Modern Wisdom - #492 - Louise Perry - The Sexual Revolution Has Failed Everyone

Episode Date: June 27, 2022

Louise Perry is a writer, Press Officer for the campaign group We Can’t Consent To This and an author. 50 years ago there was a dream of women being released from the patriarchal shackles of stringent sexual norms. They should be able to sleep around like men, talk about sex like men and decouple their emotions from their bodies like men. Except it didn't quite work out, and now Louise thinks that both men and women are in a bad spot. Expect to learn why trying to not catch feelings when sleeping with someone is very dangerous, how TikTok is encouraging young girls into rough sex, whether sex work is real work, why men's porn addictions are ruining their sex lives, how the washing machine is more useful than most feminists, whether inventing the pill was an error and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://bit.ly/cdwisdom (use code MW15) Extra Stuff: Buy The Case Against The Sexual Revolution - https://amzn.to/3tWS9bf  Follow Louise on Twitter - https://twitter.com/Louise_m_perry  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everybody, welcome back to this show. My guest today is Louise Perry. She's a writer, press officer for the campaign group we can't consent to this, and an author. Fifty years ago, there was a dream of women being released from the patriarchal shackles of stringent sexual norms. They should be able to sleep around like men, talk about sex like men, and decouple their emotions from their bodies like men. Except, it didn't quite work out. And now, Louise thinks that both men and women are in a bad spot. Expect to learn why trying to not catch feelings

when sleeping with someone is very dangerous, how TikTok is encouraging young girls into rough sex, whether sex work is real work, why men's porn addictions are ruining their lives, how the washing machine is more useful than most feminists, whether inventing the pill was an error, and much more. I really enjoyed this conversation. I didn't realize the impact that the sexual revolution had had. I didn't understand all of the strange second-order effect of what it's done to women's levels of anxiety or body image or men's relationships and the erectile dysfunction. It is a very courageous position for somebody who

is on the left and a feminist to take to push back against sex-positive feminism so much to take away from today. And if you enjoyed it, the book is also very short and very good so go and pick that up as well. But now ladies and gentlemen please welcome Louise Perry, welcome at the show. Thank you so much for having me. Given your political background, how does it feel to have Ben Shapiro quote tweeting your work? I didn't know he has. Did you not see this?

No. Let me tell you. So there is a tweet that someone put out a couple of days ago explaining about how don't kink shame the naked men doing parades in front of children and working in front of cops. And that was one photo, which was a new story. And the other photo was the chapter list from your book, which said things like many women are different, and Loveless sex is not empowering,

and it said, people of the West choose your future, something like that. Wow, okay. Yeah, okay, That explains things. I have quite a heavy notification filter on on Twitter, so I don't always see everything. The contents page, though, completely blew up like three months ago,

long before the book was published. If they just, the publisher just put up online, the cover, the title, the fact that Kathleen Stock wrote the forward, because she's got a kind of existing reputation among her haters, my haters, and the content's page. And that was enough to have like a several day to a storm. Why do you think that was? Those statements. I mean, I guess because, I mean, I did write the chapters with the knowledge that they're like, they're simultaneously obvious,

and also incredibly provocative, which was precisely my intention, because to some people read it, I mean, some people read the whole book, but some people read the chapters, tires in particular, and they're like, yeah, and other people read them as like fascist basically. I mean like like so political outrageous. I mean I'd say that the response to the book so far is only been out for a couple of weeks in the UK and not yet in the States is like 80% really positive and 20% complete outrage and not very much in the middle. I think well what do you think is going to happen when it comes out in America? There's a good question.

I mean, the culture was more intense in America in every way. It's so similar, I think, to what we have here. I mean, actually, I think we import it, really. But yeah, I don't know. I mean, I like, I did that like British political context is different from American right. And I write for the New Statesman magazine, for instance, which is like traditionally left-wing outlet. I have come from the left even if I wouldn't necessarily consider myself still a part of the left and so on. So I hope that the book doesn't just get treated as

like yet another socially conservative take on such revolution, because even if I'm reaching some conservative conclusions, I'm doing it via different priors, if that makes sense. Yeah, well I didn't you say I start from feminist priors and end up with socially conservative conclusions. Yeah, some socially conservative conclusions, yeah. Which means that there's sort of something in it for everyone to hate. Because I have a... It's a lot of the whole thing, I'm not sure how he might think about some of the early chapters.

You've been co-opted by the right wing of America now, and this is your future. So I was at the Hedgehogs Academy, Jonathan Heights, organization. I was at the conference for that this weekend. One of the speakers said something that kind of, I think, sort of is a good synopsis of the thesis of your book that says, there are many ways to change the world, few will make it better, many will make it worse.

Yeah, it's true. There's a road description quite like that. I can't remember exactly how it's phrased, but something like, it's really easy to break things and it's really hard to make things which I think is it's like a really fundamentally conservative observation and true What's wrong with the sexual revolution then? So My argument in the book is basically that there are some really important ways in which men and women are different from another So some of those differences are physical and should be fairly obvious. Like only women can get pregnant men are bigger and stronger than women are on average, like

on average, but also that the difference is massive between the means. And also there are psychological differences, which are a lot of feminism of the last half century or more has been really invested in minimizing. But I think definitely there, if you look at the research and if we'll see just look at the world around you. One of those differences for instance is that male sexuality is different from female sexuality on average

that men are more likely to be into things like casual sex, watching porn, buying sex, all things that have become much more socially acceptable post sexual revolution. And my argument basically is that sexual revolution was kicked off by the pill, which did a pretty good job of severing the link between sex and reproduction. And it's kind of gave the impression that sex could just be a leisure activity, that it didn't have to mean anything, it could just be sort of a bit of fun.

And my argument is actually that that idea that sex is just a bit of fun, it doesn't really mean anything. Suit, mail, interests, much more than it does female. Because casual sex in particular is just one men wanting all the women do, and two women carry all of the risks associated with it, like physical risks, like pregnancy and violence and so on. So, Margaret, basically, is it a bad deal? Well, originally, it was the sort of thing that was pushed by liberals and feminists, right?

This is exactly the sort of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the, yes, the popular narrative that I'm challenging is one that this extra evolution was like a feminist accomplishment. And I don't think that's true. I mean, which is not to say that there are some things about it that have been good for women. I mean, I mean, if you look at the story of recent decades in particular, there are all sorts of ways in which women are doing great, actually, like women are going to

university more from them, men are, they are right up until they have children are doing better in the workplace. You know, this is not to say that like everything is, like the battle of the sex is women are like losing across the board, not at all. But I think in terms of sexual culture, using across the board, not at all. But I think in terms of sexual culture, that I'm concerned. I'm concerned for women and I'm also concerned for men. I mean, there's a lot in the book about, for instance, the really malign influence of porn on young men. Like, in a superficial and short-term way,

it's great to be a really attractive man in this sexual culture, right? You can basically attract as many partners as you like, you know, consequence free sex, he's freely available to you, but I think actually in the long run that's not a very... that's not a happy way to live your life. You say that your complaint is focused more against liberals than conservatives. Why is that? I mean, because I'm expecting liberals to read it. I might be wrong about that.

But I that that's the space that I'm coming from originally. Like I went to I went to such a left wing university. Where can you go? I went to Sawa, Cilandan. I don't even know what that is. It's like a really, really small, really crazy university. So I, you know, I've I've So I've read all of this radical stuff as a student and I'm coming from a feminist background and coming from as I said, the new statesman I work for is historically left-wing. So I'm trying to speak to those

people. But I mean, the books for Conservatives as well, because there are bits in it that I think everyone will find challenging. There's another fact that a lot of what you're talking about here is conserving some fairly traditional views around men's and women's roles with each other about sort of

chivalrous conduct and having constraints on the way that men and their aggression and their desire for multiple sexual partners. Like that that is a fundamentally conservative value. So it seems to me like the conservatives would have far less to disagree with you. Not again, there's something for everybody to disagree with, but that the conservatives would probably have far less than the new wave of liberals. Probably, yeah. Although I should say that this idea of like constraining male sexuality, which is central to my thesis, basically, it is conservative in the sense that it was considered to be like a mainstream idea before sexual revolution in the sense that it was considered to be a mainstream idea before

such revolution in the West, but if you look across time and place, that's not necessarily considered a tradd thing. If you look for instance at antiquity, the idea that some high status man would have access to his underlings was like completely Accepted it's really I don't know if you read Tom Holland's book dominion No, you don't mean Tom Holland's the guy that plays spider-man to you. No, I don't A common common mistake. No No, he's a British shekdamek and historian writer and he's got a fantastic book called Dominion which is about basically about history of Christianity and the ways in which Christianity

influences the modern world even if we consider ourselves to be a religious or post-Christian and he has a bit in there where he talks about me too and it really triggered a lot of my thinking about this actually a few years ago where he points out that in say the Roman, no one would think that Harvey Weinstein was doing anything wrong. Like the idea that this guy who's at the top of the tree of his particular hierarchy would be able to have sexual access to anyone kind of subordinate to him was like, yeah, obviously. And actually the idea that he should be,

that he should be constrained is Holland argues a very Christian idea. And you know, I'm, I'm not Christian, I'm not coming at this from a religious perspective. But it's worth pointing that out, you know, like this is not necessarily a normal thing to think. The window of trad sort of shifts over time, right? Like no one's actually going that far back. So, okay, so the sexual revolution happens, like, truly women have benefited with no more shame and stigma around enjoying sex and stuff like that, like who benefited from the sexual revolution overall? Yeah. So the shame is stigma thing. I mean, so the show is dig me thing.

I mean, yes, that is definitely one outcome. I mean, like, I think that one of the, one of the things that I'm trying to push in this book and that is shared with, like Mary Harrington and Nina Powell that you've had on the show before, they, that we, yeah, we're on this, we're on the same page about this, like challenging the idea of progress, We're on the same page about this, like, challenging the idea of progress, particularly from a feminist perspective, this idea that history has a shape, and everything is always getting better and better,

and the sector revolution, you know, everything post-sector revolution is necessarily better than what came before. I just don't think it's true, I think that's nonsense. Like, we're looking at a massive historical event triggered primarily by technology, of course, they're going to be upside-down sides. Yeah, so I think it is actually the case that women now can be much more open about sexuality and I'm more able to enjoy sex and certain circumstances and stuff, that's true. But I also think that to some extent, like we're social animals and we're very responsive to norms.

And what I think has happened is kind of the norms have just spun on us six points. And now, whereas previously it would have been the case that young women, for instance, were like protecting their virginity and their reputation, being chased and so on, was considered very important socially. Now, if anything, it's the opposite, or not quite the opposite, but that now the pressure actually is on for women to be up for it, and to be just as like sexually adventurous as the guys, and you like there's it's like a slightly painful

there's a contradiction within that which is really hard to navigate for young women we're on the one hand like it's good to be sexually open it's good to sort of base your reputation on being base your reputation on being really sexy, but also that is actually a penalty if your body count is too high, which is quite difficult. And I think a lot of young women don't necessarily realise that as well. They're actually treading a really difficult tightrope, which is why I think this idea of like, oh well, people can do whatever they want now, we're all free to behave as we want to actually. I just don't think it's true because every culture has expectations in relation to sex, has norms in relation to sex. I think that what we've done, that we had some quite deeply embedded norms, which were thrown out the windows, the consequences of such a revolution, And now there's like a sort of halting effort

to maybe rebuild them. Sometimes they're implicit. And it's kind of a wild West out there basically. And I look at it. Who's enforcing this then? Where's this coming from? Are you suggesting that men are weaponising women to believe that they should have a particular type of sexual proclivity that then plays into men's hands

because they get more variety? I don't think that anyone is enforcing it. I think that it's just everyone responding to incentives as individuals. And that knits together to create the culture that we see before us. So, like, yeah, it is in the interests of men who want to sleep around to encourage women to match them, you know, in that kind of behaviour. That's clearly going on at an individual level. But then in terms of like women's magazines encouraging their readers to do the same, I did a lot of digging through women's magazines for this book and like, there is some really grim articles out there. What were your least favourite headlines?

I can't remember exactly the wording of it, but there's a whole genre of articles in Women's Media about encouraging women not to catch feelings or I mean the way that it's phrased is how anyone of any gender can not catch feelings when they're having casual sex and how to have casual sex in like a fun, feminist way, etc. But like we know that women are much more likely to bond quickly with their sexual partners. We know that they're just much less likely to like casual sex. Something that's what are really interesting and really marked difference to many women on average in sexuality is women's sexual disgust threshold is a lot, lot, lot lower. So women will get the ICC much easier than men will. But if you're going to participate, if you're going to have sex like a man, you have to overcome all of those instincts, right? And so there's

a whole genre of women's mags that will basically like instruct their young readers in how to suppress their instincts and have sex that actually they kind of know deep down they shouldn't be having, which I think is really bleak. And yeah, and I think that just representing that as feminist in a way. Interestingly, looking at it from a man's perspective, I agree that this is bad for women. I don't think that it serves their interests. I think that the biological predisposition that women have when it comes to sexual partners trying to decouple having sex. First off, having sex and making babies was decoupled, but then having sex and having emotions,

getting attached was decoupled. That second one, the pill for that is, I mean, you know, what is it? Is it 10 Vodkas deep? Like, does that really help? You know, you wake up in the morning and you feel, but you use this analogy about the fact that Marilyn Monroe was a sort of very attractive woman

that was weaponized, commercialized, utilized by a society that wanted to sexualize women. And this was at the benefit of Hughes, Hugh Heffner's, the sort of high-status man who was able to sleep with lots of women and continue to do this. I agree, I think that you're right, it is bad for women, but very few men are Hughes. And what you're seeing in the modern society is this most women are probably dissatisfied with the way that their sexual pursuits are going. Most men, now the number of men reporting no sex between the ages of 18 and 30 is tripled to nearly 30% in the last 10 years.

So the Matthew principal kicks off here. So I think on average it's bad for pretty much everybody. 30% in the last 10 years. So the Matthew Principle kicks off here. So I think on average, it's bad for pretty much everybody. I think that the sort of amount of sexual satisfaction has lowered for everybody. And you have this huge underclass of sexless men, which is where in cell black pill, make-towel red, some parts of the red pill,

the manus via men's rights, all of these movements. As far as I can see, they're big copes from men who are now in a sort of sexual wasteland where they're really, really struggling to find connection. So I think that it's, I understand that from a feminist perspective, it is bad for women and that there are higher costs that they pay. But being a listless, liminal space man with no desire from any female that you give your attention to is not a good situation to be in either.

Yeah, I completely agree. Yeah, I add to that things like rates of erectile dysfunction among young men, are like insanely high, which is probably to be with porn, maybe also to do with the strength and the environment. I don't know. Got to have an eastergid. I was eating some Edd-E-Mame beans the other day

and everyone at the table who's like big in health and fitness look I was eating some Edd-A-Mame beans the other day and everyone at the table who's like big in health and fitness look disgusted. Apparently Edd-A-Mame beans have got tons of Eastridge in it. Who's new? It is soy, can't you? That's one of the other things. I'm going to the side argument. But yeah, few many views, right? So, they're the ones that are losing. Yeah, yeah, no, this is this completely true. And I think as well that there's this antagonism between feminists and let's say in cells broadly, which does I think very much come down to these innate differences

to male and female sexuality and the fact that we don't really talk about them enough, which means I think that you end up with the sex is really misunderstanding each other, right? So like feminists will look at in cells and like completely not understand why it would be so frustrating to be a young man who can't get laid. Like I think a lot of women are like surprisingly clueless about male sexuality in all sorts of ways. Like definitely the dark side of male sexuality, but also just like its intensity. I think most women can not, can't just can't like directly empathise at all. And similarly in cells I think would look at women and be like but you can walk out into the street and pick up half-hills and guys, you know, within five minutes, you must be living heaven on earth and women will die. but I don't want that. And so you end up with this, everyone thinks that like

the other side has it easy, which has a lot to do with the fact of just this like, these quite fundamental biological differences, making it hard for us to empathise with one another. And this is added to a culture in which, like, not only are those sexuality differences routinely denied, but like the existence of sexual dyomorphism is routinely denied. It's like how can you possibly like successfully navigate the sexual landscape if you don't even think many women exist as just great categories? Do you think that inventing the pill was an error then? No, because I think I mean socially no, like there are

Mary Harrens, who will probably talk to you about the environmental consequences of the pill and we've just mentioned Eastlittons and that's another story. Socially, I think no, I mean I think it is I'm personally grateful for the fact that my life is not entirely dominated by child bearing, which you would have been in a previous is, I'm personally grateful for the fact that my life is not entirely dominated by childbearing, which it would have been in a previous era. I'm not going to expect to have 10 children and to suspend my whole life by the pregnant or postpartum. I think it's more that we haven't really negotiated with the social consequences.

And that's what I'm trying, that's the sort of conversation I'm trying to initiate. Because we have the power to, I'm not like it complete. I have a sort of materialist analysis of all of this and I think in the end it does come down to things like the pill, things like changes in the economy, I think so often you get the popular narrative of feminist history is basically sees it as being driven by particularly inspiring feminists who just kind of give really strong arguments and everyone is persuaded and this is what gives us the vote, this is what gives us access to professions whatever. I don't think that's true.

I mean, clearly there have been some very impressive feminists, or ugly, but I think that the real story of the last century is things like the washing machine. Yeah, you said the washing machine helped liberate women more than any feminist did. Yeah, I think John Peterson said the same thing. You're completely right. He also mentions tampons, yeah, there's all sorts of technologies which make it possible for women to have lives outside of their home, or more outside of their home, and previously. And also changes to the economy, which means that if you're in a knowledge economy or a service economy, where male physical strength doesn't have anything like the economic importance that

it once did, women and men can participate basically as equals. You know, there are obviously childbearing makes a difference. But if you're on the pill, you're delaying childbearing, you're working at a laptop, and you're operating in a very kind of gender neutral social sphere, you might not even, you might not even like work out, you might have no recognition of the fact that men and women are profoundly physically different in terms of things like strength.

Like from that perspective, it looks as if the whole world is done to neutral. And so that's kind of, that is the sort of social context in which this idea of the the difference history many women being socially constructed or being trivial makes sense but actually that's like a very very superficial analysis of what's going on. I actually I mean one of the physical differences is still profound but also that those psychological differences go really deep because we're talking about

hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary history feeding into us having these really distinct reproductive roles and that leading to us having quite different modes of sexuality. Didn't you say that the USA women's football team was beaten by the Dallas under 15's football team. Yeah, yeah. There are several examples of this, yeah, of elite women's teams being beaten by teenage boys. I think that the fastest woman in the 100 metres on the planet gets beaten by about 100 or 200 under 17s in America, 200 under 17 men in America. I mean, the whole, like the discussion around male and female physical strength differences are purely due to the fact that girls get told that they need to play with dolls and guys go and lift little trucks and stuff. It feels like lopping to me. It feels like everybody is living this sort of charade and nobody can bear themselves

to pull out of it. That's wild. But when it comes to the psychological differences, there's a little bit more plausible room for maneuver there because you can't see them manifest as much. And when you've also got a discussion about people being able to transition from different genders the male brain and the female brain and traits that you put them on and take them off like clothes. Yeah and there are outliers you know there are there are like less so physically I mean you do sometimes get. Really strong women or whatever but even then I mean, you do sometimes get really strong women or whatever, but even then, I mean, I do, my husband and I are both power lifters, and just, I don't think that you can spend five minutes in a powerlifting gym and not be aware of the fact that men and women strike differences

as a matter of, even if there are obviously some really strong women. Do you pull conventional or sumo? Conventional. What about the husband? pull conventional or sumo? Conventional. What about the husband? Also conventional. Good. It's a family of non-chators. I'm adamant that sumo's cheating.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, and then I see, I've been, you know, trading it for years, and then I see like novice men warming up with my one-wren max on band. Like, it's just, it's just like the pure reality of it. But I mean, if people don't participate in those kind of sports also things like martial arts, if you don't participate in that, you wouldn't necessarily know it. But on the psychological differences, yeah, there are more outliers. There are some people who are really atypical for their sex and their Cleley is like a lot of space for culture to intervene.

But it's so on an individual level, if you know what if you know someone sex you don't necessarily know anything really about their personality, it's more that at the population level when you're talking about millions of people, that's when you see it play out. And like something that is really interesting and really makes clear that how how profound these differences are is you look at things like university campuses and look at their sex ratio on campuses where there are more women than men, so men are the rare sex, there's more hook up culture, because the rare sex is able to set the terms more easily. And then on campuses, whether or more men and women, you have the inverses more monogamy.

And that's the sort of thing where, yes, there will be individual outliers, but you can't deny the differences when you see it playing out in those kind of larger arenas. Well, that sex ratio hypothesis is kind of the basis as well for a ton of hypergamy that as you have an ever increasing group of high performing women and ever decreasing group of under performing men that are dropping out of college, that aren't getting as educated women age 21 to 29 earn 1,111 pounds more on average than the equivalent man.

So during the period when women are seeking a mate, they're unable to find what fundamentally on average women want to find a mate that is more statusful, wealthier and better educated than they are. Those are the cues typically that they were attracted to. But now women are able to gain status, earn more and become better educated than men at higher rates than men, which is what's causing this sort of upward tilt toward turbo-chad at the top, sleeping with everybody, listless, sexless men underclass down here, and then the wistful women and alpha widows that are in this sort of world. I mean, this is the most interesting dynamic that I think there is at the moment when it comes to dating

It's got downstream implications economically. It's got downstream implications when you think about population growth population decline culture Crime, you know, you don't want this huge underclass of sexless men roaming the streets when you get into a relationship as a man Your testosterone goes down when you have a child your testosterone goes down again When you have a child, your testosterone goes down again, because it's advantageous, it's adaptive for you to not be going out doing reckless shit when you've got a baby and a wife at home to look after. So all of this, I mean, this is just,

it is by far the most interesting dynamic, I think, that's happening in the world at the moment. Yeah, and this is the subject of it. So my last chapter is called Marriage is Good. And a lot of people who've just seen the contents page sort of assumed that it's a Christian argument or whatever. But actually, it's making exactly, it's like a very rational secular argument.

For actually, if you look at what happens to a society when you get rid of monogamous marriage and you compare our society and as it wasn't passed and also look at societies where polygony is the norm. Like most society, I think it's about 80% of societies on the anthropological record have had polygony as a socially acceptable thing. So you end up with the, you know, the chads who are having multiple wives and then you've got men who never marry at all. And you do also have some inogamy in the middle, like it's normally not quite that extreme, but that it seems is basically our natural state as a species.

And because it just, it just recurs again and again and again. And that, that minority of cultures that have been monogamous, including Western cultures, are unusual, and it's not like it does sort of have to be imposed. Like, you know, a lot of elite men will cheat, for instance, and you know, they take on extra lives that they could, like people, monogamy is not really on actual state. It does have to be socially enforced, but it also is like amazingly successful. Anthropologists talk about the puzzle of monogamous marriage in that it is weird to see that a culture like ours would have developed it in the first place because it clearly doesn't suit the interests of elite men. You'd think that the

elite men would want, would want to have multiple wives, which of course they do. But the reason they think that it's become as successful as it has is because minogamous societies do well. More stable. They're more stable. They're also more productive. So they colonize other parts of the world, basically, because they're wealthy and striving and successful, and then they impose their marriage norms elsewhere. Think about it this way. I've only just thought about this. The naturalistic fallacy gets used a lot with this, right? Look, and, so, really, we maybe don't have tons of evidence that we're a monogamous species, therefore, monogamy is not the strategy that we're supposed to go down.

Yeah. If you accept the fact that non-monogamous societies are more unstable and are going to exist for less of a Roman amount of time, that means that the living standards are going to be lower, that means that mortality, all of the things that you care about are going to be out of the window. Yeah.

What if monogamy for the individual, sometimes can be suboptimal, but on average is optimal for the culture as a whole? In the same way as when seatbelts got introduced, people didn't want to wear them. And a lot of the time, it's not just you that you're saving. It's also other people in the car because if you don't have your seatbelt on, you bounce around and you smash up everybody else as well. Maybe a different way to frame monogamy is that it's kind of like following the law a little bit. It's a small individual sacrifice that you make

that does perhaps make for some people suboptimal living standards, but only a little bit. But the reason that you do that is to contribute to the entire stability of society. Yeah, I've heard, I can't remember who came up with this, but I've heard Menogamy refer to sexual socialism. For basically that reason. It's a redistribution strategy for sure. I can't remember who he came up with this, but I've heard Menogamy refer to sexual socialism. That means. It's a redistribution strategy for sure.

Yeah, I mean, I mean, mentioned your niece again, he got in trouble for saying something along these lines. I can't remember exactly what. In forced Menogamy, I brought it up with them at the start of the year. Yeah, because it sounds really authoritarian, but I think what he was describing is basically a weird describing where it's like socially prescribed. It's not even

necessarily legally required. It's just considered to be the norm, you know, cheating is considered to be bad. You can't have a second wife. And yeah, there are also, I mean, there are other good outcomes also in terms of things like child abuse and domestic violence, which obviously is something that feminists are very interested in. Polygonist societies have much higher rates of both because the household with multiple wives and their children are full of conflict. A hundred times more likely that a child is going to be killed if they're in the household with one parent that isn't a biological parent.

A hundred times more likely. Yeah, this is... 100 times more likely. Yeah, it's insane. It's wild. Okay, so what's sexual disenchantment? So social disenchantment is basically, I took it from Max Weber, the sociologist who wrote about disenchantment of the natural world as part of the enlightenment. So when you, people used to really pre-enlightenment, the natural world was kind of possessed by spirits and had like

agency and specialists infused within it. And then we become more rational, whatever opposed to enlightenment and realise that actually it's all just like scientific forces of play. I think that it's not my turn. I borrowed it from Aaron Sibarro, he's American writer. Secretary of Discent Charment is what happens post-sector revolution where you used to think of sex as having this kind of

special nurse. I mean within Christianity being like a sacrament, within marriage. And then now it's stripped of all of that meaning. And it just becomes basically any social interaction, like it's just a means of having fun, basically. It doesn't necessarily mean anything. I mean, the point that I'm making the book is actually, basically no one really believes in such a disenchantment. People talk about it a lot, and particularly like progressives and liberal feminists will talk about it as if it's an ideal, like we should of course get rid of all these like stupid old-fashioned ideas about sex, having some like innate specialness, but actually people don't really behave as if that's true,

because people behave almost always as if actually sex does have a special status. And it's a special status you can't necessarily define very easily, but people feel it. Like people care if they get cheated on, even in the polyamorous community. Like if you go into any polyamorous, subreddit or whatever, you will find people really struggling with jealousy as is like intense instinctive thing that they're trying to override and they can't quite do it. People, sexual harassment in the workplace, like the, I get really frustrated with feminists who claim simultaneously that sex workers work and that we should like get rid of all these hangups about

selling sex being any different from working with Donald's or selling any other kind of servers. But then they also get so sensitive about any perceived section of propriety in their workplace. What like? Like being touched by a boss, for instance, like not even in a, like, a really aggressive assaulting way, but just, you know, when we're getting touched on the arm or something like that or being asked out in a context that you don't really feel comfortable, you know, all that kind of me-to-stuff, which is quite low level. Like, if that, if it's really the case that sex work is work, then what is the problem would be asked

by your boss to give them a blowjob? Right, it's work, it's just a service. It's like being asked to do it over time. Or make a coffee. Or make a coffee, yeah. And no one actually thinks that that it's just like making a coffee. So I think that the sexual disenchantment idea

is really just theoretical. It's a rhetorical kind of move but actually doesn't really describe reality and doesn't really describe how people feel. I mean it's kind of an inconvenient fact that if you're trying to be super rational and you're trying to resist anything like remotely traditional or religious or anything, anything old fashioned. Then the fact that people feel very differently about sex and they do about other things is kind of inconvenience. It's felt like an aberration, right?

It's like, oh, this is just an analogy drawn with the non-monogamy community is so correct. One of my friends out here in Austin was telling me about the first time that his wife brought somebody else back, and he was on the floor of the bathroom dry-wetching. But at the time, he's not married. At the time was adamant that this was just him working through his ego, and this is in part of the process, this is part of the processing thing. I'm like, dude, you're not choosing to throw up. That's something way, way, way behind conscious programming.

That's innate. That's built in. But is it you? Is this your quote that says, few liberal feminists are willing to draw the link between the culture of sexual hedonism they promote and the anxieties of a campus rate that have emerged at the exact same time? Yeah, yeah, that's yeah, yeah, because I thought I think what's going on a lot with me

too is that what what was describing me to and still is I guess I mean it's still going on in different forms, right? Was not always right, right? Like some, so with, like going back to Weinstein, for instance, some of what he did was straight forwardly illegal. And he was convicted a little bit therefore. But a lot of what is described is much more somewhere in the middle, you know,

much more open to interpretation. And often what women were talking about was just like feeling creeped out or feeling like exactly this dry wretching on the bathroom floor feeling, like your instincts are telling you something, even if you can't quite rationalize it. And often this was like expressed in terms of consent, because in the liberal feminist framework, the only thing you're really allowed to talk about is consent, because all the old fashioned norms are out of the window.

You're not allowed to talk about shivalry, you're not allowed to talk about like any kind of instinctive feeling of disgust or discomfort that you have kind of has to be suppressed, but you are allowed to talk about consent, and so everything had to be expressed in the form, in like the language of consent. So I talk about, for instance, the Aziz Ansari case, you might remember, I can't remember the name of the grace, I think, was her, her pseudonym. It's a woman who went on a date

with the actor Aziz Ansari, went back to his house afterwards, and he kind of, he didn't rape her and he didn't do anything illegal but he just kind of subtly pressured her into doing sexings that she didn't really want to do. And then later she wrote a sort of first hand account of this and he got in trouble but it was one of those, it was a bit later on in Meantoo and it was one of those ones that provoked a lot of discussion because it was, because it was a bit later on in Meantoo, and it was one of those ones that provoked a lot of discussion because it was a borderline one. Like, he hadn't had he done anything wrong, he definitely hadn't done anything illegal.

The idea that he had violated had consent just didn't really stack up, just based on her own story. I think what's often going on here is it's to do with this pressure that women feel to have sex like men and to try and have emotion in the sex and to try and just like, you know, to do the sexual disentral and thing and just treat it like a like a ledger activity, but they can't actually quite

do it and they feel like they feel sexual disgust, they feel shame, they feel like these deep painful emotions. And the only person sometimes to blame is the man. Even though he actually might not have done anything wrong, really, or he probably wasn't behaving like a gentleman, but he wasn't doing anything illegal and he wasn't doing anything really wrong according to the standards of the day. It's just that the standards of the day, it's just that the stands of the day

are not actually very good for women. That's it, you've nailed it. You've absolutely nailed it that. And you're right, the outlet for pushback and for distaste, the only one that is there is the man and the only framing through which you can talk about this is consent, which is where false allegations, I think sometimes come in that perhaps you repurpose Ick as guilt as...

It's a must have done something criminal, yeah. Now it's rape, yeah. And of course the nature of it is that there are only two people there. There weren't any witnesses. And so it's everyone's like analysis or something that's gone in the past is just really difficult. And to be fair to you a lot of men, they're being raised in the same culture where you're told that this is women love it. I mean they haven't necessarily watched sex in the city, but it's the same milieu where having sex like a man is aspirational. And the idea is, I write a lot in the book about pop culture examples of women who are

clearly aspirational, fictional characters, who have loads of casual sex, love it, don't have any emotional connection to the men that they use for sex. And this is aspirational. And young men are seeing this as well and they're also watching porn which could be completely unrealistic, realistic perspective on what women like and so you know the clueless basically. They're playing by the rules of the game as well or at least by the cultural influences of the game that they think are going on. Another another problem that you have here in the asymmetric

warfare of the sexes is that men who begin to get a little bit of resentment for women, let's say that they've had the heartbroken in the past, but that they are within the standard where they can keep having sex, right? They're not one of the underclass, they're actually someone that can keep on doing it. If they become aware of the fact that girls are trying to play this game of detached, emotional, or sex, if they've fully become conscious of that, they go, oh, okay, let's see who can win at this game the most, because it's not going to be you.

It's going to be me. And they can, you know, this isn't to say, again, on average, this isn't to say that some men don't get attached after the first time they have sex, or they go, some of my friends fall pretty hard. But if they can weaponize that, they can go, some of my friends fall pretty hard. But if they can weaponize that, they can do a ton of damage as well. And yeah, I don't know. There's maybe an argument that everybody just needs to not be able to have sex until the age of

25. And then when they do, they're like, look, I'm fully emotionally balanced. I've been through a bunch of breakups. I didn't have sex during the relationship, I kind of know what I like, I'm what I don't like, blah, blah, blah. I don't know, it's just so many of... It's driving Mary's marriage, Chris. That used to be what it was. Every person. You went around to have sex with where you got married, which gave men in particular a

massive incentive to get their shit together. Because if you can't get married until you say achieve certain adult things, like you've got a job, you've got a house, you know, or like you've got whatever the system is, like a certain amount of money that you can demonstrate, your sort of eligibility as a husband. If you have to get all of your doctorate before you can demonstrate your sort of eligibility as a husband. If you have to get all of your doctorate, before you can have sex, I mean, you can potentially buy sex, but you can't have it like socially illicit. Then that's a huge incentive to behave yourself and to do pro social stuff, whereas if you have a scenario now where either you're like attractive enough that you can get sex, casual sex without having to do anything really except be moderately charming, or you can get sex

through all you have access to porn which gives, gives some of the same feedback from your environment as if you were actually having sex. I mean, this will get so, this will get so much worse with sex robots. Where all of a sudden you can basically bypass all of the effort that you might historically have had to put in in order to access sex, you can just buy a sex robot. And you can spend your whole life playing video games, never going to gym, never showering, never having a job, and you still get access to this thing that your ancestors like,

40th and now to get access to. Even without the sex robots, men are retreating, I think, from the dating market, terrifying rates. There's a quote that Rob Henderson came up with, which is this a similar sort of dynamic that we're talking about here. He says,

norms were loosened around being an absentee father. So more men took the option, but nobody wants to admit it because it upsets people. Instead, we retreat to discussions of poverty and economics because talking about family and parenting makes people feel weird and judgmental, but young men will only do what's expected of them and a lot did use to be expected. There were social norms to work hard, provide, take care of loved ones and so on. Today,

these norms have largely dissolved. Young men have responded accordingly. Yeah, he's very, very smart for Benson. He's completely right. Yeah, he's very, very smart, Robinson. He's completely right. Yeah, I think that the line I have in the book about Debbie Daz is that when when motherhood became a biological choice for women, fatherhood became a social choice for men. What do you mean by that? In the when contraception and legalised abortion became available, that basically killed the shotgun marriage pretty much immediately because it no longer served the same social purpose that it had before. But the nature of contraception is such that nothing is 100% of foolproof,

and actually the pill pill particularly in its earliest incarnations wasn't that great and still isn't that great because it depends a lot on the user using it properly. So if you're using it properly it's like 99% plus effective but in reality it's more like 91% so you end up with a lot of unplanned pregnancies and there will always be some women who don't want to have a termination for whatever reason. But if you're in a social context where like there isn't necessarily considered to be a link between sex and reproduction, and getting pregnant is considered to be like this unwelcome aberration rather than literally the whole point,

then it becomes much more socially acceptable for men to not stick around because they say, well, you chose this, you know, you're on your own. Which is, yeah, I mean, obviously there have always been cases of people, I've had some critics point this out, you know, there've always been cases of men abandoning their wives or banning women that they made pregnant outside of marriage. You know, they've always been scoundrels, they've always been unwanted pregnancies, whatever, like that's absolutely true. But rates of out-of-wedlocked births now are completely historically unprecedented,

which is kind of weird because you would think that giving women the technology that enables a controller fertility would reduce single motherhood, but it's done the opposite because humans are humans are complicated creatures. That's what I learned from Mary Harrington that you introduce the pill. Single motherhood goes up. Who the fuck could have predicted that? That's four degrees of detachment away. It's so interesting but also kind of tragic. But it seems like women, it was a perfect storm, right? You had the decoupling socially, then you had the decoupling biologically, but you haven't had the decoupling emotionally. It's still that haven't had the decoupling emotionally. It's still that, fundamentally, there will be some women that are able to have sex like a man, and there will be some men that are

able to have sex like a man. But on average, it used to be something that you worked toward for a long time. It used to be the sort of thing. And think about now, I was sent another article by Rob Deere the day where he he was talking about why is it that parents tend to select when their daughter or son brings home a new potential partner. They look at things like job title, earnings, family, and he asks why is that the case? Why is it that you look at these? When they're not looking at how hot they are, not looking at attraction and stuff like that. Even kindness kind of takes a little bit of a back seat and it's less falsifiable basically. The fact is, look, these are the things that are going to be the most likely to become

grand child optimizing algorithms. Do you have status? Do you have money? Do you have the right family behind you? If you've got those, I'm probably going to have grandchildren. All of the other ones are wishy-washy and kind of easy to to fake in a way. Why why is it then that loveless sex isn't empowering? Yeah, I mean, because your animal brain, which none of us are completely in control of, for women in particular, even if there are some allies, as you mentioned, I mean, often the allies, like often women who don't get attached to sex, for instance,

have a history of sexual trauma. There's often not a very healthy reason behind it, but accepting the fact that there are outliers, your animal brain thinks that this guy is going to knock you up, and you are going to become a profoundly vulnerable mother baby dyad, you know, like human infants have been saliently vulnerable. They need so much more care than any other. As far as I know, any other species young and mothers are also extremely vulnerable

in the later stages of pregnancy and during infancy, you have to put so much energy and sacrifice so much in order to raise this child to adulthood. And that before like five minutes ago in evolutionary history was what happened, what certainly what you risked happening if you had sex, had sexual sex. And so like, our brains are still primed for that. And that's the whole purpose behind emotional attachment to a sexual partner. And also the whole purpose behind like choosing a sexual partner.

And the fact that women do tend to be a lot cheesier than men. There's these quite funny studies that have been done several times where they get quite attractive strangers to go up to many women. I think when university campuses normally in proposition them and when the women proposition male strangers they almost always say yes or if they say no it's because they have a girlfriend or whatever. Whereas when the men proposition the men, the men, the women, they always say no, because women, like their filter is impregnable. And there's a reason for that, is if you don't want some, some, like, to be knocked up by some bowzo.

It's just one of the reasons why prostitution is as traumatic as it is. I mean, there are all, there are all of the physical, resting, and bulging prostitution like rates of murder, I'm insanely high, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, if we were to compare it to another profession, it would be by far the most dangerous profession ever, like rates of PTSD are much higher than in the military, for instance. But one of the reasons why it's so profoundly just stressing is that women have this really, really strong instinct to like vet their central partners, and to only have sex with men who seem like good prospects. And women also have a very low sexual disgust threshold, which means that they get the

yik very readily with a man that they don't fancy. And what women and prostitution are basically required to do is to override that and to suppress those instincts. And if you talk to women who've experienced it, they often talk about like working really hard to dissociate from their physical feelings. It is that, is that retro-murdering, bathroom floor thing. I mean, actually, Rachel Moran,

whose prostitution survivor and is written this amazing book called Paid For, which is a memoir of her experiences. She talks about that, the fact that not vomiting is one of the most important skills a prostitute can have because your physical urge to run away and to cry into vomit is that strong that you have to fight it down. I think that if, you know, in a much less extreme circumstances, obviously, but when women to like to play the masculine role and

imitate male sexuality and to enjoy sex in the way that they think they're supposed to, they are basically obliged to suppress their instincts which isn't, isn't at all psychologically healthy. Has normalizing sex work like only fans been a benefit for women? I mean, they clearly are some women not only fans being a benefit for women? They clearly are some women only fans who make a lot of money from it. So there are some winners. They are very unusual.

Most women only fans probably make a loss in terms of the amount of time they have to spend because the Pareto distribution on only fans is wild. And most of the women who do really well on it already celebrities and are already quite wealthy, so this idea that you can just be like, as long as you're sufficiently pretty, you log on and you're making a fortune is not true and I'm sure has been deliberately whipped up that idea by OnlyFans because they're the only people actually really profiting at the end of the day. I mean I think the only fans is not like street prostitution or brothel prostitution. Like it's clearly not the same. I, it's pretty gross and you will have men asking you to do things that really turn your stomach, but it's clearly not like physically dangerous.

I think that the main risk of only fans is your ability to have a long-term relationship afterwards. Because you end up putting your images out in the world and you can't get them back because that's the nature of the internet and often only fans creators get their images stolen and so they'll be shared and they don't even get any money from it and the risk is in the future that even though men don't always admit it, the sexual double standard is still actually really alive and well. So it's actually double standard being when men are permitted to be a bit promiscuous

and that's okay socially, but women tend to be punished for promiscuity. I think that only fans goes beyond promiscuity. You know, the double standard didn't account. It's not men whanking on camera and then trying to find a wife and them saying, my friends shared something in a WhatsApp chat earlier on and that kind of looks a little bit like you. What about normalizing, like, love sex workers? Sex workers are, you should be completely fine with your partner doing only fans or perhaps even escorting. I mean, crazy. What kind of, yeah. I mean, either if I think if a man is really comfortable with that, that's like a red flag to me.

Honestly, like again, it's an example of men's oppressing their instincts because the the instinct is was jealousy is so strong. And again, has such an obvious evolutionary origin to it. Because if you're putting loads of resources into raising children that you've had with this woman, you want to know their yours, that's make guarding is what the biologist call it, and it's so common that I think it's considered to be a human universal. And yeah, like there are loads of unwelcome phenomena that come from that.

Gellacies often, the motive behind domestic violence, for instance. Because you mentioned the naturalistic fallacy, the fact that it's natural doesn't mean it's necessarily good. But it does also mean that trying to completely override it is probably not going to work. You have to find a way of accommodating your instincts. You can't just try and suppress them and try and rewrite the human blueprint.

Well, that's where I think the, it's not men that are encouraging women to do only fans. I don't see men on the internet saying that you should go and you go, should ditch your job and go and do it. The only people online saying sex work is real work seems to be women. Yes, men are the ones that are paying for their images once they're in the game, but I think that's because once women cross that threshold and become a sex worker or whatever, they're almost kind of not subhuman, but they're in a different category, right? And it's like, oh, well, they're doing it. I didn't get them into it.

So I'm just going to continue to fund them. But if you were to say to most men, I think, would you advise that pretty girl to get into only fans so that you can see her nudes? Most of them would say, probably not. Probably not, but almost every healthy man would say no, right? They'd say, no, I'll try and go out with her or maybe she should just go and enjoy her life or do whatever. But once they're in the game, that's what's going to happen. But you have this, this very bizarre

sort of cartel, I don't know, it's like a self, not self oppression, but like self capitalization from women of women, encouraging other women to go and do the game, despite the fact that the chances of you making money on only fans is minusculely low when it comes to actually making the tens of thousands of dollars a day that the biggest creators make. And yeah, I mean, even if you were able to have an unbelievably secure only fans that was never able to leak your photos online. You have two choices for the remainder of your life when you get into talking to a new

partner. You can either tell them the truth and regardless of how comfortable that guy is with his sexuality, finding out that his miss is, forget body count, even if you've only slept with one of the person, but that was something that you did. You can't, like, left brain your way out of thinking that that is, oh God, well, if she did that in the past, does this mean that she's maybe going to, she's a risk for promiscuity in the future.

Like the cook radar is so hyper attuned for men, which is why we get more jealous. Or the other one is to lie to him. Cook radar is interesting, praise. Good coinage game. Because I have used the, I have done it right in the book, but I've, like, talked about on Twitter,

Nance Radar, which I've been thinking. I think women have really strongly, I mean, I think men do as well. Well, I think women in particular have a really strong like. I think it's hardly a sexual disgusting. It's that feeling of like, this guy is creepy. And I think that it's like female intuition, right? And I think it's coming.

It's probably partly coming from wanting to protect yourself. It's also partly wanting to protect your children. You've got that like, this guy's bad news. Yeah, if I'm going to sleep with him, what are you going to do to the kids, perhaps that in the line? I got to tell you about this meme that I saw. So Carl Benjamin, Saga and I have a guy who has incredibly conservative views about

this stuff, but aligns completely with what we're saying here. He posted a meme the other day and it had a girl from only fans in like a bikini or lingerie or whatever sort of dancing away on one side. And it had Michael Scott from the office on the other sort of looking strangely and the text said, we call it female empowerment and they will dance naked for the price of a cheeseburger. Yeah, I mean, this question you raise about why women encouraging each other to do it, but you're right.

I mean, one exception, I give you a dear friend who went on a date with a guy who said, you're so hot, you should be on only fans. And she did not go on a date with him again, because it was just so obviously, I know. Failing strategy, I think. Yeah, because the way that she interpreted it, and I think correctly, was that he was he was clearly not regarding her as like wife material, right? And this is this is I think an area that women do make sometimes where they don't have a good understanding in male sexuality and they don't, it's really interesting.

I don't know if you read David Buses, but bad men. Absolutely, but yeah, I brought him on for the, he tasked the book, yeah. And he talks about the fact that women tend to assess like short-term partners and long-term partners based on the same qualities. They want the same things in all the men they have sex with. Men don't do that.

They have a much lower standard for their short-term partners and they do for long-term partners. And so they will be willing to have sex with the woman that they absolutely would not marry. They would not even introduce to their friends. And I think a lot of women don't necessarily know that. And so they will interpret sexual advances from men as flattering when actually they can are potentially cheap, you know.

This is the genesis of the alpha widow, right? Like this is what many girls that are liberated sexually and using Tinder and stuff like that don't get. And I think that this is another, I'm actually not so convinced about quite how big of an effect this is, I'd need to see Rob go and do some research about it. But certainly, women are able to sleep with men that they wouldn't be able to get into a relationship with,

but the reverse isn't true. And there is an argument that the aftershock of this means that those women are constantly to constantly pine after the nine out of ten guy that's worth half a million and all that. I'm not sure about how long that would last for and the echoes of that and stuff like that, but I certainly think that what porn has done to men, which is to teach them that women are to be objectified, is similar in part to what only fans has done to women, which is to teach some women that men are commercial vehicles to be exploited, and that their sex is just a commodity. You can trade it like anything else.

Yeah, and it's not, I think, as well, some women who are already posting a lot of raunchy photos on Instagram, don't necessarily feel like any fan's is that bigger step, it's just a bit more explicit and you get paid for it. So you can sort of see the reasoning and what some women say and I get it, is that, yes, maybe that it means that some men in the future wouldn't want to be in a relationship with me because I've got these photos out in the world, but I wouldn't want to be in a relationship with a man like that anyway if he's going to judge me sort of thing. And the problem with that is that if you actually look at a research on men, it's like, that's basically all men.

They might not say it because it's not really socially acceptable to admit to, but actually it is basically all men. Like, to the point that, if a man isn't bothered, I'd wonder if he had a cuckold fetish. And then that, obviously, brings complications to relationship. What did you learn about porn when you looked at that? For the book. I mean, the thing with porn that I think a lot of people don't fully appreciate is that

online porn is a completely different beast from like Playboy of the 60s. I mean, I start the book by writing about Playboy writing like you have now. And clearly, like there were feminist writing at the time about porn being really grim for women. There's this famous cover of an issue of hustler. I can't remember what year it was published in probably 70s, where a woman is being like ground up in a meat grinder and her legs are just sticking out the top. It's really like of like deliberately grotesque image and feminist got so upset about it at the time, I think, rightly, but they had no idea what would happen with the internet.

And I think that the thing that's so sinister about online porn is that there's this quote I use in the book that the nature of like technic capitalism is that we are all either above the algorithm or below the algorithm we're either writing these, we're either creating these these these pieces of tech or we're being influenced by them because we're using them or we're you know, sexually interacting with people who are who them. And porn is such an amazing example of this, because it's just profit driven, that's the point of it. It's not, it's not interested in the wellbeing of its consumers. I mean, whatever porn have, like, porn have various, like, advertising efforts to try and sanitize what they do, but the whole, the whole point

of it is making money, and they're really good at it. And the way that they do it is by basically creating a super stimulus, which addles user's brains, and that like they're incredibly adept at basically arousing the human body, the human animal, like we can't really resist animal instincts, as quickly as possible. So you log on to one of these platforms and you look at the front page and like everything is designed to make you as horny as possible as quickly as possible. And the way the platforms are designed is to like introduce you to the stupid stimulus and then introduce you to

something even more stimulating and even more stimulating and more stimulating and so you end up and I mean I mean so a lot of people are able to use porn casually quite a lot of people don't use it at all like a surprising including men's, surprising proportion. Do you know how much that is? So I read a survey that about a quarter of millennial men haven't used it in the last month. Which quite a lot. But the, the, there's a minority of users who are like helpless. How are users? Yes, yes. Like again, it's a Pareto as it play as well. There is a small number of men who watch, I remember the figure I quote in the book, it's something like two percent of users use it for like seven hours a week or more.

It's a lot of porn. Do you know Mary Harrington's Law of Fapp Entropy? Yes. But whatever you start out wanking to will get progressively more disgusting over time and you'll be down in the depths of blueberry porn before you know it. Well yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, like, just anecdotally, there are some very strange things that compulsive porn users end up being turned on by, and like to the point where they can't even, like, erectile dysfunction being a huge problem, they can't actually have sex with a real person. What's the name for that? It's not ground pounding, what's it called? It's called

something. Oh, death grip syndrome. Death ground pounding. Where the fuck did I pull that from? Yeah, definitely. More unpleasant. I mean, death grip syndrome isn't that nice either. Yeah, and I write in the book about cultural death grips in a home, which is where we've got an incredibly porn-ified public life. You've got so much more like sex scenes on TV, advertising billboards, whatever. I mean, like sex scenes on TV have wrapped up so quickly just in my lifetime that used to be edgy and now it's like, you know, every drama has to have like super-super explicit sex scenes every five minutes

or whatever. So you've got that on the one hand or I don't think we've ever had this much explicit sex in public life, but then also people aren't actually having sex. You have this extra session, this extra pression where you've got, as you were saying, you've got loads of men who are virgins of into their 20s and so on. It's this really weird really weird, what's the word? It's this really weird contradiction and it's one that the feminist of the 70s who were so upset about porn didn't foresee interestingly, like they were concerned that porn would inspire sexual violence and like is complicated because it probably does a bit like in some circumstances. So for instance, choking porn has become so popular

and is so mainstream in a way that it wasn't at all 20 years ago. It used to be considered a really niche media sin thing and even actually in the BSN community it was considered a bit risky. Whereas now, like survey data is crazy for millennials and younger, the proportion of young women who are being choked by their partners, sometimes asking for it and sometimes non-consensually,

but it's like just become insanely mainstream really quickly. And the only mechanism that I can see for that is porn, that it's inspiring a change in sexual culture. So sometimes, yeah, it's inspiring more aggressive behaviour from its users, but equally actually sometimes it's like basically neutering users. They become actually incapable of having sex with a real person and even becoming capable of being around as much as normal porn because they're so they go down the rabbit hole. Laura Fapp intrably continues to. Yeah.

What do most modern feminists think about porn now then? Do they think that it's liberating women and allowing them to earn and sex work is real work? It's complicated because I think that the, like, most liberal earn and sex work is real work? It's complicated because I think that the, like most liberal feminist and sex positive feminist would definitely think that there's nothing like inherently bad about porn and would absolutely defend the right of women to produce it and so on, but I think that there's increasingly a view that actually it's not great. I did a debate at the Oxford Union earlier this year and the proposition was something like this house welcomes a new porn. It was mostly about

any fans but ended up being a rapporteur general. And I thought I'd be slaughtered because I thought that the students were going to be so sex-political and so on to everything I had to say. And actually, I won surprisingly. I had some quite aggressive questions from the floor, but actually at the end, I saw one. Why do you think that was? Because I think actually this generation, I mean these 18 year olds are right, so they've, or a bit older, they, they're the generation who had pawn, like on their private computers, on their phones, from adolescence onwards. I mean, I'm 30, so I didn't actually have my own smartphone or whatever until teens and above, but these are the kids who had it from like,

adolescence and would expect to be exposed to porn really young, and it was really formative in their sexuality. And I think that it's hard not to recognize the downsides of that. The thing that I see online, I don't know a single guy that is pro porn. Guys are either neutral porn or anti-porn.

Like, and the ones that are anti-porn are vehement about it. Do they tend to be anti-porn from like the ethical women's stuff or because of the effect on them? I can see that from the effect on women's stuff. No, I think that I actually think that the guys that are behaviorally addicted to porn or have got friends that do or are scared that they're going to become it. I actually think in part that they see the women that are a part of the porn machine as part of the oppressor. I think that they think that they are creating the

content which is causing me to have to fap three or four times a day and feel disgusted with myself or waste time or have this sort of super normal stimuli problem of not being able to get it up. Yeah, I mean, it's another one of those things where everybody's losing. You know, it's except for the owners of my geek, they're fine. Yeah, it didn't, one of those, one of those went on a podcast a few years ago. I remember hearing about how huge that my geek empire is. It's like more than 50% of all porn streaming on the internet goes through them.

Remembering that porn is still the biggest traffic source on the internet, and they've got, it's wild, yeah, and they British. I've basically known. One of the guys British as well, I'm sure. Yeah, Canadian, the guy who only fans his British. Yes, yeah, he's a... I was trying to get him on, I was trying to bring him on because he seems like a very interesting guy.

And I was really fascinated by the attempted move away from explicit content. It was obvious that they had... I don't think that that came from altruistic means. I think that that came from probably investor problems and shit to do with banks. So Chelsea Ferguson, if you know her, she owns Admiami.vip, which is another version

of only fans. She was on only fans, she found out that it was a problem, she's a friend, I've been friends with her for a very long time, she's got a huge private Snapchat, she's been a stripper for a long time in Newcastle, and she was telling me that she had to go to Germany, Germany was the only place that she could get a bank that would process payments when they found out what she was doing. So the back end of stuff, I think that that was the story about only fans wasn't that they were trying to clean up the image.

It's that they were probably having investor problems and operational shit on the back end. Yeah, interesting, because that was one of the... My memory of the timeline is that big New York time speech about pawn hub and Mikey came out and these are in particular, possibly some other companies I can't remember, got a coffee and thinking that they were inadvertently funding child rape images. And so I guess that that, I mean, I mean, only fans has loads of kids on it realistically. And I know that they try, they say that they try I mean, I mean, only fans has loads of kids on it realistically. And I know that they try, they say that they try to make sure that it's only adults, but they can't realistically do that.

There are loads of stories anecdotally of girls, you know, 14, 15 year old girls, whatever putting their images up there. It is inevitable. On any of these platforms, you can't really protect against it. What do you mean when you say that people are not products? So that's the, yeah, that's the, when I mentioned at the beginning that I had that big Twitter storm about my chapter titles and that was kind of the most, all these like left-wing sex-foceted people absolutely outraged at me saying that people aren't products. I mean, it comes back to the section of Disentralment Point

that if you really think that the sex is meaningless, it's just that making coffee, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that people can just like sell sexual access to themselves, like they'd sell any other kind of service or any other kind of product. Like, it's internally consistent and it's the sort of the phrase that I use in that chapter is that it's the logic of the punter. I mean, that's what punters think that they can just, they don't really see prostitute women as being properly human, I think, I mean, based on the way that they write about them, doesn't seem to be how they view them. There's like a polling review platforms online, where punters will review women that they've bought sex from, and there's like no human feeling in

that, like there's like true psychopathy on display. So, so that probably is the only population who actually believe in sex, tradition, charm, the women they're wearing sex from certainly don't. And like thinking away from the more extreme end of it in terms of prostitution as well, just thinking about things like dating apps, which are also kind of designed, like they're also sort of continuous with the logic of the punter, in that they are designed to be like shopping apps, that's how they feel. You don't feel using them that different from using like ASOS or eBay or whatever, because you swipe, swipe, and select your product, I mean, or not, of course, if you're like an Ensel,

he doesn't get any matches, but for the highest status men and for women, that is how it, that's how it's experienced. And it's got a really, really consumerist kind of energy that had the whole, like, casual sex phenomenon, which ought to be the sort of thing that the left are really opposed to. My colleagues at the New States,

and this ought to be, we're talking about this multi-billion-pound global empire of the porn industry. We're talking about a really consumer assasute towards other people's bodies and minds. Like this isn't conservative, or it shouldn't be. Like this should be 101 anti-capitalist critique coming from the left. But it isn't and I think that that's because a lot of people on the left have prioritized like owning the comms and are more interested in tearing down, brought

to our sexual norms and basically promoting free love at all costs than they are in thinking about where this is actually led to, led us to. I think that this, the last 60, 70 years post-experimental revolution period has been, has been in a big experiment in what happens if you disconnect sex from reproduction and you basically discard all of the like quite finely tuned norms that used to exist basically to keep young horny people away from each other. I mean the way that this history is interpreted by feminist often is this, all those social norms exist to control female sexuality and they did, but they also exist to control male sexuality and the purpose of it wasn't to oppress women, it wasn't motivated by misogyny, Mae'n gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaith that that's that matters to the family, that matters to the community. It's it's essential in a

world without contraception to control young people's sexuality and that's what those norms existed for and we threw them out the window very rapidly and we've basically seen this play out over the last however many decades and I think that the the results are in and they're not very promising. That's really, really good. I learned from Mary when she came on the show about the fact that a lot of the rules and the norms that are set are by the elite and they're usually not the ones that suffer the impact. It's a luxury belief, right? So hold that men don't need to hold the door open for you and that having shivalry and constraints on male behavior, that's not needed by some upper middle class woman whose husband has got a postgraduate degree because there are

maybe levels of education or or norm enforcement that have occurred just through his upbringing and her upbringing that means that it doesn't matter. What you don't think about is that the underclass, or the working class guy and girl, who perhaps haven't had those same sort of levels of norms enforced. And maybe they don't know that not hitting your wife is that big of a deal. And then when the culture starts to erode and evaporate that away, you go, well, the people that made the rules or that encouraged the norms to be

dissolved and not the ones that are suffering their dissolving. Yeah. We're up here in the next, I think you use as polyamory as one of his examples as an in his original luxury beliefs essay, where your high status person, let's say in the Bay Area where everyone knows Polyamory, like Polyamory is really just like cool and you can, if it all falls in a heap, it doesn't matter because you've got your money and your status and all of your stability to fall back on and everyone will just think that you're a bit behemian whereas if you're a working class underclass woman who's basically, you know, living polyamory, like having lots of different partners and

lots of different children by them, people one will think you're trash, but two, like your life becomes so challenging because you've got, you've got all these children to look after and you don't have the reliable support of a partner. And like you're at risk, absolutely everything fall in the part. But this is, yeah, it's, it is a luxury belief in the sense that saying that that's a good thing and, and resisting the, resisting the traditional norms that used to, that used to exist, gives status to rich people. Well, think about it. I really like the idea that beating the other side was more important than raising up the people of your political party. And I think that that's very true.

There was a study that I saw around about 2012, surveys of Democrats and Republicans, the proportions twisted and they flipped from I vote for my party because I like my party to I vote for my party because I dislike the other party. Pretty much more people were doing protest votes because of a hatred of the other rather than a love of the similar. Yeah. You go, well, how easily is that to be weaponized? You know, and how many perverse incentives

are you gonna create there? You mentioned at the beginning about how my book will be received in America and not all, but a lot of my friends who are also writing on similar things like Mary and Nina and so on are British and British feminism is much more permissible to say this stuff than it is in the States in general. And I think the reason for that is that we don't really have a Christian right in the

UK. So there isn't really any like fearsome enemy that we all need to be focused against and things like abortion rights are rock solid pretty much like not in Ireland but in the mainland UK like that doesn't feel under threat and I think that's what it is because I think American feminists are just so focused all the time on like often shadow boxing against the Christian right in the sense that I think they overstate their influence and their power and they're kind of stuck in the past a little bit. And there's this like underdog mentality that we, things like constantly having to reassure,

like, oh, you shouldn't be a change of sex, you should be. We're more, it's like, we've won that fight. Come on. I think it's like, look at any, any news paper magazine TV channel, whatever, like, the idea that women are not allowed to say they enjoy sex there's like 50 years out of date come on so they're so focused on a like somewhat imaginary enemy that they can't actually interrogate the coherence of their own views whereas I think in the UK that isn't that isn't so much the case at all and actually in the UK that isn't that isn't so much the case at all and actually there's a lot more

things like trans politics or whatever which we haven't gone into in this discussion but is is much more cross-party is not there isn't this like really fierce dichotomy politically which I think gives more space for thinking critically. I feel like I can write this book and I'm not going to get pegged as a crazy conservative. I might be wrong about that. We'll wait and see. How should people act then? Given all of this, everything that we've gone through, how should people act? So I do basically make the case in the book for being a bit more old fashioned on some stuff. Like a lot of that section of it is directed more at women than it men. So like

I think for instance it's a good idea for women not to have sex for the first day or not even to have sex in the first three months because that gives you the opportunity to assess whether or not he considers you should be good time only, or if your wife material, stuff like that, which you could basically read in most agony arts from the 1950s, which is obviously what I get accused of in my reviews. But also, there was a reason for it. It wasn't managed by someone, you know, there was a proper principle behind it. I mean, similarly for men, I don't know what advice I have to offer for themselves to be honest.

I think I'm probably not the right person to offer any kind of advice because... Typically they don't like advice in any case. No. From a fish teaching a fisherman how to fish type thing. It just it goes down badly. I had a Nama Kate's on a couple of months ago and she's done tons of work, tons of research, like first hand research into it. A lot of people were unhappy about the fact that she wasn't someone that could understand their plight. So okay, so for women don't have sex

on the first day. Not having sex for three months. So, there's an interesting insight I learned from Jeffrey Miller, evolutionary psychologist. So, his book, Mate, that you wrote with Tuckermax, which should have been so much bigger than it was, it's such a shame that it didn't do like mental numbers because it's great. He explained about how slut-shaming is a sort of game

of theoretic enforcement mechanism to ensure that the price of sex doesn't descend lower than women wanted to, which is why most women are the enforcers of slut-shaming not men. Men actually have an incentive for slut-shaming to go away. But one of the problems that you have here is you can kind of see ease of sex or speed towards being accepting of having sex with a potential new partner as kind of being a price, right? And as you start to extend that out, the price that the man has to pay continues to go up and up and up. So you really do need a bit of a God's eye view because if every woman tomorrow said,

right, no sex until three months, that's the playing field. Maybe you would have more men that would sort of duck out of the dating game, but over time they would acclimatize, right? Because we acclimatized to no sex before marriage. That was there. So yeah, I think, okay, so what else, what else can people do? I mean, yeah, so on that point about, yeah, I mean, strike breakers, really, really, really, very well. I think that one of the things I hope comes from the book is that a lot of young women in particular because they've not yet learnt through life experience are phenomenally ignorant about the reality of male sexuality and the reality of sex for difference. And so don't realise for instance some of what we've spoken about the fact that like

the sexual double standard is alive and well and a lot of like men can have a motion of sex in a way that women can't and all of this and so we'll interpret, for instance, they will misinterpret a lot of male behavior and end up making decisions that actually not in their best interest because they think that the guy he wants to sleep with must want something more from them afterwards and then I like learn the hard way that that's not true. And I think that actually if there was more knowledge, widespread knowledge, about the existence of these facts, I think actually

that young women's behaviour could change quite quickly because at the moment for instance the like you go and tip top whatever and you get young women will do things like show off their bruises that they've got from having rough sex with men who like obviously hate them. But there is a status symbol because it's a sign of being, oh look I'm so attractive, I particularly leave things like choking a lot of women interpret choking as being a sign of like passionate love, like in like a 50 shades of grey way, like I want you so much, I'll do anything to have you, it's the way that this is like interpreted in the romantic imagination. That's not generally how the men who are doing it interpret it at all.

So there's this like mutual miscomprehension where each sex is doing something and they actually don't like realize how the other side is interpreting it. I think if more women realized that, it would it would no longer be high status to be showing off your bruises on TikTok because actually the the truth of it is that basically any moderately good looking young women can get as many partners as she wants and can get them to do, you know, if she asks me to choke her, they will. It's not a sign of being super attractive, but it's misinterpreted as being such. So I think that if there were more, I think there was a better understanding than some of the incentives would change, which a bigger thing for young women. Louise Perry, ladies and gentlemen, I really, really enjoyed the book. I think that the

group of women that we've got in the UK, you marry Nina, we need to come up with a new net. This can be a public service announcement to the people that are still listening. Before we started, we came up with the name of based British women, but then realized that the acronym of BBW can... It's problematic. So if you've got an alternative that the girls can use,

that would be great. But yeah, I think that it's really great. I really, really like all of the work that you guys have put out. Where should people go? They want to read more of your stuff online. Where should they go? So there's a book, obviously, which is out already

in the UK, the case against sexual revolution. And it's out at the end of August in America. And I write weekly column for the New Statesman. You got a sub-stack as well, right? No, I don't actually. I start as it went very briefly, but then I got off for the new statesman job and I can't do two columns a week, so... Take the money. Louise, I appreciate you.

Thank you. Thank you so much. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,