The Case Against the Sexual Revolution | Louise Perry

Intro

The argument is that marriage is an oppressive tool, which I say yes, it is. When motherhood became a biological choice for women, fatherhood became a social choice for men. It became socially acceptable for men to walk away from children in a way that it hadn't been before. Those high-status men are able to really, really set the terms. If a woman doesn't, say, have sex on the first date, it's easy enough to find another woman who will. So, you end up with a slightly artificial level of competition between women who, you know, there are actually enough men to go around, but there aren't enough men that they actually want to be with to go around. And so, they're competing for a minority of men who basically have I mean, it's kind of open season.

They can demand that their own preferences be met. Louise Perry, it's very nice to meet you. And you. What a pleasure to be here. Yeah, this should be good. Uh thank you very much for agreeing to come on. I'm excited for this conversation.

Before we get started, can you give a brief background about who you are and what it is you do? I am a a British journalist based in London and a campaigner and uh the director of a think tank called The Other Half, which maybe we're going to talk about, which is um we promote what we call common sense feminism. Wow. Yeah. And uh and I'm an author of a new book called The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. Case Against the Sexual Revolution. Okay, this should be good.

How much negativity do you get online? Less than you'd think. Good. I thought Yeah, I thought that I'd get loads, but actually, I would say 90% positive. Well, you have a very nice soft voice, too. I don't Maybe that's what it is, yeah. People can't get mad at you, too mad at you.

Oh, that's nice. I think it might be the English accent, as well. Yeah, that's sneaky. That's makes people sound smarter, too. It's kind of like a cheat code in life. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Okay. This should be good. So, what's your book What's your book about? And what is common sense feminism? Let's start with what is common sense feminism actually?

What is Common Sense Feminism?

I mean partly it's a nice phrase that sort of confuses people. This sort of calling a book something like the case against the social revolution is bit is a bit confounding, isn't it? What we're trying to do with the other half, the reason we called it the other half is because it's not only about talking about women, you know, the other half of the human race. It's also about talking about the other half of life. Because my view that I put forward in the book is that what the feminist project has been at least in the second half of the 20th century until now has been about encouraging women to be more like men. Mhm. In every possible way.

So to imitate male sexuality, to gain access to the male sphere, to imitate the male life cycle in terms of things like prioritizing professional success over anything else. All this sort of stuff. And I think it is very clear and is becoming clearer over time that this isn't making women happy. And that actually most women do not see that as their aspiration in life. Most women want to either prioritize family life or to or to balance it against career. Most women want to spend more time with their children not less. Most women want to aspire to stable and meaningful monogamous relationships rather than have sex like a man as Sex and the City described it.

And this is extremely obvious from polling. You ask British women and indeed American women all of these questions and and it's a fairly there's a fairly resounding majority. But that isn't what you hear represented in Westminster or indeed in Washington. Because there's a really big gap between what most feminist lobbying organizations or rather because the organizations of all kinds and and and also in the media tend to represent as what women want and what women do actually want. So that the project that we've set ourselves is to try and represent majority female opinion in the corridors of power. Wow. Okay.

Are you making any progress? It's very early days, but yes, I would say yes. Good. Good. Um, do you know the background of why the sexual revolution kind of pushed women towards acting more like men? It's an interesting question. I think it's probably partly got to do with the women who who who formed the second wave.

Um, I think that the the feminist culture of the 1970s, um, which was really focused in places like Greenwich Village in New York and a handful of other urban centers.

The Sexual Revolution and Aspiring Toward Masculinity

And the women who who who wrote the most important texts of the second wave and went on to found organizations like now tended to to be super super well educated, super intelligent, super disagreeable, particularly disinclined towards things like family life, you know, the whole the whole from their from their point of view, they were really spurred on by a desire to reject the traditional feminine role and often did so in quite spectacular ways, you know, on a personal level. Some of the biographies of second wave are really um really unusual, really interesting. And so, they obviously had preferences that are different from average female preferences. Which isn't to say that everything that they campaigned for was so kind of misaligned with what is good for most women, you know, things like setting up domestic violence shelters or setting up rape crisis centers. My first job working out of university was um was working at a rape crisis center. Those are the kind of institutions formed from the second wave which are, you know, like really good. I don't think anyone I I think very few even anti-feminists would argue against the establishment of those kind of institutions.

But I think they were also just generally geared towards aspiring to a more masculine way of living just on the basis of self-selection and and personality than are most women. That would be my guess as to why the priorities kind of tended in that direction. That's interesting. That totally makes sense, too. Bunch of disagreeable, extremely smart women pushed society in a direction that doesn't represent the average woman. Yeah. Yeah.

Wow. Although I do say say that I think that the feminist thinking has been important and has and has um shaped our recent history in all sorts of important ways. But it it all comes secondary to material changes. All of it, you know. The I think it was Phyllis Schlafly who who first said that the washing machine did more to liberate women than did feminist campaigning. I think this is just so this is evidently true, right? And there are so many ways in which our lives have dramatically changed within the last 100 years, not just the washing machine, but the pill, which is really forms the Yeah. the center of my my book, the fact that we now are orientated much toward much more towards a knowledge and service-based economy, which de-emphasizes manual manual work and and physical strength, which of course men have more of.

Um I think all of these things have have pushed women out of the domestic sphere and into a more more masculine roles. Um you know, it is good for GDP, to put it bluntly, to to have women participating in the workforce. And when you have things like washing machines and central heating and microwaves and all these things which mean that the work of running a household just takes less time, it becomes more possible to for women to do things like that. And when you can also delay childbearing through the pill and other contraception, women being more like men becomes possible and becomes actually economically productive. The problem is that there are all sorts of costs down the line from that. And actually including economic costs down the line from that, which mean that we're dealing with some quite painful trade-offs. This episode is sponsored by NordVPN.

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Economic Trade-Offs of Women Being in the Workplace

Uh let's start with economic trade-offs. So, what are the economic trade-offs for having, I suppose, women in the workplace and less around children? Cuz someone has to look after the children would be the first thing. So, you have these slightly strange artifacts of the way that we um measure GDP, where if you have um if a if a mother goes to work and hires a nanny to do her role what was her role while she's at work? Um that appears to be economic growth because you now have in that unit do you have mother, father, nanny all employed as opposed to just having father employed. It's it's a misleading way of calculating that though because the you know, the work of the domestic work that was previously unpaid is still being done. It's exactly the same work.

It's just being done by someone else and for a wage. Um and of course is is there's all sorts of sort of friction in that system that wouldn't be there otherwise because you've got three rotating parts that need to lock together unlike in the single earner household where you just have the one and then you have someone you have specialization between mother and father. And you have mother specializing in the domestic work. Um instead when you in introduce the paid component everything becomes much more complex, much more liable for collapse. So interestingly um Elizabeth Warren of all people who wrote a book some decades ago ago called The Two-Income Trap about the fact that yeah, I've heard of that. Yeah, when you when when both parents are in in paid employment the household becomes dependent on both of them being in paid employment and there's much less room for slack. Whereas what you would have had previously is is women kind of dipping in and out of the workforce, particularly working class women, dipping in and out of the workforce when say children are a bit older or when others' earnings have stopped third and they need a bit of extra money and female labor participation becomes a sort of a variable that can change over time depending on economic circumstances.

Whereas if the family all families are dependent on two full-time incomes, there's no room for slack. There's no there's no source of other income if if if hard times come along. And what's more you will end up competing with So the lump of labor fallacy obviously you know, it's not quite true that um you end up with the wages halved by women entering the workforce because women entering the workforce does grow the economy in all sorts of ways, but there are certain products like housing for instance, if you have a fixed supply of housing in say a good school district and everyone is competing for to buy that to buy that housing and everyone is competing with two incomes rather than one, you you do end up in the situation which I think we we're in now where in order to have a good standard of living you have to have two incomes unless you have one extraordinary high high earner. So, is that is that a result of women going back to work or going to work in the first place? Is that actually a direct result of that or did the housing the increase in housing prices come first? There are other things contributing to housing housing prices um including I mean the the the the thing that is most unspoken about in the um political discourse on this is lack of building which clearly is a factor. It's a factor as well in someone like the UK that you have this extreme concentration of high earning jobs in London and in other in other part other parts of the world you have this concentration of high earning jobs in in in the major cities so you will expect, you know, house prices in San Francisco to rocket because Silicon Valley is basically nearby.

Um there are other factors, but I think it is absolutely the case that joint mortgages, the fact that you now have have two incomes competing for the same for the same product of the housing that everyone wants has made it more difficult for people to live on single incomes. And look, there are advantages of women being in the I mean I say this, look at me, I'm working, there are advantages of women being in the workforce in all sorts of ways. Um women having, you know, we mentioned domestic violence briefly that if women have separate sources of of income and want to escape an abusive marriage, that's clearly advantageous. The fact that women I mean women on average are as intelligent as men, have all sorts of skills that are actually really well suited to modern economy. The fact that women are more agreeable than men is actually great in a in a service economy for instance. Um and increasingly I'd say that office culture and all sorts of corporate culture is increasingly feminine and and actually women can really really flourish in that kind of environment. So I I I I think that the the the idea that we can just sweep women out of public life and and go back to the 1950s.

Which is of course an unusual decade. Um I don't think that's going to happen even if we wanted it to. But the but but the but these tradeoffs exist. As with as with any complex historical change. Interesting. Okay. Um you you spoke about the birth control pill.

I'm very interested in that. I I know when I was young I was put on the birth control when I was 14. I think it for my skin.

Consequences of the Birth Control Pill

You know, because you get And I I didn't stop taking it until I was 23 when I started reading about what the birth control does to your brain and the side effects it can cause and generally does cause. That's what I figured out since, right? Like depression, things like that. Uh can you get into what what you think the birth control's done to society? It's interesting you talk about the I mean I don't really write in the book about the past the personal side effects of birth control pill but so many women experience it and just and just anecdotally I know so many women who've said they they came off the pill and their personalities completely changed. Yeah. And they realize how cuz as you say if you go on it as a teenager for acne and then you're still on it a decades.

You don't even know. You don't even know part Also, if you're having a moody teenage phase, then and the moodiness never ends, then you don't identify the issues as the pill. It's extremely problematic, yeah. Especially if you've been taking it for so long, you don't even notice. It's like a vitamin. Yeah. And it shouldn't surprise us really because we're we're meddling with very, very important hormones, which have all sorts of far-reaching effects that we should we don't really understand.

I mean, we don't as a as a species, we don't really understand our reproductive system at all. Yeah. Um and all of the efforts to do things like growing babies outside of the womb or sex change or, you know, any of these sort of ambitious scientific projects, they're going nowhere. Like let's be real. Yeah, yeah. It's so much more complex than anyone can can actually grasp. I think we're a long way away from being able to do that kind of radical radical transformation even if we even if we'd want to.

I think the idea of growing I personally find it incredibly dystopian, the idea of growing babies outside of the human body. Oh, and you have it's so narcissistic, too. It's like, oh, we're we're smart enough to figure this out. And that's that's just a narcissistic way of thinking, I think. Imagine a Imagine a a newborn who'd never heard his or her mother's heartbeat. I just find that Oh. You with your like English accent, too.

It's like worse that the description's worse, yeah. Yeah. Um so, the pill, yeah. I mean, so in terms of the the social consequences of it, I don't think that we should be surprised that for the first time in the history of the world, reliably separating sex and reproduction has had some pretty massive effects, and that those effects have been both positive and negative and and vast, right? And the thing that you notice happening across if you if you know, you look at the the social effects in the in the decade or two immediately following the introduction of the pill, remembering that it came in two waves. So, initially the pill was made available to married women only, and then it was made available to unmarried women as well. Ah.

And then not long afterwards, you have I mean, the the timeline in Britain and America and other um Western nations is all about the same. Not long afterwards, you then get the decriminalization of abortion. And then not long afterwards, you see the the shotgun marriage ends as a as an institution. You see you see marriage rates of all kind falling off a cliff, but you also see the shotgun marriage, which had existed to deal with unwanted childbearing, disappears as a social tool. And the the really perverse outcome of the pill, which is a beautiful example of the fact that human beings are very, very complicated and our society is very complicated, and you can't predict how technology shocks are going to affect them, you see um rates of single motherhood rise. Who would have thought that would happen, right? You you introduce a technology which allows women to regulate their fertility, and it leads to a rise in single motherhood.

But I think the reason for that is because the pill isn't 100% effective. No form of contraception is. And actually the early pill in particular, you've got quite a high rate of about quite a high failure rate. But you end up with the absolute amount of premarital sex goes up, and therefore some portion of that is going to result in an unwanted pregnancy, and and and some women, for whatever reason, don't want to have an abortion. And so you'll end up with unexpected babies. And when the social institutions that used to exist to regulate fertility, like marriage, have all fallen away as a result of the pill's introduction. That's I mean the the the phrase I use in the book, which isn't original to me, I can't remember who who first said it, but when motherhood became a biological choice for women, fatherhood became a social choice for men.

And it became socially it became socially acceptable for men to walk away from children um in a way that it hadn't been before. Not to say that there hadn't always of scoundrels, you know, impregnating women and then and then leaving. But it is now the deadbeat dad is now completely socially acceptable in a way that he wasn't before. And he's really in a way that one of the one of the winners of the sexual revolution because there's now no there's no no I mean the the the rates of nonpayment of child support are astonishingly high. And it shouldn't surprise us that single mothers are some of the um is the group that the group of people most likely to be in poverty, while married mothers are least likely to be. Which is why I have a chapter at the end of my book where I make a feminist case for marriage. I say that actually marriage is completely in the interest of of of mothers and and their children.

That doesn't surprise me at all.

The Feminist Case for Marriage

But that's but that but that has probably been the most controversial chapter for feminist readers. Really? Yeah. Oh, well. Yeah, I suppose. If you don't think about it, then it would be difficult to wrap your head around, I suppose. The The argument is that marriage is an oppressive tool.

Mhm. Um, which I say yes, it is. Or maybe repressive would be a better way of phrasing it in that the whole point of it as an institution is that you make a promise and you're obliged to keep a promise. And that means that your freedom is limited. There are things that you can't do anymore once you've entered into that kind of institution. But that applies just as much to men as it does to women. The purpose of the institution is that it is controlling, but the principle being once you have established this unit legally bound together, socially bound together, spiritually bound together if you if you understand in a religious sense, then that is the basis from which you can form a family.

So, it's a kind of It is Yes, it's a means of of control and repression, but it's one that permits your life to begin as a family. And also and means, you know, in extremis that the nature of sexual asymmetry, which despite all of recent efforts by the trans movement and so on, isn't going away, right?

Sexual Asymmetries Between Men and Women

Men and women are profoundly different on a cellular level. I was I find it really interesting that the campaign to deny the existence of biological differences between men and women has arisen at exactly the same time and become perversely successful at exactly the same time that actually we're understanding more and more about how profoundly we do differ. Ooh, let's get into that. How How do women and men differ? You said on a cellular level. Yeah. So, I So, in the obvious ways, women are the ones who get pregnant, men are not.

We are smaller and weaker than men, particularly on in terms of upper body strength. So, the the force that a little woman can apply through a punch is about half as much as a man. Um which is a lot, right? And this is why you see in um in elite athletics, the difference between male and female athletes is is huge. I do wonder whether the the the people the progressives who are most in denial about the differences between men and women physically, I I I cannot help but suspect that they don't do a lot of sports. Cuz I think that if you participate particularly in strength-based sports or like martial arts or anything like that, you you are going to it's going to become immediately apparent that men and women are profoundly different in this dimension. They're just hanging out with all the like spindly artist types.

I Yeah, very indoorsy. Yeah. Um um So, there's those which ought to be obvious to everyone, but there are also all sorts of really interesting ways like women's immune systems are very different from men's. As we saw with with COVID, men were more likely to die from COVID, and it was partly to do with things like men um certain lifestyle factors that might make a difference, but it was also just to do with our immune systems and the fact that we have to have immune systems which are um able to accommodate the presence of an of an alien being in all you know, through pregnancy. So, it it has to be different. Women are more prone therefore to having autoimmune diseases. Um and um Much more Yeah, more prone to things like as you know, osteoporosis.

I mean, a host of things where you see massive massive sex differences. Um there's increasingly moves towards in in in pharmaceuticals, moves towards creating drugs that are actually have different formulations for men and for women because of the recognition that actually our our systems are so profoundly different that it's not we can't just consider women to be smaller men, which is normally what you do in dosing. You have to regard men and women as actually having some really fundamental differences, which mean that our drug interactions are are different. And yes, this is happening exactly at the same time that you have this like political discussion around whether or not women even exist as a category. We're not all not just sort of gendered gay. Did you see the clip going around of It was somebody suggesting that the heartbeat at 6 weeks was manufactured by the patriarchy? I I I Yeah, I think I saw a little bit of that.

American politician, was that right? Yeah. That's where we're at. This episode of the podcast was sponsored by Paleo Valley beef sticks. If you want to lose weight and be hotter, eat beef sticks instead of eating junk. It's an easy switch, and they honestly taste better than junk anyway. And they fill fill you up, but they don't make you want to keep eating.

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Particularly, I think I'd say particularly now, but it's a long-standing issue when it comes to the psychological differences between men and women, the differences above the neck. We Some feminists, you know, radical feminists in particular, can are completely okay with the differences below the neck. Um and will recognize the importance of things like strength differences. But the But the fact that there are average differences, but very apparent ones at the population level, is is more difficult if what you're aspiring to is equality. And as you As I said at the top, if you if your interpretation of equality is women being more like men, the fact that there are these psychological differences is that affect our our behavior and our preferences is is quite difficult to reconcile. So, things like women are more agreeable than men are on average. Women are more neurotic than men are on average.

And the fact that our sexuality difference differences are very obvious at a population level. Yes, there are exceptions, but in general, men have more unrestricted sociosexuality. They're more interested in having casual sex, in watching porn, in buying sex. Um men are much more likely to have paraphilias or fetishes than women are, much more likely with with with a few notable and interesting exceptions. So, for instance, women are more likely to be masochists and and so on. But in in all other paraphilias, men are wildly in the lead. And I These are all things that have become much more socially acceptable post-sexual revolution.

All preferences that are much more likely to be found in men than they are in women. And something like porn or prostitution or casual sex, not only are men more likely to be interested in these things, but they also depend on women in order to enjoy them. Right? Which therefore places demands on women. I think that what what we're basically have seen post-sexual revolution is if you can if you understand two bell curves for men and women along the sociosexuality scale, you know, it's not a conspiracy. It isn't to do with um with some with some exceptions, this isn't generally to do with men putting sort of interpersonal pressure on women. It's got It's got more to do with culture and a new incentive structure post-pill.

But you what you're basically seeing is women's the bell curve to sort of trying to be dragged upwards towards the the male end and and women being encouraged to behave more like men in every possible way. Um and I think in a lot of cases it's making women miserable, which is why I wrote the book. It's making a lot of men miserable, too. The I'd say the only the only group who have really profited from this change to the sexual culture are very high-status men. What about very disagreeable intelligent women? I'd say in the workplace, absolutely.

The Main Beneficiaries of the Sexual Revolution

In terms of sexuality, I mean there are women who have very high or very have very unrestricted sociosexuality, I should say properly, uh genuinely do enjoy casual sex, genuinely do want to watch porn, genuinely are interested in all kinds of sexual adventure and experimentation. Those women do absolutely exist, but they are rare. Yeah. And they will always suffer from the risks associated with casual sex, like the risk of unwanted pregnancy, the fact that uh women being smaller and weaker means that in any encounter between a man and a woman on their own, the woman is almost always going to be much more physically at risk of violence. You know, most women can most most men can kill most women with their hands, and but not vice versa. So, even a woman who genuinely really loves casual sex, genuinely is really really driven to have as many partners as possible uh aside from any cultural pressure put on her, she's always going to run any run a risk in any encounter. And I think you have to really want to have casual sex for that risk to outweigh the benefit to you.

So, yes, there are women who are exceptions to this. There are also men who are exceptions to this. And I think it's worth emphasizing that male sexuality is quite is quite is quite flexible. Um not in terms of sexual orientation. There's an interesting difference between the sexes that women are much more bi more likely to be bisexual than men are. Um you know, 90 I don't know, 7% of men are straight. Um but they are flexible in terms of their short-term versus long-term strategy.

So, there are circumstances in which it's it's um adaptive for men to want to have casual sex and to, you know, in theory men can conceive a child every time they have they orgasm, which is obviously not true for women because we have much greater physical input into into reproduction. Um so, you can see why women would have evolved to be much more choosy about their mates and much more careful about having sex than are men. Um and there is a I describe it in the book as cad mode. There's you know, cad mode for men um is being driven towards having as much being as promiscuous as you possibly can get away with, you know. But the other mode for for men, which I call dad mode, is oriented towards finding a wife, having children, investing in those children, investing in that unit, stability, you know. Like that there is and there's a there's an element of personal preference. Some men are just more likely to be drawn towards one mode or the other.

But there's also an incentive factor and a cultural factor that if it's advantageous in that moment for you to do one or the other and if your culture is telling you to do one or the other, then that's going to drive men, you know, in one or other direction. And I think what we we we see post sexual revolution in our social culture is um the incentives are all towards cad mode. Yeah. Definitely. Definitely. I think a lot of that's how you're raised as well and who your friends are and I think for me growing up, I went to an art school in high school. So, I was in a I was in a very liberal crowd.

I didn't even know like what a conservative person was until like 2016, really. Like I didn't know any conservatives. Um and there was definitely a stigma around getting married, settling down, even dating somebody for a long period of time. It was pretty intense. It was very difficult to find somebody who's interested in being married eventually. It did happen, like I did know have some friends that were like, "Oh, no, I'm I want to find somebody and settle down." And I think that was because of how they were raised.

Is there was a big emphasis put on that's the right way to live. And for families that had a more difficult time or were somewhat broken, then there was less emphasis put on that. And then, those are the people who still aren't married and are still kind of screwing around at like 32, which is also which you probably get into, not that risky for a man, but very difficult if they're dating a 32-year-old woman who wants to have kids. Completely. Completely. And yeah, because I mean, it's going back to the limits of medical technology, right? We We We do have things like IVF.

I'm sorry to say. Um which supposedly extends the biological clock. But the failure rate of IVF is pretty amazing. Particularly when it comes to age-related infertility, for other causes of infertility, IVF is quite good. But for age-related infertility, it's honestly close to being a scam. Is that when you harvest eggs late? So, I think that the age of the eggs does matter um quite a lot.

IVF and the Limits of Medical Technology

So, if you harvest them early and then do IVF later. Um but even then, do you remember there was that um woman who appeared on the cover of Time because she was she was one of the early people to to invest in egg freezing. And she did it because she was in a very high-powered job, I think in New York, and um, it was advantageous career-wise for her to delay childbearing. And so she was she was this kind of glamorous shot on the cover of Time magazine and and and and her promoting this this route to liberation for women. And then some years later, she went to harvest she went to actually use the eggs and discovered that almost all of them had been destroyed in the process. Mhm. It's just devastating.

Um, it's it's a it it's it's by no means a guarantee. And I got to say, when you see um, employers offering things like egg freezing to their young female employees, this is increasingly a perk of jobs in certain in certain places, particularly say Silicon Valley, um, or off offering, sorry, these services or these other things. Um, they are doing it because it's in their interests. Yeah. They are not doing it. I can't say that you know, it it's a very, very risky route to go down in terms of your your chances of actually having a live child at the end of the process. But it is this unfortunate fact that a crucial moment in your professional life maps on exactly to your your fertility window.

Which is actually quite quite short and it's has proved very difficult to to to expand it. It's a funny thing that we can we can keep people alive for a long time. And until recently, life expectancy just ticked ticked up and up. I mean, it's now it's now falling because of things like deaths of despair, but that's the great story of the 20th and 21st centuries, life expectancy just goes up and up. But people our fertility window doesn't. And our and if if anything, all of our social systems are completely massed against it. You know, the healthiest time really to be having children is in your early 20s.

And yet that's exactly when we've got everyone is in education, you don't own a home, I know. you don't you're not you're not married or in a relationship. Like everything is completely inappropriate for child-rearing in a social sense. In a In a biological sense, it's perfect timing, but you know, that's not that's not the priority. Um Also, things that we can't we struggle to keep people healthy for a long time. So, yes, you stay alive for a long time, but from say the age of 17, you're going to expect to have a lot of health problems, to be to be so much less physically able than you once were, normally not really able to work, depending on what kind of work you do, certainly not able to do manual work. We've managed to extend old age, but not health. It's just the limits of medical technology never never cease to amaze me.

So, I've had a difficult time. I I grew up in a like my dad was traditional, right?

The Digital Harem of Online Dating and High Status Men

My mom stayed at home, so I had a stay-at-home mom. And I was always I I had this kind of a difficult time understanding what I was supposed to do because on one hand, I was told getting a PhD was massively important, going to university was massively important, but also you should be a stay-at-home mom. And I can remember as a teenager like adding up the years and being like, okay, if it's easiest to have kids in your 20s, but I'm also supposed to supposed to get a PhD. It wasn't even bachelor degrees, like that's for sure, but like PhD is what you really want. I was like, how do I do both? And I can remember just being like, I don't know if I can. Like I don't know if I can do both.

Unless like I don't know how I can do both. And then I had some health problems which delayed schooling and it was like, okay, well, now the years are completely off. I'm not going to get a PhD till I'm like 31 and then like how do you balance everything in there? Um and I think I had a difficult time understanding what the average female is like because I'm extremely disagreeable. And for my entire life, I thought everybody else was just like me. Like it wasn't till I was 24. I had I have no idea why this was because my dad being who he is, I knew people had personality differences, but I couldn't wrap my head around what those actually manifested like.

Mhm. So when I had conversations, uh I couldn't understand why people acted differently in conversations than I did till I was like 24. I don't know if other people have that problem, but it took me a long time. And it was difficult for me to figure out what I should feel like. And so the conversation's interesting because I don't think I think like the average female because my disagreeableness is so high. Um what do you think the average female looks like? What do you think they want?

I'm super agreeable. So yeah, so which I do think actually is a real factor in all this sexual culture stuff. So a question I get sometimes is why are women putting up with this? Why would women put up with a culture that is not geared towards their preferences? I just anecdotally uh and also in in in media culture, whatever, you see so many examples of women who will um go along with situationships, so called, right? Or have um casual sexual relationships without any kind of commitment. Without even displays of affection, um which they desperately crave.

And will do pornified sex acts that they don't enjoy, that they don't really want to do, but they're trying to please this man, whatever. And And the question is why would women put up with this? When When in general, women are the more are generally the the sex with more choices when it comes to mates because we know from all the dating app uh data, which has proved to be so useful for sex researchers, that um the hypergamy instinct in women, the the the subconscious desire to to marry up and to um be drawn towards higher status men than oneself, which men don't have. Men are quite happy to generally have relationships with women of the same or lower status than themselves, but women are not. Means that you end up with women kind of clustering towards the higher status men. I think the figures on Tinder is it's like 10% of men get 60% of likes. The top 10% of men that is.

And then the bottom 90% are getting very little. Whereas women are generally get a lot of likes, but they're getting likes from men that they're not interested in. And I think that what's going on is because you've lifted the monogamy restriction. Not legally, you know. Polygamy is still illegal, at least in the UK. Um that is probably the next frontier. Yeah.

Poly polyamorous are going to start clamoring to have their their relationships recognized in law. But for now, it's still illegal. But in practice, because premarital and extramarital sex is now socially acceptable. Um these high status men who in previous era would have got married and would have removed themselves from the dating pool, instead are able to have be um serially monogamous or even able to have simultaneous relationships with with women who don't mind or even realize, you know, that they're part of these harems, right? Digital harems. And um Mhm. I I think that's why those women end up those those high status men are able to really really set the terms.

Because if they if if a woman doesn't, say, have sex on the first date, it's easy enough to find another woman who will. So, you end up with a slightly artificial level of competition between women who, you know, there are actually enough men to go around, but there aren't enough men that they actually want to be with to go around. And so, they're competing for a minority of men who basically have I mean, it's kind of open season. They can demand that their own preferences be met. So, what's the what's the solution here?

Tradition as a Solution to a Failed Sexual Revolution

Now that we're in this predicament. I mean, on an individual level, it is quite possible for people to just choose to be a bit more trad. The The The challenge is of course finding a partner who wants to who wants that, too. But, I I'm noticing around me a a quite a significant turn against this stuff. It's increasingly common in elite circles as well. You know, there's this there's this apparent turn towards Catholicism among young neologers and I see it among young Londoners as well. A greater conservatism among a sort of subsection of of the elite.

You can choose to do that, you know, you can still get married, you can still not have premarital sex, you can still choose to be a stay-at-home mom, have loads of children. I mean, it's more difficult because things like being a stay-at-home mom in an in an economic environment where that's really challenging. It's just harder than it used to be. Um you won't have the social support that you used to have if if that's the route that you're choosing. Um you will forego status to some extent. But, it's still possible. So, I do have advice for for for readers along along those lines, you know, you you I think that one change that would could come about quite easily is just I think part of the So, sorry, I was saying before that part of the reason why you see women putting up with nonsense is because of the hypergamy fact.

But, I think the other reason is to do with agreeableness. Mhm. Mhm. And agreeable people just find it really difficult to to to be assertive in those situations. And when when for instance the norm becomes having sex on a first date. And indeed the norm becomes having sex before marriage per se, you know, it used to be that if the social expectation was that you you wouldn't have sex before marriage, then there's no conversation. It is just assumed after a date that we will not be having sex.

That's the default. Now, the default is to have sex. And that means that women are put in the situation, sometimes very agreeable women, who are really keen to please these, you know, these these desirable men, whatever, where they have to be defending their own sexual boundaries, even if they're actually quite reluctant. And off it's often often what you see in Me Too cases, where women are describing situations where they're they're you know, they're with a man who potentially they are actually quite romantically interested in after a date, whatever. Aziz Ansari was a famous example. Do you remember that one? The the actor Aziz Ansari, who had a date with a woman, um went back to his place, and she didn't want to have sex, he did.

He didn't rape her. There wasn't anything illegal that happened. She never really said no, but she also wasn't was was a bit reluctant and and made it she felt made it evident nonverbally that she was reluctant. He apparently didn't think so. Um and they ended up and they ended up having sex. And she felt felt really violated, felt really distressed. And she later just she later wrote about this, and it became a whole thing.

She had to express what what happened in the terms of consent. And so the the the conversation that happened afterwards was, was this really consensual? What, you know, what was this sexual assault, etc. I think the answer to that is no, it wasn't sexual assault in an on a legal level, but it also wasn't good. And he didn't behave well, and he didn't behave like a gentleman, right? Is what you would have said historically. He didn't behave like a gentleman.

He didn't demonstrate chivalry. He put pressure on a woman who what who who he ought to have recognized was reluctant. But the thing is that when when the expectation, particularly when you're talking about a fan going on a date with a celebrity, which is the circumstances there, and you've they've gone back to his house, the expectation was that they would have sex. And so it was incumbent on her to be assertive and to say no. And agreeable people find that really hard. So I think that's that's very often what's going on. And I think that if there's one change that could happen quite swiftly potentially is if we had a bit of a change in in norms and expectations.

And if women felt more confident in demanding certain things. That I hear so often from young women in particular this, you know, I'm afraid of being frigid. I'm afraid of being a prude. Yeah. I'm afraid of of of being considered low status because I don't want to do XYZ. If if the status flipped and and different expectations were in place then I think you would see women and therefore men behaving quite differently because women women are the gatekeepers, you know, most of the time. What you see now for instance at the moment is you see there's this dreadful phenomenon on TikTok of young women showing off their bruises that they've got from having rough sex with their boyfriends like really young women, teenagers.

So that they've got bruises on their neck and they'll like take TikToks of them and this is this is considered to be really desirable. I think all women will show off by how many partners they've had. I think that that's coming from a misunderstanding of male sexuality. I think that we because we're we're all kind of collectively in denial about how profoundly different men and women are on the cellular level as we were saying but also psychologically. And I think that a lot of young women don't realize that men are much more geared towards having emotional sex than they are. Yeah. are much more willing to have sex with women that they really they wouldn't care if they got hit by a bus next week frankly. And so things like having you know being able to to to entice a man into bed or or or to have rough sex or whatever is not actually much of an achievement.

It's pretty easy to do that particularly as a as a young woman. But because of that misunderstanding of the fact that men regard sex quite differently from women I think that these these young women don't know that because they've not learned it yet. And because the culture completely misinforms them about reality. Um I think that if they did know that I don't think they'd be putting these videos on TikTok. Yeah. So, that's a kind of modest aim. To let them know.

It's a good It's a good aim. Um I agree. I think that that's kind of similar to my misunderstanding of personality differences till I was 24. Just not I just didn't I knew, but I didn't understand what that looked like. I think that probably goes for differences between men and women, too. I still have a hard time with that. Like even with my husband.

And I am fully educated in the differences between men and women, and I still have a hard time understanding why responses to situations can differ between us. And it's because we're, you know, I I mean, I have that issue with looking at other women as well. But I I think it's very hard for people to to understand how different men and women can be or people can be from each other. It's tricky. I found that having a baby actually I mean, I I like you, I knew I knew these things academically.

Maternal Parenting Instincts

I found that having a baby made them really, really apparent. Um the sense to the the sense in which we are sort of slaves to our biology. And actually, we don't we don't have nearly as much control over our our instincts and our behaviors as we think. Because the way in which maternal and paternal instincts differ, for instance, is really striking. And particularly during So, my son's 16 months old now. Mhm. You know that instinct to check that your baby's breathing?

Yeah. Which everyone does. I didn't know initially that that was a natural thing to do. And so, you you feel a bit crazy constantly going in and checking checking your baby's breathing. But then I and I still do it occasionally, but when they're newborn, they do it all the time. I found out recently that apparently chimpanzee mothers do that. Oh, that's cool.

Yeah, isn't it? I didn't know that. That's cool. Yeah. Um and my husband doesn't do that. Or a little bit, maybe, but it's not the same kind of desperate drive towards like I've got to check the baby's breathing. Um which all of my all of my mum friends have said that. they have as well.

Um These things are the The thing Yeah, yeah, they are. The thing that I noticed So, uh the thing that I noticed when I had I have a 5-year-old daughter. This was very strange and I thought this was on a serious biological level is as soon as she was born, I couldn't sleep. I don't know I don't know what your experience was, but I used to be able to sleep through anything wherever, whenever. And then as soon as she was born, it was like she'd just breathe funny, right? Like she's not crying. She'd be like huh just like this tiny little and I'd be like it'd be like an electric zap through my body and I'd be awake.

I was like that's crazy. And she's five now and it hasn't gone away. So, I sleep with like a mask and white noise and if my husband moves, then I'm kind of awake and that wasn't the case before and it happened as soon as she was born. Did that happen to you? Was noises? Yeah. Yeah.

Oh my gosh, it's exhausting. It really is. Um and I found as well that I um So, initially we didn't co-sleep because I was so scared of all the SIDS stuff. And then ended up kind of gradually letting him stay in the bed. And one of the And And I did that partly because I read about like the anthropology of infant sleep and the fact that infants sleeping in the same bed as their mothers, crucially not their fathers. So, it's not safe to have fathers sleep with the infant. Yeah.

It is safe to have mothers sleep with the infant as long as there are certain like risk factors aren't present um like premature prematurity or and mother has to not be on sleeping drugs or drunk or anything like that, but but in most circumstances it is safe to for mothers to sleep with a baby um because you are so attuned to them all the time. You're not going to roll over your baby. And actually what you end up doing instinctively is forming a C-shape around the baby where you have like your arm. Yeah, and you do it in your sleep You don't completely and that is apparently the natural thing the C-shape is what they they they they write about in in the sleep studies. Like this? Well, all like on your arm, you know, and then you like like a little cuddle. Oh, that's so cool.

Okay, I did that. Um and yeah, that's just that's cuz cuz your body is like completely set on this. I found as well when I in the early in the early weeks in particular I'd like I would only ever dream about my son. I didn't dream about anything else. And I would if I closed my eyes I could see his face. Like I had that level of constant attunement towards the baby which then gradually lapses. Yeah, yeah. that link becomes a little bit less you know, but you know they talk about the fourth trimester.

Yeah, we we give birth to our babies too early really and so you you you have to have this intense dependency initially. Um Yeah, it's crazy. which has all sorts of social effects obviously as well because it's just is a very uncomfortable if if if if you're a liberal individualist and you're all about people having autonomy then motherhood is a is a huge problem. Because mothers can't be autonomous. And there's this really you know, you you're not really talking about two individuals when you talk about a mother and a baby. Because the baby definitely can't be considered in that way because because he or she is just completely dependent on on other people for staying alive. But mothers also are so emotionally drawn towards them but even if you've got formula, even if you've got daycare, even if you've got all these things which can kind of um physically lessen the dependency, that emotional link is insane. And you know, try as you might try and persuade mothers to to break it.

If that's your social project, you're going to fail. That's also cruel. It would have been so much easier.

Shifting Early Family and Motherhood Norms

Like I had Scarlet Yeah, she's 5 so I had her 5 years ago and it really decimated my social life. Like and I was prepared for that but it would have been so much Like there's a reason women most women aren't doing that, right? Especially if you're in a more liberal circle cuz you have a kid and you're 25 or like 24 or 23. Even 26. Yeah, it's like I was 29 and I felt really young. Yeah. I know, 29 even.

Yeah. Right? Like and then you're the only person, especially if you're like probably if you're educated or if you're more liberal, you're the only person in your friend group that has a kid. I had responses from friends that are like, "Oh, you're ruining your life." And like that was and then the neighborhood I moved into at the time, too. I was looked down on. Like I had a kid and they're like, "Well, what's your job?"

It was these older women, too. These like 50, 60-year-old women were too like, "Oh, you're just staying at home?" Gosh. Okay. Yeah. And I was like, "What Wow, so now my entire social circle is broken. My neighborhood, everyone in my neighborhood is 15 years older than me with the kids that are the same age."

It was just like good luck with that. And it's worth it for sure. It's worth it and I think um trying to like I appreciate what you're doing because what needs to happen, I think, is it needs to be made cool again because women need it, right? It needs to be cool. It needs to be cool to be a gentleman. It needs to be cool to be a dad. Like having it's so attractive to have a man say "Hey, I want you to have babies with me and I want to take care of you."

Like that is so attractive. I don't know when that stopped being attractive. I think it still is. It is but It It's just Yeah, it's just persuading people. I know, I know. I completely agree and it it it also ends up with the slightly unfortunate that I found around here cuz we live in we live in London and we're in one of these parts of London where yeah like at my hospital the average age for first baby was like late 30s the average age. That's crazy.

Yeah. Wow. And and that was including you know where I where I gave birth covered an area with quite a high South Asian immigrant population where women were having babies a lot younger so it was it was that balanced with the with the upper middle class women who are having them really late. And and also most most women go back to work quite quickly. So you can find quite soon that if you if you want to be stay-at-home or if like me at the time I was I was at home part of the week you have no one to hang out with. I know. It's it's rough.

And also you don't have many friends who have children so they're all at work obviously. And their social schedule isn't going to fit in with you. You know you want to be having like mid-morning socializing. You can't be doing late nights and stuff. It's yeah it's difficult breaking from Yeah. You have to see you have to seek out people who are also making your eccentric decisions. Yeah.

Yeah and hopefully that'll become more and more common. It was so interesting. I spent a period of time in Serbia. And if you went out to like the the streets or there people would hang out at like little coffee shops there were people my that would have two or three kids with their friends like that would also have two or three kids. Mhm. And the like men are drinking beer women are drinking coffee or having a beer. Kids are like running around them and they were 28-year-olds.

And they had kids from like a kid on their lap and then two kids that were under five. And I can I looking at that being like they're having a good time. Like that looks like fun. They haven't lost their lives. They still have friends. They're out socializing, but their kids are there. I was like that just doesn't exist here.

And then when I was in in Russia, they have restaurants set up so that you'll have a really nice like steakhouse restaurant, and at one area of the restaurant, they'll hire this generally like a kind of a grandmother type person that will you can give your kid to for dinner. Yeah, and they'll entertain your kid and it's just part of the restaurant. Or they'll have little rooms that are full of toys, so parents can go and you can say, "Hey, you you know, here's a kid for a few hours." The kids have a blast, parents get a break, but society is set up so that people can do that. And that institute like those types of institutions don't exist at all here. Unless it's super deliberate. So I'm going on a a weekend thing which is put on by a by a conservative think tank.

And because they're very deliberately pro-family, they are providing deliberately providing child care. Everything is family oriented, you know, but that's not normal. So I initially thought I can't possibly go because I don't you know, and I spoke to them and they said, "No, no. This is genuinely pro-family." They made it, yeah. Yeah, but you have to kind of you have to go that extra mile. It was also something to be fair that a lot of um feminists did like doing conferences in the second wave times, doing conferences and providing crushes because, you know, if if children won't participate, then mothers can't participate because they they come as a package.

Um I think also this thing of the fact that we don't really see kids running around in restaurants and stuff. I think it's also because that feeling of social disapproval. I think we've never had a time, probably in human history, where so many adults have no have no experience of children. Mhm. Because you can now make it a really long time and never have held a baby. Because you're you're not likely to have a lot of siblings who are having kids, and not likely all of your friends are also delaying childbearing. You're not really seeing kids out and about.

You can you can reach the age of 40 or something, and you've basically never been in charge of a child. I mean, I used to work as a nanny when I was younger, so I'm unusual in that sense. Um but I I It's kind of no wonder that you have people sort of winging about children on airplanes and women with children in restaurants and all this stuff. Like, children are members of society, too. And they I mean, there's one thing to obviously complain about parents not being sufficiently attentive, but just Yeah. Children Children, you know, like they they they behave differently from grown-ups. And you you kind of have to learn you just have to learn that from being around them.

And I think that as a society, we're increasingly not familiar with what children are like. Which then makes it more difficult to as a parent to be bringing children into places like restaurants or or churches. Think how Think how noisy churches must have been. You know, what I mean, Sarah? I can almost remember um and I'm 30. I feel like when I was a kid, the the weddings I went to, and I went to church. I didn't go to church often.

I went to church a few times, but I remember every time I went to one of those events, a baby would cry, and then someone would get up and go outside with a baby. That was just the norm at those events, and now it's not. Including a child-free weddings. Have you come across these? Is I've not yet been invited to a child-free wedding, but this is apparently a thing now. I think that's the norm. I think it's the norm.

I think that also has to do with It It is crazy. I think it It has to do with how much people are spending on weddings as well. Yeah, so I can see how you don't Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which I think as well, you know, is a consequence of is a consequence of the pill, because because Well, consequence Well, a consequence of the death of the marriage institution, which is downstream of the pill, because I think that now it is so easy to get divorced. There's so much less permanence in general attached to marriage, but I think people don't feel as if it has much inherent meaning anymore. Whereas, you know, back in the day where you really couldn't get divorced, if you just show up to you go to Gretna Green and just you two and a witness, you've completely transformed your life. Even if the day was pretty trivial in all of the senses and you didn't spend any money on it, you've completely transformed your life.

Whereas now you haven't actually and everyone kind of knows that. So I think people try and invest meaning by spending money and making it into a massive event and having these kind of big society weddings, which were not normal um for say our grandparents' generation. They wouldn't People didn't spend that that kind of big reception dinner and everything. That was what people did in the upper classes. That wasn't a normal um whereas now it's expected and it ends up of course being another impediment to getting married because you if you can't afford to have a big wedding then you might delay it and children, which are actually the whole point of marriage. Right? That's the original That's the original purpose of marriage is to provide a basis on which to children.

Um whereas now the connection is not at all obvious. It's seen as a sort of means of self-fulfillment, maybe, uh an accomplishment in that you found your your forever person. It's not seen as a a precondition of family formation. Hopefully things get better. I think I think I've seen I think things are going to get better. I It felt like things were going to get worse in 2018 and I feel like things are getting better now. I think the popularity in some of these more traditional ideas and the acceptance of them There's things have split more, but I I feel like there are more people talking about, "Hey, having a family is okay.

Wanting to be a stay-at-home mom is okay. Kids are Kids are great." Like I think it's more popular. I hope. And I think men are are getting more interested in the idea as well. I think. Or I could just be in a bubble.

I think you're right. I think there's something happening. Someone said to me um the other day that uh if you read if you read if you address in this book 10 years ago it would have been a flop. But but this seems to be for some reason a moment where I didn't have very much negative response actually not at all. Cool. That's cool. overwhelmingly positive and so much bigger than I thought as well. I get like I get emails several times a day from people who are saying wow this book has had such an impact on me.

And I I sort of feel like I'm just saying obvious stuff, but I think that we're living in a time where the obvious stuff needs to be said. Agreed. Okay, so where can people go to find your book and where can people go online to find you? So um best place to find me is on Twitter.

Outro

So I'm @louise_m_perry. And the book is called The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century, and it came out uh like 2 weeks ago in the States and is available all over the world and is about to be translated into a bunch of other languages, but for now it's just in English. That is so cool. Congratulations. Thank you so much.