TRIGGERnometry - The Sexual Revolution is Terrible for Women

00:00:00.000 A common narrative that you'll hear is from feminists or from progressives is that the

00:00:04.800 sexual revolution was a great idea and it was a way of counteracting centuries of oppressive

00:00:11.420 patriarchal repression and the problem is just that we haven't like fully implemented it.

00:00:17.200 The original idea to free everyone, to prioritise freedom above all other values was fabulous.

00:00:25.440 The problem is that we haven't quite yet done it. We need more freedom. We need to push that

00:00:29.260 freedom lever again and again and again until everything comes right and I think that was

00:00:33.380 the error. I think actually freedom is not the preeminent value. I think it has to be balanced

00:00:38.860 against other values. Like what? Like restraint. Oh, we don't like that word in the 21st century,

00:00:49.080 do we? We don't, no.

00:00:59.260 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.

00:01:18.180 I'm Constantine Kissin.

00:01:19.460 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:01:24.720 Our terrific guest today is a journalist and the author of The Case Against the Sexual

00:01:28.940 Revolution. Louise Perry, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:01:31.480 Thank you so much for having me.

00:01:32.560 It's really great to have you on. Before we get into what I'm sure will be a fascinating

00:01:36.220 conversation, tell us who are you? How are you, where you are? What has been your journey

00:01:40.580 through life?

00:01:41.600 My journey through life. Well, I'm a journalist now. I wasn't always. My first, well, I'll start

00:01:51.160 a little bit earlier, very briefly. I'm born and bred in London. My family are Australian,

00:01:56.460 but I've always lived in the UK. I, as we were just talking about, I did anthropology at

00:02:03.900 university. And then the first job that I did after leaving university was working in

00:02:07.900 a rape crisis centre, which I'm sure is going to come up in relation to the book. I did that

00:02:13.820 for a couple of years. And then I became a journalist, freelancing various places. I now work for a

00:02:21.500 combination that people find surprising. I'm a columnist at the New Statesman, and I also

00:02:24.740 write for the Daily Mail.

00:02:28.700 It's true. And this is my first book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. I'm also,

00:02:33.960 I'm a press officer for a campaign group called We Can't Consent to This. And we campaign on

00:02:41.700 cases where women have been murdered and men have claimed they consented to lethal violence

00:02:47.960 as part of rough sex. I'm sure, again, that's going to come up because it all feeds into the

00:02:52.080 book. I mean, the book, in a way, is a culmination of life experience and thinking over the course

00:03:00.940 of, you know, ten years at least. And we've had a couple of people to talk

00:03:07.920 about the problems with the sexual revolution in the past. And, you know, it's not necessarily

00:03:13.920 a new critique, what the sort of things that you're talking about, but generally it would

00:03:19.040 be people who sort of wanted women back in the kitchen, people like me. No, no. But you

00:03:25.260 know what I mean? Do you see what I'm saying? It was coming from a certain angle and that

00:03:28.640 was the concern. Yeah. I don't think you're coming at it from that angle. So what is it

00:03:34.220 that you have identified that has been the negatives, particularly for women, out of some

00:03:40.780 of the changes we saw in the 60s and later? Yeah. So as you say, this is quite a well-trodden

00:03:46.380 path for religious conservatives, in particular, who tend to come at it, as you say, from a different

00:03:53.400 angle from me, because I am, you know, for all of my heterodoxy, I suppose I am coming

00:03:57.920 at this from, I say that I start with feminist priors and I end up at some conservative conclusions,

00:04:05.540 although not all, but some, in the sense that I think that the sexual revolution from the

00:04:12.220 get-go had downsides for women. You know, not to say that anyone designed it, it's not a

00:04:18.280 conspiracy, you know, it's a culmination of a lot of different historical accidents and

00:04:22.160 individual behaviour and whatever. But the common narrative that you'll hear a lot nowadays

00:04:29.960 is I think that people are starting to recognise, including feminists of all different strains,

00:04:34.780 are starting to recognise that there are problems with the sexual culture, recognising, for instance,

00:04:39.460 the fact that porn is really grim, a lot of young people are really unhappy, not having

00:04:43.540 happy sex relationships, all of this. I think that pretty much across the board, everyone agrees.

00:04:46.880 What everyone disagrees on is the cause of it. And a common narrative that you'll hear is from

00:04:52.420 feminists and from progressives is that the sexual revolution was a great idea and it was a way of

00:04:57.940 counteracting centuries of oppressive patriarchal repression. And the problem is just that we

00:05:05.460 haven't fully implemented it. The original idea to free everyone, to prioritise freedom above all

00:05:13.180 other values, was fabulous. The problem is that we haven't quite yet done it. We need more freedom.

00:05:18.440 We need to push that freedom lever again and again and again until everything comes right.

00:05:22.480 And I think that was the error. I think actually, freedom is not the preeminent value. I think it

00:05:28.080 has to be balanced against other values.

00:05:31.340 Like what?

00:05:33.400 Like restraint.

00:05:34.920 Oh, we don't like that word in the 21st century, do we?

00:05:39.340 We don't, no. I mean, I guess the point that I'm coming at this that makes it particularly

00:05:43.420 a feminist argument is I think that male restraint is the really important thing,

00:05:47.540 which no one wants to hear.

00:05:48.820 Well, actually, I mean, I'll be honest with you. I've sort of, certainly in terms of me growing up,

00:05:54.500 the idea that men have to restrain themselves, particularly in relation to women.

00:05:58.440 Yeah.

00:05:58.640 I mean, as part of the trad sort of way of thinking, you know, you don't hit girls,

00:06:04.540 for example, right? Because we can be as equal as we want, but there's certain things that we

00:06:09.060 respect about each other's differences that we don't treat each other exactly the same and

00:06:14.060 everything. You know what I mean? And there's other things that you do with women that you

00:06:18.040 don't do with men and vice versa. That was, but like you say, that can be experienced by some

00:06:24.180 people is taking us backwards. Yeah. So how does that circle get squared or the square get circled

00:06:30.280 or whatever it is? I try really hard not to use words like backwards and forwards, actually.

00:06:33.780 Yeah. Because sort of what I'm saying, which is, I guess, quite radical, is that the whole idea of

00:06:41.600 progress, I think, is nonsense. I don't use the word progressive to describe myself, even if I agree

00:06:47.440 with people who call themselves progressives on some things. I don't use that word because I think

00:06:51.460 the whole idea of history having a shape is absurd. It's derived from Christianity, actually,

00:06:56.900 in a way like the, you know, we're all headed to the kingdom of heaven, ultimately. I think that

00:07:03.780 history is just about change and trade-offs. And even if you can sometimes identify some things

00:07:09.100 that have clearly got better and are likely to get better, something like infant mortality,

00:07:12.280 let's say, none of it's guaranteed. And I think that what the sexual revolution represents is not

00:07:19.960 progress. It's just a change primarily driven by technology and by changes in the economy and by,

00:07:27.760 you know, in all other ways, material changes on which the ideological changes are built.

00:07:32.480 And yeah, I don't think that the simplistic narrative is right. And I don't think like

00:07:38.200 vocabulary like backwards and forwards actually illuminates anything. I completely agree with you

00:07:43.400 that it is very common in all other societies, but our own pretty much, this idea that, I mean,

00:07:50.000 it's chivalry is what you're describing, right? It's a horribly old fashioned and unfashionable word,

00:07:54.680 chivalry, which has mostly been thrown out because obviously, you know, there are good things that

00:08:00.400 come with it, but there are downsides too. It can be patronising, it can be, you know,

00:08:05.080 enfeebling women in various ways. But I think it was a terrible error to throw it out completely

00:08:10.200 because when it comes down to it, men and women are different in some really important ways.

00:08:14.880 And I think we have to find ways of negotiating that rather than denying it.

00:08:18.460 Do you not think that it might well be that it's all gone a bit too far? Do you know what I mean?

00:08:24.260 Like it started off, you know, like progressivism, liberalism, and it had these noble values. And

00:08:29.440 then you end up at a place where you talk about how men and women are the same. You go,

00:08:33.460 well, that's just scientifically nonsense.

00:08:35.860 It's also the logical end point of that thinking, though, I think. I mean, this idea of equality,

00:08:42.680 this idea of sameness, right, rather than something like justice or fairness or other

00:08:48.600 terms that you might use. I think that there are circumstances in which it makes sense.

00:08:54.160 You know, I think that saying, for instance, women should have access to the professions

00:08:57.440 is just, I don't think anyone can really argue with that as being an important source of equality.

00:09:03.980 A few would. Not people I'm friends with, right?

00:09:08.740 That's fine. Voting rights, all of this sort of stuff. The problem is that those battles

00:09:12.360 have been won. They've been won a long time ago now. And what we've ended up with in recent

00:09:17.320 decades has been a push towards, a more radical push towards sameness, even to the extent of

00:09:24.060 denying the existence of physical differences between the sexes, even to the extent of denying

00:09:29.060 the existence of sexual dimorphism. It's all got quite crazy, right? And I think the problem that

00:09:34.100 we're now coming up against is we've reached the kind of bedrock of biological difference,

00:09:38.800 having chipped away at a lot of sort of, to mix my metaphors, having taken all the low-hanging fruit

00:09:45.240 in terms of, like, providing women with access to public life. We reach the point where actually

00:09:51.960 we can't quite make everyone the same. Even if you can sort of pretend to. I mean, this

00:09:58.320 is a thing about the modern world. We have, we live in a very, very different way from our

00:10:05.440 ancestors, right? And I think that much of what we see historically as feminist progress

00:10:12.960 can be attributed to material changes, right? So one of the really important ways in which we

00:10:21.520 differ from our ancestors is that male physical strength doesn't mean very much anymore. It

00:10:25.100 doesn't matter very much. If you live in an agricultural industrial society, obviously the

00:10:29.960 fact that men are so much bigger and stronger than women is hugely important. If you live in a

00:10:33.400 knowledge economy or service economy, it doesn't really matter. We can all work in, like, gender

00:10:37.720 neutral offices and not really notice the differences between us. Similarly with the pill,

00:10:43.580 which I argue in the book is, like, the technology shock, which explains so much of this history.

00:10:48.920 If you can delay childbearing or if you can forego it altogether, again, you can just operate in the

00:10:54.700 world pretty much as, like, a man. You know, you might not even go to the gym. You might have, like,

00:10:58.940 literally no sort of encounter with the existence of male physical strength. It's quite hard to, like,

00:11:04.220 go into a powerlifting gym and not notice, right? But in general, you can go through life not

00:11:09.860 observing these differences. And it almost becomes plausible to think that gender is fluid

00:11:15.040 and that all of this is just this, like, backwards ideas that for some reason our ancestors believed.

00:11:23.500 But that's an illusion. And I think it's very brittle and it's built on technology, which is

00:11:30.460 actually remarkably new. And I think it's that newness. I mean, women were not able to suspend

00:11:38.460 their fertility for 99.9% of our species history. You know, this is, like, five minutes ago in

00:11:42.600 historical terms. And I don't think we've really come to terms with it, which is what I'm trying to

00:11:46.360 do in the book.

00:11:47.280 So what has been the fallout of the fact that women are able to suspend their fertility?

00:11:51.100 So I think that the, I call it sexual disenchantment. I've borrowed that term from an American writer

00:11:58.840 called Aaron Sbarium, and he's borrowed it from Max Weber, the sociologist. So Weber was describing

00:12:04.080 the disenchantment of the natural world that was a consequence of the enlightenment, that

00:12:09.040 previously people thought that the natural world had agency and spirits and specialness

00:12:13.540 and whatever. And then post-scientific revolution, we come to the realisation that actually it's

00:12:18.420 just sort of inert scientific forces. I think that this same process has happened, or at

00:12:25.760 least rhetorically has happened, in that it used to be, and I think every culture has

00:12:31.960 elaborate rituals and beliefs around sex, ways of formalising sexual relationships in marriage

00:12:38.080 or, you know, similar equivalents. You know, up until recently, sex within Christianity is,

00:12:45.560 you know, only permissible within marriage or religious sacrament. It has this incredibly special

00:12:48.760 status, incredibly regulated by the state and by the church. And we've got rid of that, mostly.

00:12:56.120 And now it is quite common to hear people, progressives in particular, say that sex actually

00:13:01.820 doesn't have any intrinsic value to it. It doesn't have any intrinsic specialness. Like, if people

00:13:08.600 want to apply meaning to it on a personal level, they're welcome to. But when it comes down to it,

00:13:15.160 it's just a social interaction. You know, you can buy it, you can sell it, it's fine.

00:13:19.960 I don't think anyone really believes that. I think almost no one actually believes that. And you can

00:13:24.200 tell because people are extraordinarily inconsistent in applying this. So people who, for instance, will say

00:13:29.880 that sex work is work, no problem, it's just like working at McDonald's, will not apply that to their

00:13:36.120 own personal lives. Or not even apply it to other sort of similar issues in terms of law and policy.

00:13:42.520 So the example I give in the book is sex for rent. All of the major political parties in the UK are united

00:13:49.160 in believing that landlords who offer rooms in exchange for sexual favours are or should be

00:13:58.280 breaking the law. They're all united in saying we should have firmer laws on it. This is particularly

00:14:02.200 post-Covid because there was sort of a rash of landlords doing this. It's the same in other

00:14:06.040 Western countries as well. These are exactly the same parties, you know, like the Lib Dems, for instance,

00:14:13.320 condemn sex for rent and think we should decriminalise the sex industry. It's the same thing.

00:14:17.800 You know, it's just goods, you know, being exchanged for sexual access. It's exactly the same thing.

00:14:24.200 And similarly, you know, people who will, again, say the sex workers work, that, you know, really buy

00:14:29.960 into the sexual disenchantment idea rhetorically, very upset about any perceived sexual impropriety in

00:14:36.360 their own workplaces. You know, like having any kind of being, you know, being touched by a male

00:14:44.280 colleague, being asked out on a date, like that stuff is very serious and is not at all comparable

00:14:50.440 to just other forms of non-sexual interaction. But sex workers work, you know, and I think that

00:14:56.360 I think that inconsistency is a result of the fact that actually sexual disenchantment just isn't true.

00:15:02.280 Basically, no one really thinks it's true. But the problem is that if you

00:15:05.160 are trying to rationalise it all and you are applying kind of utility brain to the world,

00:15:11.640 it's quite hard to articulate. It's quite hard to rationalise. It comes from a very visceral place,

00:15:21.560 which is a bit inconvenient if you're trying to apply that kind of, you know, very logical world

00:15:27.320 view. The fact that people have emotional responses to things that are somewhat inconvenient,

00:15:32.440 you know. But the truth of it is that people don't feel that sex is the same as other social

00:15:36.280 interactions. People absolutely feel that sex has some unique status, which is of course why,

00:15:41.240 I mean, thinking from a feminist perspective, which is why rape is so uniquely bad, which is why

00:15:45.800 sexual harassment is so uniquely bad. If you don't think sex is special, you can't think any of those

00:15:49.160 things have special status either. And I think that that idea of sexual disenchantment

00:15:54.920 is bad for everyone, but it's really bad for women.

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00:16:26.600 Why? Partly because of a physical imbalance between the sexes, so the fact that it's only

00:16:33.560 women who get pregnant. Women have to suffer the side effects of hormonal contraception.

00:16:40.120 Women are much smaller and weaker than men, which means that any heterosexual encounter,

00:16:43.560 if you've got a man and woman alone together, the woman's going to be almost always the more

00:16:48.760 physically vulnerable party. So there's that kind of risk inherent to sexual encounters that women

00:16:54.040 experience that men can't experience in the same way. There's also the psychological stuff,

00:17:00.280 and that's more controversial because the push towards kind of radical equality within feminism,

00:17:09.320 in liberal feminism, has also included pushing back very hard against the idea that there are any

00:17:17.000 innate differences between the sexes on a psychological level. And some of that is coming

00:17:21.240 from a good place. It is clearly the case that in various periods in history,

00:17:27.080 pseudo-scientific ideas about women's intellectual inferiority in particular or emotional inferiority

00:17:33.640 have been used against women. This is clearly true. That does not, however, mean that those

00:17:38.520 differences don't exist at all. And actually, as decades have gone by and we've got more and more

00:17:42.440 scientific research on this, it actually becomes more and more apparent that those differences do

00:17:46.360 exist on average, right? The on average thing is something that people often can't wrap their heads

00:17:51.240 around. Well, they can, they just don't want to. Well, people can when it comes to something like,

00:17:56.600 the example I give is like, you know, if we say that Germans are on average taller than people from

00:18:01.960 Spain, people are like, oh yeah, fine. No one says, oh, but I know a really tall guy from Spain.

00:18:06.840 That disproves your thesis. You know, this is the nature of bell curves. There are all sorts of ways

00:18:12.360 in which the certain psychological traits differ on the bell curve basis between men and women.

00:18:18.120 The one that's most important for my purposes is the trait called, the psychologist called

00:18:22.200 socio-sexuality, which is not quite the same as sex drive. You can be, you know, high in one and low in

00:18:27.720 the other, but socio-sexuality is about your desire for casual sex, basically. How much you want to have

00:18:34.440 sex with a variety of people? How quickly you want to jump into bed with someone?

00:18:38.040 Now look, I'm not an expert, but I'm going to guess men are more prone to have the higher rate of that.

00:18:43.720 Cross-culturally, trans-historically, yes.

00:18:46.120 Wow. Yeah.

00:18:47.320 I'm a genius. How did I work that out, Liz?

00:18:49.480 Right, I know. How dare you notice these things.

00:18:52.520 Yes, I mean, anyone who's like got eyes and lived in the world can tell that there clearly is that

00:18:56.760 average difference between men and women, even if there are lots of outliers on an individual level.

00:19:00.920 I mean, just because you know someone's sex doesn't mean you know their level of socio-sexuality,

00:19:06.040 but at the population level, you see it. You see it, for instance, in the fact that all,

00:19:11.000 almost all sex buyers everywhere in the world are male, because obviously the people who are,

00:19:15.800 it's that tale of high socio-sexuality is like all men, right?

00:19:22.200 I'm going to say something even more controversial than you, but basically,

00:19:24.920 if you want to understand what men are actually like, just look at gay men, right?

00:19:28.520 How much sex do they have? And how many partners do they have on average,

00:19:32.360 compared to the average heterosexual man? And you kind of get like,

00:19:35.560 gay men are actually the real men, because they're unrestrained by women.

00:19:38.920 Yes. Yeah, absolutely.

00:19:40.040 It's really that simple.

00:19:40.920 Yeah, it's how men would behave if women weren't a limiting factor.

00:19:44.440 Exactly.

00:19:44.920 Yeah. And I mean, it's interesting, if you look at the survey data on gay men,

00:19:49.000 of which there's quite a lot, because it comes out of like sexual health research and stuff.

00:19:53.640 What you have is actually like a goodish proportion of men who are just as monogamous as lesbians,

00:19:59.960 and you have a lot of men in the middle, and then you have a proportion who are really promiscuous.

00:20:05.560 And because there isn't the limiting factor of women saying no, those men are way more promiscuous

00:20:11.800 than promiscuous straight men can ever be, because they just have so much more opportunity.

00:20:16.280 You know, but that proportion of like would be promiscuous straight men still exists.

00:20:24.440 It's just they've got the complexity of having to deal with female choice,

00:20:29.400 which makes the whole heterosexual, you know, dating marriage scene that much more complex.

00:20:34.920 So essentially, one of the things you're talking about, which is apparent to anyone who's paying

00:20:39.720 attention is that one of the consequences of many of the technological changes, but also the cultural

00:20:45.400 technologies that we've now developed, is that we have a dating market, hate that term, but dating

00:20:52.040 market that caters to men's predilections much more than it caters to women's. And so women who used

00:20:58.600 to trade, this is very kind of biological looking at it, so I hope no one's offended by this, but used to

00:21:04.200 trade sex for commitment, right? Now are trading sex for the promise of commitment from men that don't

00:21:10.600 need to give it anymore. Yeah. Is that fair? Yeah. So what I describe in the book is what I call

00:21:16.760 the sociosexuality gap. The fact that you've got the male bell curve is that much further towards the

00:21:20.840 high end than the low end. And interestingly, one of the responses that I've got to this book from some

00:21:27.400 readers is, now hang on, are you talking about the sex revolution in the 1960s, or are you talking about

00:21:32.200 the sex revolution of the first century AD, which is a really interesting historical comparison,

00:21:38.840 which I'm not expert in by any means, but what happens during that period is you have Roman sexual

00:21:46.760 norms, yes, prized chastity in high status women, but also have vast, vast numbers of prostituted slaves,

00:21:55.480 who men of all classes have access to, basically. And the promiscuity and the straightforward violent

00:22:04.120 sexual abuse visited by high status men on women and sometimes men who are lower status than them

00:22:10.440 is gone completely unmarked. Harvey Weinstein, in that context, no one bats an eyelid. He's just behaving

00:22:18.120 completely, you know, normally. And what is very strange about the Christian revolution is that

00:22:23.640 Christians are unusual in expecting chastity, not only from women, which basically every culture does,

00:22:28.840 and for obvious reasons, because it's about to do with, like, paternal certainty. And they also

00:22:34.840 expect it of men. And so the early Christians, like, basically ask the male, the male bell curve to be

00:22:42.840 dragged down to the female level, and for men to behave more like women sexually, and to not buy

00:22:47.720 sex and to, you know, to not cheat on their wives and all of this and to expect monogamy, which is

00:22:52.520 what we know from all sorts of, you know, survey data, loads of other evidence, is what women on

00:22:56.840 average are most likely to want, to want monogamous commitment. And what I think has happened in our

00:23:02.120 sexual revolution, our most recent sexual revolution, is that the female bell curve has been dragged up,

00:23:07.720 you know, in that the expectation now on women is that they will meet the male demand for casual

00:23:13.080 sex, because obviously the socio-sexuality gap has to be bridged somehow. And if there aren't enough

00:23:19.480 women who are outliers and really up for it, you know, there's a kind of, it's, you know, I say again,

00:23:26.200 it's not a conspiracy. It's just a culture. It's a networking effect that the incentive structure has

00:23:31.880 changed, and it is now more in women's interests to imitate masculine sexuality, and to have sex

00:23:38.280 like a man, and moreover to present that as being feminist, and as a form of empowerment, as a form

00:23:45.160 of, you know, self-expression and all of this. The problem you've got is one, the physical imbalance,

00:23:50.200 the fact that women are suffering all of the costs of this, and two, is that psychological,

00:23:55.720 like deep down reluctance that a lot of women feel. Doesn't make women happy. Mostly no, yeah.

00:24:03.240 And, you know, women are much more likely to say that they feel really miserable and depressed

00:24:07.320 after casual sex, to feel used, you know, all of these kind of negative emotions coming out of these

00:24:12.120 encounters. And this will sometimes be chalked up to, you know, particular men behaving badly,

00:24:19.640 which obviously they do often, but, will sort of be seen on an individual level, or will be ascribed

00:24:26.280 to slut-shaming, and say, well, the problem we've got is that we actually haven't sufficiently freed

00:24:32.360 ourselves. Is that pressing the freedom lever again and again, right? The problem is we've still got

00:24:36.520 these hang-ups about sex. We still haven't completely completed the sexual disenchantment process.

00:24:41.880 Women are still, like, ashamed of their sexuality, ashamed of being seen as promiscuous,

00:24:47.320 etc. That's why women are completely miserable. I don't think that's true.

00:24:53.640 I think the problem we've got is that actually there's like a, one of the really interesting

00:24:57.880 differences in sexuality between men and women is women's sexual disgust threshold is a lot lower.

00:25:03.240 And that's the sort of thing you can actually measure quite empirically, because you can test

00:25:08.520 the disgust response by looking at things like sweating and heart rate and whatever.

00:25:13.560 And women get much more easily triggered into that feeling of, like, ick than men do.

00:25:23.640 And there's a biological reason for that as well.

00:25:25.960 Yeah, to do with the fact that it is, like, getting pregnant is extremely consequential

00:25:31.400 for women, right? To the extent that having sex is, like, potentially one of the most

00:25:35.880 consequential things you can do as a woman in terms of the effect that it has on the fact that you then

00:25:40.440 are carrying this child for nine months and then have a dangerous labour and then have many,

00:25:44.760 many years of infant care, or attempting an abortion, which until very recently is invariably

00:25:50.520 very dangerous thing to do, right? Or infanticide or, you know, any number of horrible options await you

00:25:57.160 if you're having sex with a man who's gonna leave you if you become pregnant. So, you know, clearly women

00:26:03.000 are, like, we've got some very strongly inbuilt instincts which are supposed to protect against

00:26:10.600 ending up in that kind of situation, basically.

00:26:15.240 And I think that what's going on very often for women that I've spoken to

00:26:20.200 is that this, one, there's this narrative of having sex like a man is empowering and the belief

00:26:25.160 that you should give it a go. And the belief, moreover, that if you don't give it a go, it's because

00:26:28.200 you're frigid and conservative and backwards and all these bad things. And two, the feeling that

00:26:33.640 they sort of have to, because the assumption very often is that you have to sort of run the gauntlet

00:26:40.440 of hookup culture in order to find a partner that you can't possibly. I mean, one of the things I

00:26:45.320 advise in the book, which I'm told is a complete crazy thing to advise, is to hold off on having

00:26:50.520 sex for a few months in the first few months of a relationship, because it's a good way of testing

00:26:56.040 whether he's serious about you. It's a good way of not being clouded by hormones if you're trying

00:27:00.040 to like vet a partner. And I hear from women, I'm like, what are you talking about? What kind

00:27:06.600 of man is going to wait three months to have sex? A man that's actually really into you, I'd imagine.

00:27:11.880 But it feels impossible. It feels like if you go out there on the dating market and you have that

00:27:17.000 restriction applied, that you can't compete. Well, you can't compete. You're not going to get as

00:27:23.160 many dates. But the point of dating isn't to get a date, presumably, right? And by the way,

00:27:28.920 one thing before you jump in for us, I would add is, I actually, I don't know what the studies show,

00:27:33.640 but I would argue that this isn't good for men either. And it doesn't make men happy either,

00:27:37.960 because actually, men also feel disgust about hookup culture and sex. It might be like a bit

00:27:43.800 of a status boost and a temporary fleeting moment of joy or whatever. But actually, I don't think in

00:27:50.040 the long run, that makes men happy either. I completely agree. I opened the book by

00:27:54.120 talking about Marilyn Monroe and Hugh Hefner as the perfect examples of the sex revolution

00:27:58.520 and the disparate effect it has on men and women. The fact that she had this, I mean,

00:28:02.920 she had a pretty consistently miserable life for all of her beauty and fame and wealth. And she died

00:28:08.680 prematurely, as everyone knows, from substance abuse and so on. Whereas Hugh Hefner had a grand old time.

00:28:14.440 But by the time he was elderly, he actually was a really pathetic figure. And he never,

00:28:20.600 you know, he enjoyed the period of youthful promiscuity and being famous and glamorous and

00:28:25.080 all of this. But actually, his final decades were quite tragic. And he ended up not ever having,

00:28:32.760 you know, the source, the thing that people actually invariably find real meaning from, which is

00:28:37.880 family and intimacy and, you know, all of the good long term things, because he just had this like

00:28:42.680 extended adolescence right up until his final days.

00:28:45.560 And the problem as well is when it comes to the dating apps is that there's only a

00:28:50.840 select selection of men who are actually, you know, seem to be...

00:28:55.480 Who are living the playboy dream, yeah.

00:28:57.080 Exactly. And then the other men aren't getting a look in because it's all superficial and it's

00:29:01.640 all about how you look in photographs. So then all the women are after this tiny sliver of men.

00:29:08.440 Yeah, the hypergamy thing.

00:29:09.720 Who therefore don't have to commit.

00:29:11.240 Yes, yes. What's really interesting about this is that, um, I said my first degree was

00:29:18.360 anthropology. Most societies on the anthropological record have been polygamous in that high status

00:29:26.360 men take on multiple wives and then lower status men have, have none. Almost no one is polyandrous,

00:29:32.840 no matter what sort of like, some second wave writers tried to sort of imagine these like amazing matriarchal

00:29:39.960 society. No, no, no. Human history is fairly clear on this. Polygamy is the norm. About 20% have been monogamous,

00:29:47.960 including clearly our society and all Christian societies. And one of the puzzle, one of the

00:29:55.720 things, what anthropologists call the puzzle of monogamous marriage is why on earth that would ever

00:30:00.040 come about. Because clearly polygamous societies suit the high status men best. And those men are

00:30:07.560 generally the people who have the most influence in setting the terms of, of society and laws and all

00:30:12.280 of this. So why on earth would they accept a system which basically restricts them? And the answer seems

00:30:17.640 to be because monogamy is a really, really good system in all sorts of completely empirical ways,

00:30:21.880 right? Monogamous societies tend to be more economically productive, partly because high

00:30:28.120 status men, instead of investing money in more wives, invest money in things like businesses

00:30:32.440 and taking on employees and, you know, all sorts of like things that are good for economic growth.

00:30:38.200 Has lower rates of child abuse and domestic abuse because households with co-wives tend to be,

00:30:44.520 have a lot of conflict for obvious reasons. And has lower crime because you don't have this pool

00:30:50.760 of unmarried and unhappy, you know, incels basically, right? Who are high on testosterone

00:30:57.480 and very low on responsibility, who are much more likely to do sort of opportunistic crimes.

00:31:03.160 So there's all sorts of ways in which monogamy, yes, it restricts, you know, that top slice of

00:31:09.400 playboys. I mean, basically that's what they're living on Tinder, right? They're not marrying these women,

00:31:13.080 obviously, but they're having like simultaneous relationships or like back-to-back brief

00:31:19.320 monogamous relationships. They're like accumulating lots of wives and it's great for them in the

00:31:24.760 short term. It's rubbish for the other men and it's also rubbish for the women because you end up

00:31:29.240 with women who actually really want to have like loving, intimate, monogamous relationships and they

00:31:34.680 don't feel like they can get access to them because that's not how the culture is arranged.

00:31:39.880 And like, yes, you can say, no, I'm not going to have sex with you for three months. You can say that.

00:31:43.480 And I do think like it's better to do that and then not like be a co-wife of a playboy than it is to

00:31:52.680 to just like go without. But it's difficult because that's not at all what the, you know,

00:32:00.200 incentive structures put in place encourage you to do. What's really interesting and just like proving this,

00:32:05.640 this, this, this population level difference between male and female sexuality is if you look

00:32:09.960 at university campuses, which are reasonably closed environments, people have having a lot of

00:32:14.920 relationships with each other and don't have very much to do. Campuses where men outnumber women,

00:32:20.680 so women are the rarer sex and therefore have more power to set the terms. I know it's so like

00:32:25.480 brutal to talk in economic terms, but that like, it has a lot of explanatory power. They tend to have

00:32:30.760 more monogamous relationships, a culture of, of, of monogamy. They're setting the terms.

00:32:36.040 Because they're setting the terms. And then on campuses where you have more

00:32:39.960 women than men, the men are the rarer sex, then you have more hookup culture.

00:32:44.280 Because these are the average preferences between the sexes and this is how you see it map out.

00:32:48.440 But hang on, haven't we evolved beyond the need for this?

00:32:52.920 That's what I've been told. You know, we're polyamorous now, aren't we?

00:32:56.520 I mean, what's so interesting, right, about polyamory is that, you know, on the sexual

00:33:02.200 disenchantment thing, like the, the polyamorous community are desperate to, to like, make sexual

00:33:07.080 disenchantment true. But you go onto any platform on, you know, Reddit, Twitter, whatever, and where

00:33:12.600 people are talking, discussing their experiences of polyamory, and you will always come across

00:33:15.960 people who are desperately jealous and really struggling with it and being like, I know I'm

00:33:19.960 being really irrational. I know I'm being really old fashioned. I need to like free my mind from

00:33:24.200 the shackles of whatever, like monogamous tyranny. But they can't quite do it. Because actually it

00:33:30.200 comes down to it. And we are, we can, unlike other animals, you know, we are able to overcome

00:33:36.360 our natural instincts a bit, like, you know, look around, we clearly live extremely different lives

00:33:41.480 from those of our ancestors and other, other primates. But like, there's a limit, there comes a

00:33:48.920 point where actually there's like a, there is a bedrock of biology. And it's actually really,

00:33:53.560 really hard to resist your instincts to that degree. And you will just end up unhappy if you,

00:33:57.880 if you keep plugging away at it.

00:33:59.000 Do you know what, when I visualize the process that I sort of think about,

00:34:03.080 we're discussing here, and more generally, when it applies to other issues, it feels to me like,

00:34:08.520 because I have to say this every time we talk about it, like, I come from a liberal back,

00:34:13.240 blah, blah, blah, blah. But it does feel like, and I value freedom. To me,

00:34:18.600 that is a very important value. I've written a whole book about it, right. But also, I feel it's

00:34:24.520 almost like we've sat there for decades, sowing at the chains that we thought were constraining us,

00:34:29.640 but actually in the process realized that we were actually also sowing the branch that we've

00:34:33.400 been sitting on at the same time.

00:34:34.920 Yeah.

00:34:35.320 And what we've ended up with is a lot more freedom to fall down to the ground and smash into it.

00:34:40.680 That's sort of how it feels like to me. Do you see what I'm saying?

00:34:43.800 Yeah, Chesterton's fence, right? It's the GK Chesterton's idea that you, you know,

00:34:48.440 a reformer comes along and sees a fence in the middle of a field and is like,

00:34:52.040 why on earth is this there? I'm going to tear it down. And then the conservator says,

00:34:56.120 if you don't know what the point of the fence is, you're the last person you should be tearing it down.

00:34:59.960 Because who knows what it is that the fence is, what tasks the fence is performing.

00:35:05.160 And I think that we are kind of learning that the hard way a bit as a culture,

00:35:07.880 like there were certain, there were reasons for some of these things.

00:35:11.880 And this is one of the problems you get with the progress narrative, that if your whole view

00:35:16.200 of history is premised on the idea that people in the past were like bad and stupid,

00:35:22.360 and that every year, you know, things get better and people get wiser and whatever.

00:35:25.320 And like, five minutes ago, you see all this stuff about like,

00:35:27.640 do you remember that rash of op-eds about how the sitcom Friends was like impossibly problematic?

00:35:33.400 Yes.

00:35:34.120 Yeah. It's like 20, 30 years ago, right? And we've already,

00:35:37.880 and we're already condemning people who are still, who are not even in middle age to like

00:35:42.280 the dustbin of history in terms of their, in terms of their ideology. I mean, this is so rapid,

00:35:46.600 this level of like regeneration and level of like reinventing, having to reinvent society constantly.

00:35:52.200 And also, I think there's a hubris to it as well. You know,

00:35:55.160 the idea that we should be able to just design society on the back of an envelope and that that's

00:36:00.360 going to be better than anything that's gone before. I think in reality, what we're actually

00:36:05.880 faced with is thinking about looking at real other societies and comparing them because these are

00:36:14.520 actually the like realistic options available to us. The utopias have never existed. And I think the

00:36:19.640 problem with some feminist efforts in this regard, like towards communal child rearing,

00:36:24.840 for instance, or political lesbianism, I mean, it does work for some people. Like political

00:36:29.560 lesbianism, to be fair, is completely internally coherent. Like if, if, if you look at the sociosexuality

00:36:35.080 gap and you look at the male propensity for aggression on average and all of this stuff and

00:36:39.240 say, I want none of it, like, you can do that. I see, I see the reasoning. The problem is that we then

00:36:46.040 have, what, max 100 years and the species dies out. It's like, it's like antenatalist in an extremely

00:36:52.200 profound way. If we want to make it work, and also if we want to recognise the fact that, you know,

00:36:59.560 most people are heterosexual, most people want to and will become parents, you know, like the, the

00:37:06.520 nature of human life necessitates connection and dependency. We can't just operate as these, like,

00:37:13.240 atomized individuals and hope for the best. Then we have to find a way of managing those connections

00:37:18.760 and dependency. And I think that the, my last chapter in the book, and probably, probably my most

00:37:24.040 controversial chapter, is called Marriage is Good, where I make the feminist argument for, for

00:37:30.600 monogamous marriage, as actually of all the, of all the systems we've experimented with, as the most

00:37:36.520 durable and the most likely to defend the interests of women and mothers in particular. Back in the kitchen.

00:37:45.640 To me, the, the, the, the really tragic aspect of all of this is that a lot of these people who

00:37:55.800 would identify as progressives and say, there is no difference between men and women, blah, blah,

00:37:59.800 blah, blah, blah, blah. There is a cap on female fertility that men simply don't have. Yeah. And once

00:38:07.400 you get to a certain age, it becomes more and more and more difficult. So this idea that you can have it

00:38:12.680 all, you're actually robbing a lot of women of the chance of becoming a mother, which is an awful

00:38:18.520 thing. It's surprising, isn't it? How, how little progress we've made in that regard. Like the, I

00:38:25.400 say progress advisedly, like the technological interventions, which we've, we've, we've tried

00:38:30.680 really hard to use to lengthen the female fertility window. They're not very good. IVF is not very good.

00:38:36.840 You know, it actually is surprisingly ineffective. Um, surrogacy is an ethical disaster, right? Like

00:38:43.800 the, all of these efforts to try and tame mother nature and, and, and basically give people absolute

00:38:49.560 freedom. And because this is what you come down to in the end, eventually, if your, your preeminent

00:38:53.240 value is freedom, you are at some point going to encounter like biological impediments to your

00:38:58.920 freedom and you have to try and chip away at them. Like if that's what the ideology directs you to do.

00:39:03.080 And I, I mean, what that means in practice is sometimes using technology with all of its unintended

00:39:08.840 consequences as all, you know, all new technologies have trade-offs, sometimes using the bodies of

00:39:13.000 poorer people. That's what the surrogacy industry does, right? Um, or sometimes trying to, you know,

00:39:18.280 master our, our monkey brains, right? Try and do things which we, we feel like we ought to be able to do

00:39:24.200 for, you know, whether that be have sex like a man, whatever it might be, and then suffering the emotional

00:39:29.240 fallout from that. And yeah, the fertility window is one of them. It's not going anywhere.

00:39:33.960 And it is another source of sexual asymmetry to the extent that particularly because women

00:39:38.680 tend to date men who are a little bit older than them. So, so, you know, women entering their thirties and

00:39:43.800 so on have that, have that sense of, um, time constraint that the men just don't. And so the playboys,

00:39:51.720 they can, you know, they can have a whale of a time for quite a long period before they have to

00:39:56.840 start worrying about whether they've, um, ruined their chances of ever having a family,

00:40:01.160 but then they're stringing along these women who, you know, wasting time and coming out of it really,

00:40:07.240 really bitter and miserable as a consequence.

00:40:10.120 Yeah. So where does this go, Louise? Because it's, I, I, you see, if we were a self-contained

00:40:19.080 society that lived on a planet and it was just us, we could do all sorts of bullshit that we want.

00:40:25.960 But when you're talking about, for example, political lesbianism, in addition to all the

00:40:29.400 things that you talk about, there's another factor here, which is there are societies that don't have

00:40:33.240 such a big problem with toxic masculinity and all this other nonsense. And as someone who actually

00:40:39.000 thinks the West, other than some of the craziness that is going on is pretty great, uh, and worth

00:40:45.080 existing and defending and living in and so on. One of my concerns has been that a lot of these

00:40:51.480 so-called progressive changes actually make us a lot weaker and more vulnerable and more appealing for

00:40:57.720 domination takeover by hostile cultures. So, uh, where, how do we sort of address some of these

00:41:04.920 things and to make sure that, A, men and women are happier? Because I, I agree with you completely,

00:41:09.800 what's happening is not good, especially for women, but also for men. But also, how do we address

00:41:14.760 it at the level of society so we actually are able to defend ourselves, project our power abroad,

00:41:20.200 have a confidence in our society that we seem to be losing because we're constantly beating

00:41:25.000 ourselves up about how we're not utopian enough?

00:41:30.200 Yeah. Great. Thanks, Louise.

00:41:35.560 Um, so I think there is possibly a sexual counter-revolution on the way.

00:41:40.600 And I say that with some trepidation, because I obviously think that the current scenario isn't

00:41:46.040 good. And I think that there has been a sort of the swing towards greater and greater freedom

00:41:52.840 has had all sorts of costs and, you know, all of this that we've talked about.

00:41:56.520 I also recognise that a sexual counter-revolution could be seriously ugly, depending on what it

00:42:00.600 looked like. All counter-revolutions are ugly. Precisely. Yeah. So, I mean, what you're seeing

00:42:05.320 a bit among, um, Gen Z is, I think, a bit of a, a bit of a bifurcation. You've got some Gen Z who,

00:42:13.720 you know, absolutely love like gender fluidity and, and, and, and sex positivism and all this stuff.

00:42:19.960 You've also got a surprising swing to the right, because normally what happens in recent decades

00:42:25.880 is that every generation gets kind of more left wing. But that's not true, actually, of this one.

00:42:30.520 And you've also, I think, got a definite swing back against porn culture, not always from the sort

00:42:36.840 of feminist ethics perspective, not always because I think everyone knows that the way that porn is

00:42:42.360 produced is really not fair trade. But because, um, coming from like groups like NoFap that see

00:42:50.680 porn as deleterious to men, which it is, but you know, that's not the only objection. Um,

00:42:58.520 you know, there are all sorts of other, like, I think on the whole, that's sort of promising, but I'm

00:43:03.800 also aware that there are lots of other ways in which you could have a sexual counter-revolution.

00:43:07.000 Islamism is one example. Um, a move back towards fundamentalist Christianity, I think probably

00:43:14.200 not in the UK, but definitely in the US. I mean, we're speaking just after Roe was overturned,

00:43:19.800 and you've got various states that have introduced some really draconian laws on abortion that go way

00:43:27.080 beyond what the modal American thinks. I mean, the modal American actually is pretty much agreed,

00:43:31.640 like first trimester is okay, and then only with serious medical problems or rape or whatever.

00:43:37.560 Um, whereas you've got some state legislators that have gone far beyond that, which is, I think,

00:43:44.840 always the risk when you, when you've overreached. Well, right. If you're out with, in the middle

00:43:49.480 of the streets with pink hair celebrating every abortion that happens, you're gonna, you're gonna do

00:43:53.640 that. Yeah. People are gonna react to that. I think particularly with social media, because you've

00:43:57.000 got this amazing capacity to, um, signal boost the crazies on both sides. Absolutely. Which inflames

00:44:04.680 the crazies on both sides. Yeah. And then you end up with this really extreme and dangerous

00:44:09.960 polarization, and you can totally see that with, with, with sex happening much more. But see,

00:44:14.440 what I would argue there as well, I mean, I do agree with you. I think both sides of the culture war,

00:44:18.200 whatever, is people from one side laughing and mocking the people who are crazy on the other side. But

00:44:25.320 what you also have is a cowardice on both sides about speaking out against their own extremists.

00:44:31.240 Yeah. Yeah. And that's, that's actually for us, that's where we're coming from. You know,

00:44:35.640 from our perspective, we were both sort of left ish comedians going, what the fuck has happened to

00:44:40.520 this industry and the world where like comedians have to like censor themselves and whatever.

00:44:45.000 But people don't want to do that. Politicians don't do that. They don't call out, you know,

00:44:49.800 if you're on the right, you're not going to call out the people who stormed January the 6th,

00:44:54.200 because you know that you're going to lose a portion of your voter base. And likewise,

00:44:57.480 on the left, you're not calling out all these social justice crazies. Yeah.

00:45:01.000 You're not, you're not calling out BLM burning down cities. You're not calling all that out.

00:45:05.000 You're just staying silent. And then of course, people are going to assume that you agree with

00:45:09.720 it. And then they're going to push back against it in ways that I agree with you completely is

00:45:13.960 going to throw the baby out with the bathwater. And it's one of the reasons I wrote the book,

00:45:17.480 because, you know, I'm coming from, I don't know, I'm still on the left. It's a complicated question,

00:45:23.160 but you know, I'm coming from, I grew up reading The Guardian. I worked for New Statesman and The

00:45:27.320 Daily Mail. Like I, I still feel a great affinity with left. And as you say, there is a complete

00:45:36.520 mismanagement of the left's crazies. And similarly on the right, it's a completely symmetrical process.

00:45:42.120 And I think the problem with the, I think that there has been a massive swing much too far in the

00:45:48.760 libertine direction. And I think that the, I think the, the, the counter swing, I think feminists have

00:45:56.840 to participate in it. In the sense that if, if we say, for instance, that, um, if we don't permit any

00:46:04.040 heterodoxy whatsoever within feminism, if you squish any, like any, any, any contrarian voice

00:46:12.120 and you reject any efforts to try and like negotiate this process, then you end up with no,

00:46:19.320 no female voices in it. I mean, this is one of the things, for instance, that's happened in

00:46:22.440 evolutionary psychology. The evolutionary psychology was condemned by feminists, you know, many decades

00:46:28.360 ago, as being inherently sexist. And there aren't any women now, right? I mean, no, sorry, there are,

00:46:36.200 but it's like, it's basically a no go zone for feminists, just to, just to voice your support of

00:46:40.040 evolution psychology as I do. It's like a very eccentric thing to do. And you get a lot of flack

00:46:45.320 for it, as I have obviously got, inevitably I knew I would. Um, but then what happens is that you don't

00:46:51.640 have a role in this discipline. There's no, there are no feminist voices within it. The most, you know,

00:46:56.200 the most, um, the most sexist voices can just run riot, basically. And I think that, yeah, there has

00:47:03.560 to be this effort at sort of not just indulging in the status games. I think that so much of what

00:47:10.040 goes on in this polarisation process is people don't want to criticise their in-groups. They don't

00:47:15.080 want to be tarred for whatever misdemeanour, like, you know, traitorous misdemeanour, because you get

00:47:21.880 punished so much more for being a traitor than you do for being an enemy, right? Yeah. Um, they're

00:47:26.920 so concerned with their status within the group that they tell lies because it's the way that you

00:47:33.320 maintain that status. And I think that we can't do that anymore. It's too serious. Yeah. Moving on,

00:47:39.880 I want to talk to you about pornography because we live in a culture now where pornography

00:47:45.000 is becoming ever more mainstream. And you can talk to a wealth of commentators and indeed some

00:47:49.880 people who worked in that industry who will say, what's the problem? You know, this is a natural

00:47:56.120 act, people watching it, consenting adults, blah, blah, blah. So what is the problem with pornography?

00:48:01.240 I think those voices are getting a little bit more sparse, actually. I mean, yeah, absolutely. You can,

00:48:05.640 you can easily find people who often have a financial stake in the industry who say that it's fine. You know,

00:48:12.280 porn hub work pretty hard to project an ethical image, um, through various schemes, whatever,

00:48:19.720 like there's an effort. I think it's sort of failing though. I think that the, particularly from the Gen Z,

00:48:25.800 the kids who've actually grown up on this stuff and who had smartphones when they were 11 or whatever,

00:48:30.120 and had access to all the world's horrors in a computer in their pockets, right? I think that they

00:48:35.320 recognise that this is, there's something really dystopian about porn. Um, I spoke at the Oxford

00:48:43.400 Union earlier this year on, on a motion to do with porn and I won very unexpectedly because I thought that,

00:48:52.360 I thought I'd be slaughtered by all of these, you know, sex positive kids. And I did get some very

00:48:56.040 hostile questions from the floor, but I won the vote. And I think that's because actually there is a,

00:49:01.800 a recognition from those who've lived it that porn culture is dreadful. I mean, I think porn culture is

00:49:09.640 the only people who are really profiting from porn are the people who actually own their platforms,

00:49:13.720 who are invariably men. There's this quote I use in the book that, you know, as tech comes to dominate

00:49:20.520 all of our lives, including our intimate lives, you end up with this situation where some people are

00:49:24.840 above the algorithm and some people are below the algorithm being influenced by, by it. And porn is one of

00:49:30.680 those things where almost everyone is below the algorithm. You know, obviously, if you are actually,

00:49:37.080 um, involved in creating it consensually or non-consensually, right, clearly you're, you're

00:49:41.960 influenced by the industry, but also people who use it and also just anyone who has sex with anyone who's

00:49:47.400 ever used it, because it has this way, particularly with young minds, of, of moulding people's sexuality.

00:49:54.840 I think there's this, there's this false model of sexuality, which is sort of linked to sexual

00:50:01.720 disenchantment, where you understand sexual desire to be a fixed quantity, both in terms of

00:50:10.760 quantity and also quality. And that what porn does, or other sexual relationships do or whatever,

00:50:16.840 is it just sort of provides a vent. It just like, um, provides a release for that sexual energy and

00:50:22.200 like you return to equilibrium. But actually what's, what's clear and what has been made clear actually

00:50:28.200 by the experiment of online porn is that that's not true. Like there are, um,

00:50:34.680 um, watching porn inscribes certain arousal patterns in the brain, you know, and the, and the porn platforms

00:50:45.000 are designed to do that. They're designed to lead the most compulsive users down this kind of rabbit

00:50:51.480 hole of seeking out more and more extreme stimulation, stuff that no one would ever have thought of,

00:50:57.400 you know, if left to their own devices, you know, age before the internet, even the age before magazines

00:51:02.040 or whatever, no one would have dreamed up some of the absolutely absurd stuff that you can find on

00:51:07.160 the internet for porn. And this is because the internet, you know, provides you access to the,

00:51:13.800 like the global hive mind. But not just that, it's because there is profit to be made from this stuff.

00:51:19.960 There's a minority of men, I think it's like 2% of men who watch porn seven hours or more a week.

00:51:27.240 And they, and they actually account for like a very large proportion of, of the porn industry's

00:51:31.240 viewers, viewers and profits. Like there's a, there's a Pareto distribution, right?

00:51:35.720 They're not a happy group of people. Like if you're watching that much porn, you, you can't

00:51:41.960 but really damage your real life relationships. It's very likely you'll end up with erectile dysfunction.

00:51:48.280 I mean, erectile dysfunction rates among young men have just skyrocketed in the last 20 years. And I think

00:51:52.280 there's, this is like a very obvious cause of it. Um, it's very hard to have like a normal sexual

00:51:58.920 relationship. Um, you're very likely to end up watching really weird stuff, including child sexual

00:52:05.480 abuse images. I mean, there are psychologists and, and, and clinical psychiatrists who, who are,

00:52:10.920 who are treating men who've been found guilty of child sexual abuse image possession, saying that

00:52:16.760 actually they're seeing men now who would not previously have ended up doing this because they

00:52:20.840 wouldn't, they're not like, um, they're not true paedophiles in the sense that this isn't like

00:52:27.000 their sexual orientation. What they've ended up doing is just go, you know, clicking and clicking

00:52:31.480 and clicking and clicking and ending up watching the most depraved things imaginable because they've

00:52:37.560 got sucked into this. You know, it's called, um, limbic capitalism is a term that's used to describe

00:52:43.880 this, this area of capitalism. It doesn't just apply to porn. Obviously it applies to like,

00:52:48.200 uh, junk food, social media, you know, um, things like apps. The reason that apps are often,

00:52:57.560 uh, brightly colored and kind of glistening, you know, how they make them glisten is because it makes

00:53:02.600 your brain think that it's water and fresh fruit. Like those are, those are stimuli that we find really,

00:53:08.120 really attractive. Um, all of this stuff is designed to like, to like hit you here, you know,

00:53:14.120 in the bit of the brain that actually you're not necessarily consciously aware of. And porn's a

00:53:19.000 really, really good example of limbic capitalism because the whole thing is just set up to arouse

00:53:22.760 the human body to the extent that it actually almost disables your moral reasoning because going

00:53:28.280 back to sexual disgust, um, being sexually aroused partially disables your disgust response because

00:53:36.520 obviously to have sex, you have to get close to people and, you know, normally you're disgusted

00:53:40.440 by strangers, right? Like being in someone's armpit on the tube is disgusting, but clearly to have sex,

00:53:44.440 you have to override that. So there's a, there's a, there's like an exchange process and just the

00:53:48.920 disgust response is really closely linked to moral intuition. So it basically means that if you're

00:53:53.400 really sexually aroused as the platforms are designed to make you so you can't reason morally

00:54:01.080 in the same way that you normally would. And so a lot of people, including women who use porn,

00:54:05.320 will talk about, um, going to these platforms, watching stuff that like in normal times they

00:54:11.880 would think was appalling, like obvious acts of coercion, whatever. And then they orgasm and

00:54:18.040 then they push the laptop away and they're like, Oh my God. But they come back and do it because the

00:54:22.840 whole thing is designed in that way. And I think that to compare, you know, people will talk about

00:54:28.760 like, Oh, what about erotic art? And what about, you know, magazines of the sixties or whatever? I mean,

00:54:34.280 like, you know, there were clearly problems with magazines of the sixties, but it's a completely

00:54:38.120 different beast. It's a completely different beast. And I think that allowing the online

00:54:42.840 porn industry to run rampant has just been this ground experiment, particularly on the world's

00:54:48.680 children. And I think as the results are coming in, it's becoming clear that this was a really, really

00:54:55.560 dangerous experiment.

00:54:59.400 Louise, one other issue, uh, that a lot of the women who watch our show have always wanted us

00:55:05.160 to talk about, you touched on earlier, which is surrogacy. I don't really know much about it.

00:55:09.960 I've never really had to think about it. Uh, but, uh, but as we know with some other conversations that

00:55:15.720 women like to have, women are really angry about it. So what's going on there?

00:55:19.080 Yeah. I mean, I think that the problem is there are a bunch of problems with surrogacy. Um,

00:55:25.240 that surrogacy is basically where someone is carrying your child for you, right?

00:55:29.240 Yeah. I mean, normally paid, but not necessarily. So there's, there's, there's so-called altruistic

00:55:34.440 surrogacy, um, which doesn't involve payment in this country at the moment. The law is that you're

00:55:39.880 not allowed to pay someone for surrogacy. And it happens because you are physically unable to,

00:55:44.680 or you don't wish to carry and give birth to a child and you want someone else to do it for you.

00:55:48.520 Those, are those the two reasons?

00:55:50.520 Yeah. Okay.

00:55:51.000 And there are also two subcategories in the sense that there's traditional surrogacy,

00:55:54.280 which involves, um, the surrogate's own egg.

00:55:57.400 Right.

00:55:58.040 Mm-hmm.

00:55:58.600 And then there's, uh, gestational surrogacy where you have an egg donor,

00:56:03.400 whether that be from a commission, you know, one of the commissioning parents or from

00:56:07.400 a third party.

00:56:08.280 Okay.

00:56:08.600 Um, so they basically put a fertilized egg in you.

00:56:11.320 Yeah.

00:56:11.800 So you're just a carrier and that's it. It's not your DNA.

00:56:15.000 Yeah. Yeah.

00:56:15.960 I mean, one of the reasons that that's happened is because traditional surrogacy arrangements,

00:56:20.440 um, the surrogate is just obviously the mother in every possible way.

00:56:23.720 Yeah.

00:56:24.200 Right. Except legally.

00:56:26.440 And so you ended up with a lot of disputes over custody because surrogates change their minds.

00:56:30.360 Like surprisingly often, surrogates change their minds.

00:56:32.520 You say that, I mean, I, I, like I said, I've never thought about this issue before,

00:56:36.280 but my wife has had a baby.

00:56:38.280 Well, we had a baby a couple of months ago and I, I can't imagine.

00:56:44.680 Like how.

00:56:45.480 Handing the baby over.

00:56:46.440 No.

00:56:46.840 Yeah.

00:56:47.080 I know.

00:56:47.480 I know.

00:56:48.120 I had exactly the same thing because I've got a 14 month old.

00:56:51.080 Oh, okay.

00:56:51.720 Congratulations.

00:56:52.440 Yeah.

00:56:52.520 Thank you.

00:56:52.920 And yeah, I had exactly the same, like, you can sort of get it in theory that before,

00:56:57.720 you know, if you've not actually gone through the process of having a baby.

00:56:59.800 But once you've gone through it, it's.

00:57:01.000 You think, yeah, because your emotional bond to that child is just, you know, unless, you know,

00:57:05.880 clearly there are cases where say women have terrible post-traumatic stress from the birth

00:57:10.760 or they have postnatal depression or, you know, like there are clearly sometimes cases where it

00:57:15.480 goes wrong and the bonding doesn't happen as it ought to.

00:57:18.520 But in a healthy relationship, you know, that bond is so strong and it has to be.

00:57:23.080 I mean, again, it's going back to evolutionary thing.

00:57:24.920 Like, newborn babies are completely helpless.

00:57:27.400 They absolutely need.

00:57:28.520 Yeah, but you've carried this creature inside you for now.

00:57:31.320 Like, I feel sick thinking about it, to be honest, right now.

00:57:33.960 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:57:34.280 It's probably why I've never thought about it before.

00:57:35.880 Yeah.

00:57:36.360 It is awful, actually.

00:57:37.720 Yeah.

00:57:38.360 Yeah.

00:57:38.600 And that, to me, I mean, there are a lot of objections you can make to the surrogacy industry.

00:57:42.520 The fact that what often happens is you've got, like, seriously poor women kept in basically,

00:57:49.480 like, farmyard condition, you know, in the third world creating babies for people in the first

00:57:55.800 world. It's like a serious handmaid's tale. There are some really, really, really horrible

00:58:00.440 examples. There are also examples which are not like that, much more sort of, you know,

00:58:05.640 organic surrogacy where you have, you know, grass fed, right? Yeah. Where you have, say,

00:58:12.200 altruistic arrangements or whatever, or women who are paid better. Like, America has a flourishing

00:58:19.320 surrogacy industry in states like California.

00:58:21.720 So how much do these women get paid in places like California? Do you know?

00:58:25.800 I think potentially quite a lot. And I don't know the numbers off of my head. Like, sometimes

00:58:30.360 quite a lot. And often these women who don't necessarily have a lot of other options. I mean,

00:58:36.440 it's quite common, for instance, for women whose husbands are in the military to do this, because

00:58:41.160 it's a sort of money you can earn. They're strapped for cash, and it's a sort of money you can earn,

00:58:45.240 like, you know, at home. I mean, it's a seriously weird job, in the sense that you do it literally

00:58:51.560 all the time. And you have, like, none of the employment conditions you would expect from

00:58:57.800 literally anything else. It's a very strange job. But, you know, there is obviously, like,

00:59:03.720 a radical feminist, a Marxist case to be made that this is the most disgusting thing, like form of

00:59:09.400 exploitation at the biological level that you can imagine. And there's clearly a huge power imbalance

00:59:17.160 based on money. I agree with that. But to me, and it partly comes down to just the experience of

00:59:22.600 having a baby myself, I just think that the idea of setting out to sever the maternal bond, you know,

00:59:27.880 obviously, sometimes the maternal bond has to be broken, you know, if you've got, like,

00:59:31.400 a child that has to be taken into care, right? It's a tragedy. It sometimes has to happen. Or,

00:59:38.680 you know, if a mother dies, and the baby has to be raised by someone else, you know, these people

00:59:43.480 make the best of it, you can find ways of getting through. But obviously, you know, it's an awful

00:59:47.400 thing, no one wants it to happen. But with surrogacy, that's the point. You set out for a

00:59:52.840 woman to carry a baby to town, give birth to this baby, and then break that bond, potentially never see

00:59:58.040 the baby ever again. And I just think it is that thing, isn't it, of like, denying our animal

01:00:04.600 selves, like resisting the most intense emotions that we can have as human beings. And you know,

01:00:11.400 one of the most, the strongest emotions you can have is maternal love. And I just think that the

01:00:16.440 mutilation of that is terrible. And it applies no matter the circumstances, it applies to altruistic

01:00:21.560 as well. I mean, there are some situations, so you know, say a sister is carrying a baby for her

01:00:25.880 sister or something. It's very complicated, clearly, in terms of the family relationships.

01:00:30.760 You know, maybe if she's continuing to have a relationship with her child slash niece or nephew,

01:00:36.680 that's like the best possible version of it. That's almost never what it actually looks like, though.

01:00:41.720 That is, I mean, look, I'm not a woman, I don't know, blah, blah. But to give birth to something

01:00:48.280 and then just hand it away like it's a parcel?

01:00:50.760 Yeah. Like, it's commodity. I mean, it is human trafficking, isn't it? Because you're not

01:00:55.080 actually being paid for the pregnancy. You're being paid to hand the baby over.

01:00:57.960 And I suppose this is one of the solutions to the fact that we need to extend the fertility window.

01:01:03.320 Yeah, this is exactly, this is a great example of just like chipping away at any limits on human

01:01:09.000 freedom, rather than saying, look, life is tragic sometimes. You know, I have huge sympathy for

01:01:17.240 people who can't have biological children for whatever reason. But also, you know, if the

01:01:25.160 impediment to your freedom, your desire is, you know, breaking the maternal bonds for money,

01:01:35.080 I just think that's too much of a cost to pay.

01:01:38.520 But also, the other thing that I think about here is the fact that actually, for a lot of people,

01:01:45.000 and I see this, I don't know what the data is, but anecdotally, I see this for a lot of women,

01:01:49.800 the fact that they're not able to have a child biologically is a consequence of choices that

01:01:53.960 have been made prior. And quite often under many of the things we've been talking about in this

01:01:59.400 interview, where society has told you that you can have things that actually you can't have.

01:02:03.480 Yeah, it's usually age-related. And in that process, you've pursued things that don't have the

01:02:09.000 long-term outcomes that you actually want, because you've bought into the idea that

01:02:13.800 we live in a world that we don't live in. It's tragic, actually, Louise, what we're talking about.

01:02:18.760 It really is. And it worries me a lot, because, you know, I was saying to you before we started

01:02:22.520 this interview, most of my family are female. I have three younger sisters. I have a ton of female

01:02:27.320 cousins. It's like me and my dad are the only ones holding the fort for masculinity, just about,

01:02:31.000 and the family. And when I talk to them, these problems are manifest in many of their lives.

01:02:36.040 Not all, but in many of their lives. And that's in Russia and Ukraine and Armenia. That's not here

01:02:40.520 in the West, where it's far more advanced. Yeah. It worries me a lot, this stuff. It really does.

01:02:48.600 So, other than the evil right-wing backlash that you're expecting, how do those of us who are trying

01:02:54.680 to be sensible about all of this make efforts to address it? I mean,

01:03:04.040 there is a lot to be said for some of the norms that we've torn down. Not all of them,

01:03:09.080 by any means. But, you know, marriage is an example. There was a reason for this stuff. You know,

01:03:15.880 marriage has proved itself to be a particularly good basis. But you're talking like you're a

01:03:24.440 funeral. Do you know what I mean? You're going, well, he's in the ground now. We'll miss him.

01:03:29.080 I know. Yeah. How do you resurrect this stuff? Well, is it resurrect or is it something new that

01:03:38.760 we have to, you know, find a way to, maybe it's not about resurrecting marriage, just acknowledging

01:03:44.520 that it's good. Like, there's got to be a way, right? Because, I mean, let's be objective. We're

01:03:50.760 pretty screwed if we don't find a way through this. And you have a child, I have a child. They're

01:03:56.280 going to be growing up in this world. I don't want them to be experiencing the stuff that young

01:04:01.320 people are experiencing now. Yeah. There's got to be a way, right? I take hope in the fact that

01:04:06.440 I have had so many responses to this book along the lines of like, thank God for saying, you're

01:04:10.280 saying this, that I've been thinking this all this time. And I think that, I think it is possible,

01:04:15.880 despite all the material constraints, despite all, you know, I think that when everyone is

01:04:19.880 simultaneously thinking something and not saying it, and then suddenly you're allowed to say it,

01:04:24.440 I think things can change really quickly. There's that, you know, there's that tipping point,

01:04:29.080 where actually it becomes permissible. And I think that there has been a feeling

01:04:34.840 that if you voice any of this, you're going to get smacked down, you're going to get accused of

01:04:39.880 being a, you know, religious conservative, whatever, which is one of the reasons I felt the need to

01:04:44.280 write the book because I, I have like a, I have a strong enough record on feminist campaigning and

01:04:53.000 frontline work. And, you know, that I, I'm not afraid of people saying that I'm, I'm a fraud,

01:04:59.960 I'm not a real feminist or whatever, because I just sort of laugh it off. So I feel as though

01:05:04.760 I felt, I felt a bit of responsibility to, to, to put my head above the parapet and say it,

01:05:09.960 and have got a lot of criticism, but I have equally also got a lot of positive responses,

01:05:15.080 particularly, you know, from readers, um, saying, yeah, this is, this is what we're all thinking.

01:05:23.560 So that's my little glimmer of hope. I'm not generally a very optimistic person, but.

01:05:27.560 There we go. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

01:05:32.360 Before we talk about everything else about where to find you online and all of that.

01:05:36.760 And before our bonus locals questions, of course. Of course. We always finish with the final question,

01:05:41.800 which is what's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be?

01:05:48.040 I'm going to mess up the, the optimistic note that we tried to end on. Sex robots.

01:05:53.080 I think sex robots are on their way. I think they shouldn't be. And I think there's a very like pro

01:05:58.200 male reason to say that they shouldn't be. I mean, the, the concern for sex, about sex robots has

01:06:03.000 generally been from a feminist perspective, the idea that you're kind of training, um,

01:06:08.360 men who use them to think of women as being inert and whatever, like encouraging violence. I'm sure

01:06:15.480 that's probably true. For me though, I think the problem, one of the really big problems with sex

01:06:20.920 robots as well as that is that you've got sky-rotting amounts of young men who are not having sex

01:06:29.720 relationships at all, who are going into their twenties or in thirties, remaining virgins, hooked

01:06:35.240 on porn, you know, all of this. And more than that, also just not living productive lives, you know,

01:06:40.120 not holding down jobs, not like, not making any progress in their lives. Um, just stuck in this kind of

01:06:46.920 kind of miserable adolescence. And I think sex robots would just super charge that if they ever

01:06:52.360 became, you know, affordable for these men and became, um, like sufficiently convincing, which they

01:06:59.160 are on track to. Because what, what sex robots basically do to the like, to the monkey brain, you know,

01:07:06.120 to the evolved mind, is they, is they give you a completely false sense of like, your own success in

01:07:12.440 the world. You can be, you know, you don't have to go to the gym, you don't have to clean your room,

01:07:17.960 you don't have to have a job, you don't have to own a house, you don't have to do any of the things

01:07:21.400 that will actually make you a happier and more enriched human being, because you've got your sex

01:07:25.240 robot who will give you the impression that actually you're a stud, right? And I think that

01:07:30.040 there's a, it's like super stimuli times a million, right? The sex robot is like the most,

01:07:37.320 the most perfect encapsulation of that, of that phenomenon and that risk. And yeah,

01:07:42.840 I don't, I think that we need to, I think we need to ban them basically, like whatever mechanism

01:07:48.360 is necessary. Very interesting. Well, it's been a positive, optimistic, uplifting interview.

01:07:57.080 But Louise, you know what I have to say, I really, first of all, respect you for writing the book.

01:08:02.120 I really am very, very impressed with how carefully you've thought about these things and how

01:08:07.160 much you have to say. And I do hope that you continue to write on these issues and we'd love

01:08:11.960 to have you back again next time you've got a book out or anything you particularly feel like you have

01:08:16.760 to say. I actually think that some of the stuff we talked about today is probably going to be shaping

01:08:22.440 the world for many decades to come in very powerful ways. And a lot of us are going to have to think

01:08:28.920 extra carefully about how to navigate all that if we're going to get to a better place, which you

01:08:33.080 don't think we're going to get to anyway. So thanks for coming on. The book is, of course,

01:08:37.720 the case against the sexual revolutions. Where can the sexual revolution, rather,

01:08:41.480 where can people find you online and follow your work if they want to get more depressed than they

01:08:46.120 already are? So I also write for the New Statesman and I write for the Daily Mail.

01:08:51.480 Great. Are you on Twitter?

01:08:53.480 I am on Twitter at Louise underscore M underscore Perry.

01:08:57.240 Perfect. Louise, thank you so much for coming on and thank you guys for watching and listening.

01:09:01.880 We'll see you on Locals for a couple of bonus questions from you for Louise. But in the

01:09:07.480 meantime, thank you for watching and we'll see you very soon with another brilliant episode

01:09:11.240 like this one or our show. And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go,

01:09:15.560 it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys.

01:09:21.880 How does a single woman find a guy who isn't totally porn-addled?

01:09:31.880 3

01:09:41.480 useful.

01:09:43.960 Mommy can see you soon, man.

01:09:45.320 See you next time.

01:09:47.640 We'll see you soon.

01:09:49.560 3

01:09:50.360 2

01:09:50.760 2

01:09:50.840 2

01:09:51.160 3

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TRIGGERnometry - July 28, 2022

The Sexual Revolution is Terrible for Women - Louise Perry

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