case, some of the most famous adult film actresses we've seen have come out later with a very different message, which doesn't get covered anywhere near as much.
00:55:24.120They, they, they basically always travel in that direction.
00:55:26.820So when you're in the industry, you defend the industry, you talk about how you're doing it for your own sexual liberation, et cetera.
00:55:33.300And then after you leave the industry, that's when the story changes.
00:55:36.080Because actually I think sometimes you need that distance from what can be really, really traumatic experience in order to actually sit back and assess it and say, hang on.
00:55:44.940That actually caused me a lot of pain.
00:55:46.340And a really good example of this is Jenna Jameson, who's extraordinarily famous, successful porn actress in the 1990s and is now actually a campaigner against porn and in particular campaigner against MindGeek, which is the big umbrella organization that owns the most popular porn platforms in the world.
00:56:03.160Jenna actually did a, participated in a debate in the Oxford Union 20 odd years ago in defense of porn and, and spoke, you know, very persuasively on how porn was actually a great thing and she won her debate.
00:56:18.740And then I, I recently spoke at the Oxford Union on much of the same issue and stood in exactly the same place that Jenna, that Jenna stood.
00:56:28.360And I opened by saying, you know, this, this was the debate that was held 20 years ago.
00:56:32.580And I reckon Jenna Jameson would now be standing on the opposite side of this bench because she has completely changed her tune about porn industry as porn actresses almost always do if they live that long.
00:56:43.160Because as I was saying, the suicide rate, the substance abuse rate is absolutely amazing.
00:56:46.640Mm hmm. What, what about, I mean, I worry about porn because I have three kids, right?
00:56:52.700And they say that the average 12 year old boy has already been exposed to porn.
00:56:56.000At least I think it's well over 50% have, have more than likely been exposed to pornography by 12, by 12.
00:57:03.960They don't know what this is. That's dark. And it's not, I mean, forgive me for drawing lines like this, but back in my day, you know, in the seventies, maybe you saw some guy's playboy, right?
00:57:14.800And you saw a picture of a naked woman, or you read something naughty in a penthouse, not at all what these kids have available to them with just a phone, you know, just a phone.
00:57:25.260And ideally you've got the parental, all that stuff, but they can get around it.
00:57:28.760They have some friend who doesn't have it, or there's some device in the house that doesn't, whatever they're seeing it.
00:57:33.640And I know I've, I've read and I, we talked about how, like, one of the reasons it's so damaging is because it, these young boys who really get into it can start to think that that's what sex is.
00:57:43.380And when they have their first normal sexual relationship with a, with a real live girl in their school or college, they think that, you know, this is what sex is.
00:57:52.740And it's some dirty, weird, bizarre thing instead of this beautiful, somewhat tenuous in the beginning, you know, like explore, exploratory, beautiful, loving exchange.
00:58:04.800So, but I think it's more complex than that.
00:58:07.820Like there are, there are other dangers to exposing yourself to porn, having your child get exposed to porn.
00:58:46.580We've got these vast multi-billion dollar global corporations who are basically beaming the most sadistic content you can imagine into little computers that are in the pockets of children.
00:58:58.520And it frustrates me so much that anyone who talks about this, you're sort of treated as if you're being, you're being alarmist or prudish.
00:59:07.920This isn't, you know, we've had however many millennia of people, you know, having sex and working it out.
00:59:16.140It's not as if this is being anti-sex to say that we shouldn't have children watching hundreds or thousands of adults, video of adults having sex before they've even kissed a member of the opposite sex.
00:59:32.980It's extremely experimental, what's going on right now.
00:59:35.580And I mean, I'm personally really frustrated by how little governments have done to regulate these huge businesses and actually how people on the left who are supposed to have, you know, an opposition to big business and to be critical of capitalism.
00:59:53.560They're actually often the first to resist any kind of efforts to regulate this stuff and say, actually, you know, children really shouldn't be seeing this.
01:00:02.040The really extreme stuff really shouldn't be there.
01:00:03.960The problem is, I think, that the platforms make money by attracting viewers and particularly they make money from the most compulsive users.
01:00:13.820I mean, that tends to be also true of, say, the gambling industry or alcohol, smoking, drugs, all these things which are addictive.
01:00:21.040They tend to sell most of their product to the minority of users who use it really compulsively.
01:00:26.460So it's about 2% of men, you watch porn for more than seven hours a week, which is an enormous amount of time, right?
01:00:34.800And anyone who's doing that is going to have almost certainly going to have erectile dysfunction, is going to have really, really dysfunctional relationships, is basically not going to be capable of having normal sex, having normal sex relationships at all.
01:00:45.620And those men are the main people who are driving the industry, and one of the harms done to them, you know, I think that the harms done to porn stars is really extreme.
01:00:59.280But I actually think the consumers are harmed too, and I feel terrible for some of the men who get stuck in this addictive cycle.
01:01:06.180You know, I've heard from these men, I've had emails from them and so on, saying how much they actually hate this product, they hate being so hooked on it.
01:01:13.180But the way that it's designed is such that it really kind of taps into the most primal bits of your brain.
01:01:19.680And it is almost like being addicted to gambling or to drugs or something like that, and that it leaves you wanting more.
01:01:24.920And even more so, it kind of, you have to get an even more extreme stimulus in order to get the next hit, because you get acclimatized to the more vanilla content, and then you seek out more extreme content.
01:01:38.680And this is when the platforms come in with their algorithms, and they suggest the more extreme stuff.
01:01:43.180So they say, and what about this video?
01:01:46.520And one of the really disturbing things that we're hearing now from psychologists who are working with sex offenders is that while it used to be that the only, the kind of the profile of the sex offender who had been caught watching child porn in possession of child sexual abuse images,
01:02:04.180you know, more accurately, were men who were sort of very deep-seated pedophiles, like they were only interested in children, they had the kind of classic profile of the pedophilic offender.
01:02:16.460Whereas now what they're seeing more and more is men, sometimes really quite young men, who actually don't have that kind of profile, have not necessarily been interested sexually in children.
01:02:26.220What they, what's wrong with them is that they're addicted to porn, and they end up, initially they're watching normal porn, but probably for a very young age.
01:02:35.220And then very soon they get, they get used to that, and they seek out more extreme content.
01:02:39.660And so they, they end up watching sadomasochistic content, really kind of taboo-breaking content.
01:02:46.000And, you know, what's the most taboo-breaking content that is?
01:02:59.340That's what's really disturbing about it.
01:03:00.760Oh, so dark, but important to know about it for the people who just give your kid the phone and you just trust and you, you think you're okay.
01:03:08.700Cause you put parental controls on there.
01:03:10.280Your kid can figure out your parental controls.
01:03:12.360He's probably smarter than you are on there.
01:03:13.920You have to check, you have to be a spy.
01:03:16.080You know, the, the host who follows me here on Sirius is Dr. Laura.
01:03:20.420And she made her bones as a family and child psychologist, uh, growing up, you know, years and years.
01:03:25.540And, um, you know, she, she talks about how there's, there's, there's no child privacy when they're minors in your home, when they're living in your home, you're responsible for their welfare.
01:03:34.660And you don't need to broadcast it from the rooftops that you're spying on them, but you need to check your kid's history and figure out where he's been going online.
01:03:41.820Because this is not only because of this, but because of bullying, which has led to a lot of suicidality amongst teens.
01:03:48.120Sometimes you don't even know what's happening in the back end of Snapchat and so on.
01:03:55.540It's about being a parental, uh, role model who cares and prioritizes safety.
01:04:02.320Something you mentioned in the book is one of the biggest stories of the past couple of years when it comes to celebrities.
01:04:07.720And that is the actor, army hammer, army hammer, who correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the guy, he actually is of the family arm and hammer.
01:04:19.260That's why he wound up named army hammer.
01:04:21.080My team will tell me if I'm wrong, but anyway, he's got that connection.
01:04:23.900He's been a very successful actor in Hollywood and then his career completely imploded because he had the most unusual, weird me too situation that we've seen amongst any actors for a very long time.
01:04:36.300And I wonder if there's any clues there for regular women, because I think without the story having broken, 90% of women would have looked at army hammer and said, sure, good looking guy, Hollywood celebrity comes from this long line of, you know, well-off families.
01:04:51.700You know, what, what was army hammer's problem and what lessons are there for the rest of us in this?
01:05:05.380So what, so what army hammer was caught doing was, well, I, I think the lesson in the army hammer story is actually that there was so many clues for so many years that he had weird, aggressive sexual preferences.
01:05:21.420So he, he himself had spoken to interviewers about the fact that he liked choking women in bed.
01:05:30.440It's the, it's the word that that's used in the porn industry, but it's really strangulation because choking, you know, you choke on food, you're strangled externally by someone else.
01:05:37.760And it is suddenly the part of this incredibly voguish thing.
01:05:41.140I think almost entirely as a result of, of, of porn mainstreaming it.
01:05:44.980So he was speaking to interviewers about, about this years ago, that girlfriends had sort of, they've been whispering about him being kind of aggressive in bed in a way that was maybe, you know, made women uncomfortable, but also within the sort of sex positive ethical framework.
01:06:03.080You know, you can, you can have as sadistic as you like in your sexual tastes.
01:06:07.760You can, you can like, you know, it doesn't matter how weird it is.
01:06:12.180It doesn't matter how troubling it is.
01:06:13.960All that matters is that your partner is consenting.
01:06:17.160And he's this gorgeous, as you say, wealthy family, whatever, gorgeous Hollywood actor.
01:06:22.560He had no shortage of women who wanted to have sex relationships with them, with him and were willing to put up with whatever weird stuff he was requesting in bed.
01:06:30.580It was only later on that more and more of these women were starting to talk about how bad the relationship had been, leaving the relationships.
01:06:41.240And you had, I think it was like text exchanges that got shared showing that he was asking for really, really weird sexual stuff, including the, you know, the big headline thing was that he had a cannibal fetish.
01:06:51.300Not that he had actually killed and eaten anyone, but he had all these fantasies about cannibalism that he wanted the women to play along with and like really, really crazy stuff.
01:07:00.920Not sure how you can satisfy the desire in a partner.
01:07:06.840And the thing that was really kind of darkly funny about it is the way that this got reported.
01:07:11.580And I think it was Rolling Stone and some other places as well reported this all as like, there's nothing wrong with cannibalism per se.
01:07:18.180The problem is, the problem is with cannibalism without consent and that he was trying to sort of pressure women into participating in a fetish who didn't want to.
01:07:29.620Like, how, how many red flags do you need until we start saying, no, look, this guy just clearly has really, really aggressive, unpleasant, violent sexual fantasies.
01:07:42.780You know, you wouldn't recommend him as a, as a, as a husband to your daughter.
01:07:46.900This is absolutely, you know, this is bad news.
01:07:50.120But the problem is that I think we actually, the, the super tolerant sex positive thing, which is extremely fashionable among young women, I think it trains women out of their self-protective instincts.
01:08:01.860I think that actually we, you know, one of the blessings actually that women are born with is a, is a radar for, for sensing like guys who are weird sexually.
01:08:12.200I think that we, we have that built in.
01:08:15.140And the problem is that it can be overridden when we're worried about being polite, we're worried about being politically correct, whatever it is.
01:08:25.620And when you've got this ideology that says that actually anything goes, even cannibalism, as long as everyone's consenting, what you end up doing actually is telling young women who, who want to be nice, who want to be liked, who want to be with it, who want to be attractive to gorgeous Hollywood actors.
01:08:39.780Because that actually their instincts are wrong and they need to be overriding them.
01:08:43.120And I, and I want to, and I want to say, and I say explicitly in this book, no, your instincts are right.
01:08:47.420Actually, you know, the, the best way that you can like navigate a really dangerous, sometimes sexual marketplace and stay away from the bad guys is by, is by properly listening to your gut instinct.
01:08:59.120Because if you feel something's off, it's probably because it is.
01:09:16.800I knew you were pregnant when you were writing the book, but it's good advice.
01:09:20.100And, and one of the pieces of advice reminded me of Gavin DeBecker's gift of fear, which is you have an instinct, listen to it, listen to it.
01:09:29.060And when, when the circumstances around you are telling you, don't listen to it, blow it off, go with this guy.
01:09:48.580And then he has so many case studies in there where he talks about cases where women had, they'd felt that fear, but they'd overridden it because they wanted to be nice.
01:09:57.380And I think that so often that's what's going on with women.
01:10:00.060I mean, that I mentioned at the top about the ways in which there are psychological differences between men and women.
01:10:07.860And one of the ones that's most marked is a psychological trait that psychologists call agreeableness, which is basically in layman's terms, like niceness.
01:10:16.300Your, your, your desire to please other people, to put other people first.
01:10:20.180Women are much higher on average in agreeableness than our men.
01:10:23.260And it's probably because you have to be agreeable with your baby.
01:10:29.020You know, like just the nature of being a mother is that you have to put your children first.
01:10:35.280You have to be nice and patient when they're screaming at you and all of this kind of stuff.
01:10:39.360So it's, it's completely adaptive when it comes to looking after your children.
01:10:43.140The problem is that it can be taken advantage by, by other adults and particularly by predatory men who will, will push it as far as they possibly can in trying to encourage women to prioritize being nice and polite over obeying their instincts and listening to the gift of fear.
01:11:02.460Yeah. And yeah. And I think unfortunately that this whole political, um, ideology around, um, supposed sexual liberation actually really plays into the hands of the sexual predators.
01:11:15.120Yes. Like there's a bit, a bit in my book where I talk about, um, advice columns and a particular advice column I, I, I zoom in on, which is a woman who talks about how she, she's, she's interested in BDSM.
01:11:29.980She's been, I guess, watching BDSM porn and she's, she kind of wants to experiment and she's got out of a relationship.
01:11:35.840What should she do? And the advice column says, you know, first of all, great, like pursue every possible source of sexual freedom you can imagine.
01:11:44.440And second of all, what you've got to do is go onto, um, a kink dating app or dating website and, uh, just say that you're really interested in whatever being strangled by a man and then just like invite him around your house.
01:11:59.180And I said, what are you talking about? That is worst advice you can possibly imagine giving to a young woman.
01:12:05.460But this is so mainstream because the, partly because the idea is that there is a completely bright line between who we are in the bedroom and who we are outside of the bedroom.
01:12:16.580And so if a man is really interested in, in violence and sadism and cannibalism, that doesn't necessarily tell us anything about what he's really like, which is so counterintuitive.
01:12:26.460And I think, no, that, that bright line doesn't exist. What you're basically telling this young woman to do is to go out and find men who are interested in sexual violence and then invite them home.
01:12:38.640I'm like, if you go out looking for a guy who's interested, he's just like aroused by rape, there's a pretty strong chance he's going to rape you.
01:12:45.860And just to say, oh, well, like teach men not to rape, that's on him. It's like, fine. But actually, I'm interested in preventing this stuff before it happens, not just in trying to punish it afterwards.
01:12:58.340Yes. This reminds me, I had a great conversation when I was at NBC with Pamela Anderson and, uh, you know, she's incredibly beautiful and she's like iconically beautiful.
01:13:07.840And of course, starred in Baywatch and was married to Tommy Lee and Kid Rock and so on. And she was never me too. She never, she had experiences with Harvey Weinstein and so on, and it didn't happen to her.
01:13:20.140Now she's Canadian. She's very practical. She is a nice, practical, wholesome Canadian gal. You wouldn't, you might not associate the word wholesome with her, but having spent some time with her, she, she really is.
01:13:33.880She's got a very good head on her shoulders. Not to say she hasn't made any mistakes. I'm just saying I was impressed with her sensibility. And she was like, you know why? I never took a meeting in a hotel room ever.
01:13:43.540Somebody tried to take me to the hotel room and I was like hard pass. And, you know, plenty of people tried to take Pamela Anderson into the hotel room for the meeting.
01:13:52.100I mean, there is zero chance that these men in Hollywood did not, did not try to exploit her in that. So she has a very good head on her shoulders and I'm not victim blaming. I understand why these women got manipulated.
01:14:02.260And the Harvey Weinstein, it's like, you're in the middle of a hotel lobby meeting. And then he's like, I'm meeting whoever in my hotel room and you should come with. You don't know. He lured people. He was smart and devious.
01:14:12.260And devious. But my point is, you can have your hard and fast rules because you say that this happens mostly to girls. I think you write between the ages of what, 15 and 24.
01:14:21.540That, that age set in particular, correct me if I'm wrong, but that they really need to have some hard and fast rules about under what circumstances will I put myself behind a locked door or a closed door with an unknown man?
01:14:32.340Yeah. So the one context here is I used to work in a rape crisis center. So I've, I obviously don't write about like girls and women I work with in the book, but it's, it really informed my thinking on this.
01:14:48.300It's partly just from seeing how amazingly young rape victims are. They're younger than you'd think. So the modal rape victim is only 15.
01:14:56.160So what we're often dealing with here is girls who basically don't know anything about the dark side of male sexuality, who, who, who can't,
01:15:04.300you can't expect girls that young to, um, come up with their own rules, their own boundaries to know things like, you know, don't trust a guy who invites you to his hotel room for a meeting to all of these things, which for older women seem like common sense.
01:15:20.020But when you're 15, you don't know that. And you, and you don't know anything, what you're interested in is, is, is being liked and being popular and being normal.
01:15:27.780You know, teenagers care so much about being normal. It's so painful for them to, to be seen, to be doing something weird. Um, and I think that we do girls a real disservice when we don't offer them proper guidance and boundaries and, and, and limits and say, well, you know, you, you kind of make it up yourself. It's going back to that permissive parenting thing.
01:15:46.900I think actually we owe it to younger women as, as women who've learned it, who've learned it the hard way, who've, who've, who've lived it already to say, you know, here are the things that are ill-advised. Um, because the problem is if you just require that young women learn it themselves, then sometimes they will, sometimes they'll learn it sort of painlessly, but often they won't learn it painlessly.
01:16:10.320And the problem is that the, the, the, the very worst stuff can sometimes happen, which you can't come back from. I say so much better to be a strict parent who sets boundaries.
01:16:22.040Um, and by the way, the other dynamic with the young women, the 15 year olds is a very often, the men who take advantage of them are older and there's something special about being chosen. If you're the young one and some, especially authority figure is coming on to you.
01:16:38.560And some of these circumstances, it would be statutory rape. Um, but the girl has no appreciation for that and just feels special, like a chosen one. Like she's, there's something about her that would make this authority figure pay attention to her.
01:16:51.060And it's something to warn against. Um, only, only a bad person would exploit that dynamic with a young, with a young girl. It's, there's so many landmines out there for these young girls in particular. We have to educate them on them, on them all.
01:17:05.800You have to do that and then keep them happy. It's a challenge. You can't spend your life mired in, and, and, and don't take a drug. I just walked, walked my kids through the other day. My friend, Eric Bowling, uh, he lost his sweet son, Eric Chase to one pill at his university.
01:17:20.560He tried a pill like so many kids do, and it was laced with fentanyl and he died. And now Eric's got a foundation in it. And it's called one pill can kill his campaign to try to raise awareness to this problem. So, you know, you tell, you tell your kids about that. Like, don't even try the one it's too dangerous. Don't take a pill that wasn't prescribed to you directly by a doctor and under control that the amounts and all that.
01:17:41.680And don't go behind the closed doors and don't trust authority figures who want secrets between you and you. It's like, Oh, have a great day. Bye, honey. Mommy loves you.
01:17:51.240But we have to do it, Louise. We got to do it.
01:17:53.660Yeah, yeah, we do, because this is the printer. And no one said parenting was easy job, right?
01:18:03.220But it is more difficult, I think, in that in the age of the internet and so on, when you don't have these kind of small communities where people know each other. I mean, the nature of the internet, it's basically like, it is a global community. And we hand over these devices to kids and just say, like, off you run.
01:18:19.520And I do wonder, actually, if parents of my generation, when we get to the point of having teenage children, are going to be more restrictive than, say, baby boomer and Gen X parents were, because we know what the internet's like. So I think there might be a bit of a swing back against giving kids the sort of freedom that they're enjoying now.
01:18:41.120I mean, I'm in news. So I'm already living that on my poor kids. But there, it's working. I mean, I have a 13 year old, he's our eldest. And I checked his phone to see what he was doing and how long it was. And he was averaging seven minutes a day. Like, good boy.
01:18:57.740That's my boy. And they were the most benign websites. It's all like Steph Curry. You want to know what the stats were, that kind of stuff. So I'm very pleased. But of course, he's only 13. And as they get older, it gets trickier. All right, stand by, Louise. I'll squeeze in a quick break. And we have much more to discuss right after this. Don't go away.
01:19:14.620Louise, this is a weird way to start, but can we spend a minute on strangulation? It's like a weird way to start. First of all, I would like to offer my tip right now on how to avoid being strangled. I know, I don't mean to make light of it, but it's honestly a safety tip. I had a very bad stalking problem. And I had these security guards with me for many, many weeks. And I learned all sorts of great things.
01:19:42.560And here is a tip for anybody, God forbid, you should find yourself in the position where you are being strangled and it's against your will. This is why I'm talking to Louise about it. Cause some people actually say, Oh, it was by consent. So I'll try to do this to myself. Abby just left the room. Otherwise I'd have her come over here and try to pretend to do it to me. All right. So let's say the person's hands are around your neck. All right. So for our listening audience, picture the strangulation pose where the person has their hands around your neck.
01:20:11.280So the average woman trying to pull on the wrists of the average man, cause it would usually be a man trying to pull, pull, pull those hands down. She cannot do it. She is not strong enough. As Louise points out, this is one of the fundamental differences and dangers between men and women. Um, so what you do is, and forgive me, I'll take one hand away so I can just show you. The woman can do this. She can pull the pinkies.
01:20:35.180You will just grab both pinkies and you pull as hard as you can out and down. And that that's not about strength. That's about ligaments and bone structure and, um, tendons. And the person's hands will come off because they don't want to lose their pinkies. So anyway, it's a tip. I give it to every women, every woman I can find every women's group, every young girl, you know, colleges and so on. It's just simple and anyone can do it.
01:21:02.080All right. There's a reason we're talking about quote choking or strangulation, because as you point out, weirdly, this is a rising trend. More and more men are saying they want it and women are claiming they'll do it and they want it to, which I don't believe, but they'll at least submit to it.
01:21:19.320So do the men want to do the strangulation in addition to having it done to them? Or, or is it just a one way deal? The men do it to the women and the women have to pretend it's, it's okay with them.
01:21:30.300It's pretty much always in, in straight relationships. It's almost always male and female. And as you say, the strength difference is such that that's a dangerous position for women to be in. I mean, sometimes there are women who will, who will ask for it. It's being very normalized in porn and in women's bags and so on.
01:21:49.260So you can kind of see why it would become a fashion thing for us to ask for. It's a way of showing that you're edgy and all of this. Right. But the problem is, I mean, well, there are a whole bunch of problems with this.
01:22:01.880One of them is that there's this, there's been this rising phenomenon in the UK and also in the US and in most of other countries where you have women who are killed by men that they're in sexual relationships with and the men, when they're asked by police, what happened say, oh, well, it was a sex game.
01:22:23.800She asked for it. And, you know, one thing led to another and she died accidentally. And I actually work for a campaign group called We Can Consent to This, which documents examples of, of, of cases where men have made these kind of claims.
01:22:40.800And it's always been male defendants in every single case that we found. We've not found an example of a woman trying to claim this kind of defense in court.
01:22:47.460And the problem is that when you have this amazing normalization of that kind of violence in the bedroom, it becomes so much easier for defendants to get away with spinning this kind of story.
01:23:00.240I mean, often we're talking about cases where there's been really extreme violence. There's often longstanding abuse in the relationship.
01:23:06.940This might be a woman who's, you know, a prostitute who's been murdered by a client, like all sorts of extremely suspicious circumstances, which make you think, actually, no, this has got nothing to do with a conceptual sex game.
01:23:18.920This is just murder. But the problem is that when you've got this idea implanted in the heads of policemen and jurors and judges and everyone that, oh, well, this is normal.
01:23:29.440This is just a sort of the slightly adventurous aspect of, of, of, of sex games that people get up to, then it becomes so much easier to spin these stories.
01:23:37.700And the nature of the, the nature of the cases is the woman can't give her side of the story.
01:23:41.280She can't tell that the court that actually this guy's making up a pack of lies.
01:23:45.780And so they're getting away with it. You know, we found that in as many of half of cases, men who, who, who spin these stories are not being convicted of murder.
01:23:55.500They're being convicted of manslaughter in a much, much lower sentence, or they're getting away with it entirely.
01:24:00.960And this is happening in America as well. It's really troubling phenomenon.
01:24:04.160It's just one example of why, you know, the defense that's made by sex positive feminists is that this is just about liberation.
01:24:16.660It's just about choice. And they say, no, you can't just say, well, this is between two people privately in a bedroom and it's no one else's business.
01:24:22.140Because when it's leaking out of the bedroom, when it's leaking into the culture, when, you know, you've got these, these, these horrible stories, which are directly downstream from the mainstream of BDSM food porn.
01:24:34.500In some ways, this is more disturbing, more dangerous even than stranger strangulation.
01:24:41.220Because if a stranger, a bad guy comes up and tries to hurt you, you understand what your mission is, which is get away, run, do the trick I just showed you, do whatever you can to save your life.
01:24:52.380In a, in what's supposed to be a loving sexual relationship, you're quote, consenting.
01:24:58.960And by the point you realize, or someone watching you would realize you're in danger, you're in trouble.
01:25:06.580You're, you've lost, you've lost oxygen, you've lost your strength, you've lost probably the ability to actually do my trick to, to get yourself out of it.
01:25:14.560You, you, you have entirely placed your safety in the hands of this other person who obviously cannot be trusted.
01:25:23.540I, I, I quote a, um, a clinical neurologist in the book who's, who's done studies of, um, the effects of strangulation on the body.
01:25:31.400And she said that it's a myth to think you can do this safely, that the neck has just contained so many important things, but it isn't possible to place pressure on the neck without placing pressure on something really important.
01:25:43.800You know, that it's, it's also kind of a myth to think that you can just accidentally kill someone through a slip of the wrist.
01:25:49.900Like it takes five minutes maybe to strangle someone to death.
01:25:53.980And if you try, I wish that every lawyer would do this to juries when you're, you're, you're dealing with these kinds of cases, you know, try gripping your own wrist really hard for five minutes.
01:26:04.020So the idea that these guys are killing women accidentally, I don't think is true.
01:26:08.740But even if you're, you don't kill someone, you can still cause a lot of damage.
01:26:12.420You know, the, the, all sorts of injuries resulting from strangulation, everything from miscarriage to stroke to incontinence, you know, you don't mess with the neurological system like that.
01:26:24.440And the idea that this is being promoted as just a kind of way to spice things up in the bedroom, I think is terrible and being promoted to young people even worse.
01:26:47.480I told the audience yesterday, we just got back from a few days in Amsterdam over in Holland.
01:26:52.500And they are of course, famous or infamous, depending on your view for the red light district, which we did not attend given that.
01:26:58.900Well, we're normal, no offense, but we're over there with our family.
01:27:02.940And, um, but I, it was described to me by some of the locals and apparently you go over there as a young woman, a prostitute, and you can,
01:27:10.600you can basically rent a room and put yourself on display for eight hours that these are rented out by landlords.
01:27:16.660The women don't own the spots and, uh, any number of men will just come in and, and frequent your, you know, room over and over and over all day.
01:27:26.380And this is supposed to be, look, there, it's their choice.
01:27:33.380We have it here in Vegas in the United States.
01:27:35.880You know, this is definitely an outcome of this, you know, modern feminist movement, which sees prostitution, as you pointed out, as quote, sex work.
01:27:47.300We're not allowed to really use any term other than sex work because other, otherwise you've demonized these women and their choices.
01:27:56.180I mean, if you want to claim that sex is just like anything else, like it's like playing tennis with someone, shaking someone's hand, whatever, it's like a neutral social interaction.
01:28:07.640And therefore that it's completely fine to commodify it.
01:28:11.280And it's just sex work and sex work is work.
01:28:13.420That's the slogan that you've probably heard that it should just be regarded as any other type of job.
01:28:18.020The problem with that kind of idea is that if you, if you take that to its logical conclusion, then if sex can't have a special category, then neither can rape.
01:28:28.020Then we just have to regard rape as what theft or fraud or something like that.
01:28:35.040Sexual harassment can't be considered to be uniquely harmful.
01:28:38.260It just has to be considered alongside any other kind of harassment.
01:28:42.300And the problem is that people don't feel that way.
01:28:44.500People, people instinctively feel and legal systems reflect this fact that rape is worse than theft.
01:28:50.040And they instinctively feel that sexual harassment is more harmful than other kinds of harassment.
01:28:54.460Louise, I'm just going to go through a couple of them, but people need to buy the book so they can read your.
01:29:17.900You've got all the psychological differences going on.
01:29:19.880And I think given that fact, which isn't going away, is hugely unwise for women's perspective to do away with chivalry, which is basically, you know, an ideology that says that men ought to restrain themselves or to, you know, if you understand male strength as a sword, to keep it within its sheaths, to be courteous towards women, to put women first, to open doors.
01:29:47.520You know, sometimes, I get it, sometimes, let's say, as a professional woman, it might feel patronizing.
01:29:52.540It might feel annoying to be, have doors held open for you and all this kind of stuff.
01:29:57.460But that is a tiny price to pay for the benefits that chivalry brings with it.
01:30:03.380Those women who complain about that stuff are ruining it for the rest of us.
01:30:09.760So men out there, don't listen to that minority voice.
01:30:12.060Listen to the rest of us who appreciate you treating us like you are gentlemen and we are ladies, while understanding that we are full, empowered ladies as well.
01:31:52.020So what do you say to those who say, I don't have friends who can set me up or they've fallen down on the job.
01:31:56.180This is my only way of meeting people.
01:31:57.840I really think that we should be much more sort of generous with our friends about setting people up.
01:32:02.720This idea of like going on a blind date with people, someone you've been set up with by friends, it seems really off-fashioned.
01:32:08.000But like it's actually the, it's not just the best possible way to meet partners.
01:32:11.520It's actually the best possible way to meet new friends as well.
01:32:13.500Because you've got a sort of filter that's already been put in place since you're meeting people who are already like you're likely to get on with.
01:32:20.320So the problem with apps is that you get a huge amount of choice, but it's low quality.