Modern Wisdom - #715 - Louise Perry - Are Women Actually Happy With Modern Dating?

Episode Date: December 4, 2023

Louise Perry is a writer, Press Officer for the campaign group We Can’t Consent To This and an author. Young women have been through turmoil over the last 50 years. With their entry into the workforce, emancipation from the kitchen and greater freedom and independence, you might think they have got everything they want out of life. But unfortunately, the reality may be less rosy. Expect to learn why 40% of young adults say that marriage has outlived its usefulness, why younger generations see relationships in TV shows as an unnecessary addition, whether women are actually happy with the modern culture around sex, what the fallout of the MeToo movement has been, why young women are unhappier on average compared to previous generations and much more... Sponsors: Get a 35% discount on all Cozy Earth products at http://www.cozyearth.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ Buy my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.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 friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Louise Perry. She's a writer, press officer for the campaign We Can't Consent to this, and an author. Young women have been through turmoil over the last 50 years. With their entry into the workforce, emancipation from the kitchen and great of freedom and independence, you might think they have got everything they want out of life. But unfortunately, the reality may be less rosy. Expect to learn why 40% of young adults say that marriage has outlived its usefulness,

why younger generations see relationships in TV shows as an unnecessary addition, whether women are actually happy with the modern culture around sex, what the fallout of the Me Too movement has been, why young women are unhappier on average compared to previous generations, and much more. Louise is great. She was on for her first book, the case against a sexual revolution, and she's working on a new one, so she'll be back on next year to talk about that too, but in the meantime, this is a good fix of her work.

I think that she's a very important voice. I think that she is a lovely, balanced redress to a lot of the problems that we are seeing, which are plaguing people's mental health and the way that they relate to the world. So yeah, sit back and enjoy this one. This episode is brought to you by Woop. Woop is a 24-7 health and fitness coach that tracks your sleep, strain, recovery, stress, and more to provide personalized insights to help you to reach your goals. Whether you're obsessed with putting in a little more effort in the gym or getting those extra hours of sleep, Woop helps you improve your everyday health and wellness.

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try it for free and if you do not like it after 29 days, they will give you your money back. Head to join.woop.com slash modernwisdom. That's join.woop.com slash modernwisdom. Nomadic is offering an exclusive 20% discount on your first purchase when you go to nomatic.com slash modern wisdom use the code modern wisdom at checkout and for a limited time and get free expedited shipping on orders over 150 bucks in the US but they also ship to the UK that's nomatic.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. But now ladies and, please welcome Louise Perry. There's a Wall Street Journal column about marriage as a mirror of human nature that says 40% of young adults say marriage has outlived its usefulness.

What do you think is going on? I mean, I'm not surprised because these are young adults who've like, I think so, I think in London now, and this would be true in lots of parts of the West, about half of kids will reach the age of 15, not living with a biological father, half. So, I guess these young people just look around and they're like, well, it's like evident to me that marriage isn't working. Mary Ebers stats got this idea about motherhood and family life as a mimetic desire, that the death of mothers and families causes fewer people to see them, which causes fewer people to want them, which causes fewer people to do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do which actually with, like if your sister or your close friend has a baby, you're more likely to have a baby in the year or two following and vice versa. So if the people around you

are not having children, you're less likely to have children yourself. I think, and that's , I think that's so interesting because there's always been this assumption by demographers up until birth rates started really crashing in recent decades that people would just spontaneously decide once they had access to contraception or whatever to have 2.1 kids, that that was like the natural settling point for the human species that we'd all reach there and we'd just stay there. And that's clearly not true because so many countries now are falling way below replacement. And I think it's because actually there's no law of nature that says that people should want to put one kids. People look around

them and they're like, okay, everyone here has one or zero or six. And then that becomes, as you say, a mnemetic desire. I think that becomes what's considered normal. And humans are completely obsessed with what's normal. which is why I'm just generally quite skeptical of the idea of people having like absolute agency or absence. I mean, we do clearly have, we do clearly have free will, but I think that what we consider to be desirable, normal, the life template is so incredibly dependent on what other people around us think. Which is I think exactly why we've got into this downward spiral in terms of fertility. I love your analogy or your conception of prudishness and licentiousness that we kind of flip flop between the two.

Which one do you think we're in now? Licentiousness, transitioning to Prudishness. Is this like the peri-pilled equivalent of the hard men create strong times, weak men, weak times? Loose women create. Yeah, okay, yeah. Maybe. I mean, I think it's kind of natural to have, I think there's always a bit of a roller coaster within culture because you reach a point where, you know, whatever particular excess becomes obvious and then people start quietly thinking,

hang on, I don't really like this. And then some people start saying, loudly, I don't like this. And then everyone kind of joins in. Mm. You know, so on forever through history. What's different about this one, of course, is that we invented the pill. So previous periods of licentiousness,

they didn't have the technological means to sort of go all the way with it. There was a glass ceiling on how licentious you could be without incurring eternal costs. Yeah, like you always had some people, some, I mean, because it's women who like carry the, literally carry the consequences of sex, I'm not right, right? There were always some women who either because they had to, because they're in prostitution, because they were poor, or because they were like crazy aristocrats

who just could be eccentric and get away with it, who would behave unusually. But most women in the middle, you know, having sex is probably the most consequential thing a woman can do without contraception. So most women would take that decision very, very seriously for obvious reasons up until the 60s and then it's all out the window. And we can't uninvent that, like the pill is not going to get uninvented, even of all

these. I mean there is a little bit of a reaction of the kind of what I think of as the goop class, right? I think women who are really into wellness. The Goop class? Yeah, like really into Goop. Goop. Yeah. Yeah. What's Goop?

What's she got to do with Goop? What's that? Because there's this recognition, which I think is true, that the hormonal birth control is bad for you, basically. And so there's a, it's not coming from traditional Catholics or anything like that, it's coming from women who are, I think justifiably concerned about the health effects, who are doing things like fertility tracking, rather than hormonal birth control. Like that's happening, but I don't think that,

I don't think that heralds amass sort of rejection of the pill. Okay, dig into the goop class for me then. What are they doing? So like natural cycles, for instance, you've heard of this. I have, yeah, Sarah Hill did a great, oh, talked about a great study that was done to do with a attraction to the partner when you were, to got together on the pill versus off the pill,

et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, I know, okay, so two things. I know quite a lot of women who have, who've, who've abandoned our criminal birth control and have ended up doing whatever kind of well, more like wellness, maximizing means of telestria. You can also do things like tracking your, like making your exercise regime gel with your, your menstrual cycle and things like that. Yeah. So there's a whole, there's a whole

wealth of of technology enabled reproductive wellness available, which is good. I don't know anything against it. I also know so many women who've got pregnant from doing that accidentally. What from the exercise routine? No, got pregnant. It doesn't work that well.

It doesn't work that well. They doesn't work that well, I realistically. Natural cycles is the moment you're under the tone, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's like a more sophisticated version of just tracking the Catholics have done forever, but like there's quite a good chance you're actually trying to. Who knew this just Catholic technology all over again? Okay, so, tradition is to licensiousness and you think that we're what sort of tumbling just over the top of that super sex positive into what's coming next? I think that we're yet...

I think the reason I booked it unexpectedly well is because, yes, we're at that tipping point, where everyone's been private, it will not everyone, but a lot of people have been privately thinking, this is weird. And then they, and then someone starts saying it, and you're like, yeah, this is weird. I think that that, I think that's probably the point that we're at. I, the only thing is though, I don't know if it's going to be

as radical a period of prudishness as we've seen historically, because we've got the pill one, right? So that's like a completely different material situation. And two, because we've got the internet, we've got porn, like is that really going to be... My suspicion is probably what we'll see is we'll see elites reacting against the licentious period. We'll see, you know, the the group class, like the, but also the male equivalent, you know, that, I mean, you know, there's the impulse control is such an important element of living in our kind of technological landscape. Like, if you can't put down your

phone, you're never going to do anything. Do anything. Do anything, yeah. So the people who are best able to resist all of the various temptations, including sexual temptations, of our new material conditions, other people who are most likely to find themselves in the elites. To what's interesting, conscientiousness is moderately heritable like or psychological dispositions. And yet, what you're saying here is that the people who are going to best be able to control

that reproduction, other people who are high in conscientiousness, which means that you're going to select for people low in conscientiousness who are going to be having more kids on average. Yes. This is a future talking about the decline of birth rates. All of the people who are anti-nadelist or anti-children or family creation, but also from the left need to read one book on behavioral genetics to realize that if you want your particular philosophical ideology, political ideology to keep going, in the space of 100 years, it's just going to be Ashkenazi Jews and Mormons.

And you guys are going to be, because again, political ideology is like 60% heritable. I agree with you. And people have been worrying about this for like 150 years. It's just that that, like you're familiar with Francis Goulton, the father of E-Genec. As far as I'm aware, I mean, this was before they even knew what a gene was. He was the first person to sit down and draw up family trees and realise that what he

called genius was heritable. Wasn't it hereditary genius? Was that not his first thing? That sounds right. And so particular families were particularly likely to generate these prominent figures. And obviously the sort of methodology he was using now seems really okay,

and how do you measure genius or whatever. But he was basically right. He was basically right. He was basically recognized that all of these things were basically every psychological trait is hurtful to some extent. And I mean, that's where the thing that people forget about the Eugenics movement is that it was, it was progressive. It was like self-consciously progressive. That's how people understood themselves. And it was often anti-religious, it was anti-conservative. It was seen as like this brave, new scientific frontier

that so many people into. Like, I've been reading about this at the moment for a piece I'm writing. And the popularity of eugenics in the early 20th century is mind-boggling and is mostly the memory-hold. Branding problem. Yeah. Just needs any branding problem.

Well, I mean, well, what they were talking about mostly, the Ceginistus of the period, was using the state to either encourage some people to reproduce or discourage other people from reproducing. And there were some really, particularly in the states, the use of forced sterilization. Did you come across that particular lady who had had, I think the statement was, three generations of idiots

or enough, you saw that one. Exactly, I can't remember her name, but yeah, that was like an important case law in the States. And yeah, like really a lot of people were sterilized during that quite brief period in America, not so much in the UK, but of course it was an answer that just completely made that line of thinking completely unthinkable.

Branding problem, telling you. So looking at this sort of licensuousness, pruditioness paradigm, which I think is really important, I think it's not. Anything that kind of has a flip flop it seems to be accurate to me because it always swings back and forth. anything that kind of has a flip flop, it seems to be accurate to me because it always swings back and forth. Yeah. Found this article that said, Looking for No Man's, study finds teens want less sex in their TV and movies. Have you come across this?

No, that's interesting. Very interesting. So, younger generations don't think sex is necessary to the plots of most movies and TV shows. That's according to a recent study from UCLA. Researchers interviewed 1,500 individuals between the ages of 10 and 24 about the way that they're interacting with media. Those between the ages of 13 and 24 were asked if they thought sex was needed for the plot in entertainment, and 47.5% of respondents said it was not.

They also said they wanted to see less romance on screen, 44%, and more content centered around platonic friendships, 51.5%. In a video UCLA released in conjunction with the survey, 16-year-old responded Anna said, ''When there's media with too much sex in me and my friends often feel uncomfortable, she later added, I feel that it is way too graphic. The survey also quoted pop star Olivia Rod Riegos' answer to the question of whether or not she watched the HBO series The Idol. I don't have the desire to. I remember walking out of Barbie and being like, wow, it's so long

since I've seen a movie that is female-centred in a way that isn't sexual or about her pain or being traumatized. What do you make of that? I'm not sure. I mean, it seems like it was both males and females that were saying that. I have got three possible explanations come to mind. The first is it's the girls not liking porn culture fair enough. I think that it's not hard to find young women who've been raised in this, you know, who had the internet access from the get-go, who absolutely hate porn culture, like, hey, what the boys are expecting from them all of this. It might be that.

It might be differential fertility rates already having an impact in terms of the conservatism and religiosity of young people, because you know, like in in America for the first time in 60, 70 years you've actually seen a decline in pro LGBT attitudes among young people. Wow, what is that coming from? Well my guess is that it's coming from the fact that it's basically since the pill. More conservative. More conservative. More religious people having kids, yeah. And then that's already starting to play out in terms of the younger generations to be the fact that basically since the pill, more... It's only conservative, that happens.

...because more religious people have in kids, yeah. And then that's already starting to play out in terms of the younger generations to be more religious and conservative. We're seeing that male, female, liberal, conservative divide amongst kids as well though, right? Yeah. So presumably if you split that polling down,

but it seems like everybody's shifting a little bit further right. That's plausible. Yeah. All right, what was the third one? Uh... but it seems like everybody's shifting a little bit further right. That's plausible. Yeah. All right, what was the third one? Like, seniorestrogens. It's possible, isn't it?

Everything. All roads lead back to Alex Jones, ultimately. Yeah, I mean, he was sort of on to something, wasn't he? I mean, it is possible that the sex recession, so-called, is partly hormonal. It's partly caused by, I mean, it might partly be caused by women being on hormonal birth control, which is changing their sexuality. It might also be caused by men being levity. So the low testosterone for men joining me in my real horseshoe theory for this. Right.

So I learned this while I was to Dr. Sarah Hill who wrote, this is your brain on birth control. She taught me that male testosterone levels are mediated by the fertility of the women in their local ecology. So if you were a male in their 20s but you happen to be around a bunch of other men or a bunch of other grandmothers, perhaps, or a bunch of children. Your testosterone levels drop. Interesting. And what you have are women who are very highly artificially suppressing their fertility. So men are able to smell the t-shirt of a woman and be able to pick the one that the most

attractive to is the one who is currently at that stage of her cycle, she's currently fertile, etc, etc. They can see, they've done studies where men watch women's silhouettes walking and the women who are currently during the seven day you can get me pregnant period, they're the ones that they're most attracted to, the fucking silhouette of the way they walk. Display is the current. And high heels replicate that. That's the idea. The high heels make you walk, and then you wiggle in that way. So you have this recursive feedback loop of hormonal birth control causes women to select for men who are more providers rather than protectors.

They want provisioners, right? They want the academic and the resources more agreeable. They then either come off or don't come off birth control but find that they've come out of this fucking hormonal fugue state, oh my god, who am I in a relationship with? But you also have this effect on men too. Not only socially, I noticed that lots of women seem to be attracted to Timothy Chalamet

who's painting his nails and kind of blah blah blah blah blah. But the genuine physiological hormonal response to men just being around lots of women who are on hormonal birth control. Now, processed foods, not enough time outside, not enough time with vitamin D, not enough time with friends, but there's a big X factor apparently amongst testosterone researchers who don't know why men's T-label have dropped the amount that they have, right? It's about 1% a year every year since I think 1950. Wow.

So it's like, and then that goes to 100, and then it's that again, and it goes to 100. So it's not how we're in minus fucking testosterone soon. But yeah, so hormonal birth control has a lot to answer for, I think. It's a really tricky trade off, isn't it? Because like there are clear downsides to having a bunch of low team men, you know, in terms of in terms of fertility, in terms of men and women just bouncing each other and like having

a functional relationships, but also like Hightest was thrown is also associated with cryovilics. So, which, you know, do we choose to have a society of kind of sexless, incredibly like online sexless, incredibly like online placid, soy people. Yeah, who also are quite chill. Yeah, cool, like enormous problems. I don't know. That's like a genuinely hard thing to choose. Yeah, you could almost look at it kind of like disposition sterilization. Yeah, in a way. Yeah

Yeah Disposition sterilization. Yeah. In a way. Yeah. Yeah. Fuck. Yeah, but... But then we have problems with like, like this is a real problem with the military. I'm sure you know, like massive recruitment problems. I thought that was because everyone's fat and got diabetes. Well, that too. Right. But also not being interested in it.

But men just don't want to wage war. Yeah. We can do it from modern warfare or I'm unread it. It's probably also partly to do with lack of like faith in the nation, like being less patriotic in general, like the pool of potentially great soldiers just gets smaller every year. And it's sort of fine, I guess, but get away with it because if we're not actually in a hot war and if we have loads of technology. But you can imagine a scenario where that becomes an enormous problem.

Like a mass mobilization, I don't know how we actually fare. The Chinese government banned K-pop. You see this? Because they didn't want, what was it they called them? It was like Sissy Men. We don't want any more Sissy Men. So it was all of the Chinese male role models were like super high T jacked dudes

and they didn't want this BTS like soy, like culture infecting them. That's how they saw it, don't you? Something I learned about that from, I had a runner-mit, who's a professor of Chinese History and Politics Oxford on my podcast. I didn't know this. In China, there's a very strong association

between communism and masculinity. And actually, it's the old pre-communist, like Confucian soyboys, but basically, you know, the sort of, the sort of like intellectual, endorsing, that's associated with pre-communist China. And so some of the reaction against feminization through K-pop or whatever is associated with anti-communist freedom.

So this sort of Gen Z pushback against romance, this is what I thought was super interesting, right? So we've got your spectrum of prudishness and licentiousness, but it's not just the short termism of physical desires being satisfied, there's also another level to this which is to do with romance and how central your connection to another person a significant other is Right, because that kind of fits on the prejuditionist life, sentiousness scale But it's also not exactly the same like that would be something that's slightly different like how important is it that you find a significant other and I think that at least a little bit of that UCLA study probably is Rachel Zygler Zygygler, is the new Snow White saying,

we don't need a prince to come and save her. She didn't have a prince, she had a stalker, a sleeping beauty can't consent. I wonder if it's not just a pushback against the sex side of stuff, but the no-mance, just against romance culture in general. HSBC got Emily Radikhouski, the tennis player, to come and do fairer tales,

princesses doing it for themselves, which was a rewriting of Cinderella Rapunzel and Snow White, where instead of waiting for a prince, the princesses went and started their own businesses on their own and invested their money wisely. So I think because HSBC is really where we go for modern fucking dating culture. So yeah, I just think that this Gen Z push back against what may on the surface appear to be about sex may actually run deeper.

The thing is that they're sort of right. The sort of a man, a woman needs a man, a coefficient needs a bicycle, an old line, or the line from Gloristine, and I always thought was really clever, which is we became the men we once wanted to marry. IE second wave feminists were able to do that. And I mean, I always think this about the sort of the disposability of men in modern culture, which is totally real, you know, that basic red pole position is true. There is this problem of men basically not feeling, having purpose, not feeling needed, whatever, women not feeling as if they need husbands because they kind of don't. If they don't have to, if they're not having children, or even if they do have children, they can participate.

It turns out that actually women being slightly more conscientious than men are, for instance, a slightly more agreeable than men are, is actually really great in a sort of laptop job economy. Brain-based instead of bron-based. Yeah, like women are actually slightly better. Not at the tech news, you've still got overwhelmingly male CEOs and things like that, but in the kind of the median range, women are actually kind of better employees in service economies. The problem that men are facing is not actually feminism as such, although feminism has kind of accelerated some of these phenomena. It's just, it's basically technology and

affluence. In highly technologically sophisticated and affluent societies, men who are not in this incredibly far-right tale, super successful, intelligent whatever, just normal men have less to do. We don't need broad. When we invented the internal combustion engine, the importance of male muscle power dropped like a stone. To finish. Yeah. Yeah. And then as soon as you had equality in terms of access to education and employment and you pivoted already from that broad-based to brain-based economy, it turns out that women have a kind of a genetic unfair advantage with the current working environment, which meant that the, you know, like, this is something that the atmosphere of the Red Pill never

really gets right. Like when they talk about how women in the past and the culture that they applied to their dating made them happier, they forget the fact that women were largely financial prisoners of their partner because they had nowhere else to go. So yeah, maybe they were able to remain loyal and make better sandwiches, but how much of that was by choice and how much of that was Stockholm syndrome. It's probably better. I think, well, so the big problem with the status quo right now, where we have, you know, women are actually earning more than men are,

at most points along the income distribution, just not at the very top. Like, the gender pay gap is basically a result of the fact that you've got a handful of male CEOs who make an enormous sums in this. You see that the PM of Iceland, the country, not the fucking company, is on strike along with all of the Icelandic women at the moment over the gender pay gap. Right. Anyway, you were saying, yeah, pretty much everywhere outside of Iceland and CEOs. The gender pay gap is an artifact. One of the fact that there is a small number of over

high earning men and two of its basic, it's basically a maternity gap. It's actually just the fact that having children, yeah, having children means that you can't operate in the workplace in the way that a man can. Like at the very least, when you're very pregnant and you've just given birth, you know. But women are choosing not to do that, right? So if you, if you, if you don't have children and you are a sort of typical woman in terms of being slightly more conscientious, like more agreeable, having all of these, you know, being more, probably me more punctual, being a better employee, you do basically have more advantage in the workplace than another man.

But this is completely unsustainable because of going back to the whole birth rates thing. Like any culture that just stops reproducing itself is not going to last. It's either going to just wither away and die or it's going to be overtaken by some other culture. And I sort of think that the answer to the riddle of why every culture that we see on historical record that has sustained itself and flourished has been patriarchal is possibly because a culture has to be patriarchal in order to reboot itself. Like that's my black pill, reading this stuff. Dig into that. Because it's very

hard to have lots of kids as a woman. You can maybe have one or two just about and not let it affect your career, but there's just a straightforward clash between the labour market and reproduction for women. You can kind of get away with if you make enough money because you can pay for nannies and all this kind of stuff. But for most women, it's just like... That's just... They're almost irreconcilable. You have to trade off something.

And what most women are choosing to do, it seems, is they're having fewer children. Which for them, do, it seems, is that they're having fewer children. Which for them personally might actually, you know, the truth is, like children are expensive and knackering. Like they're wonderful, they are wonderful, but if you've not had them, you don't know how wonderful they are. Like once you've had your children, you just love them more than life itself. Like every mother I know says, I would unhesitatingly die for my children. But if you've never experienced that kind of love and it's kind of theoretical, yeah, then why wouldn't you say, actually, no, I'd rather make this an expression? Well, the modern culture prioritises pleasure in

the here and now in short-termism over everything else. I think human beings just do that as well. and now in short-termism over everything else. I think human beings just do that as well. You know, maybe there was, I don't know, maybe you're right, but it seems like there was definitely a preparedness to invest now for returns in the future, more so. Our ability, the marshmallow test was more effective 100 years ago for most. I think because culture kind of, I think culture serves good culture, serves the purpose of channeling people's, making people more long-termist, because our natural inclination is to be short-termist, most of us. And all, I mean, the thing is with having

children is like, you're short-termist because you want to have sex and then, oh, whoops, they came along, like, normally you don't have to think about that. Yeah, that was evolution's big trick, wasn't it? Yeah, exactly., but now I thought you were just having fun. Guess what? The next 19 years of your life are locked off. And I mean, there's like, there's a certain elegance to that right, but we've lost that because of contraception. And now there are still groups, there are still cultures, there are still, there are still

people who just love babies and will have loads of kids because they just get so much joy from babies, which is great. Like by one of those people I would rather have loads of kids and earn less money. I've made that rational decision. But a lot of people, for a lot of people, that's not an obvious choice. Some cultures are still channeling people into being more traditional, as being more long-termist. But the mainstream culture absolutely isn't doing that. And the very likely consequence of that is that... I mean, I can't remember the numbers exactly, but South Korea, you'll know, has the lowest fertility rate in the world.

For every 100 South Koreans, there will be four great-grandchildren. Right. There's never been a plague that has knocked out that many people. The 96% extinction rate over the next 100 years. Right. There's never been a plague that has knocked out that many people. The 96% extinction rate over the next 100 years. Incredible. Of Koreans, remembering that we shut down the entire world for something that kills 1% to 2% of people. Yeah, it's crazy. It's the most incredible evolution you bottleneck that we're going through. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Kozioz. We sleep one third of our lives. Do not spend 33% of your life in anything other

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The interesting thing about declining birth rates is that it's not an existential risk in the traditional sense of permanent, unrecovable collapse. It's not a classic version of it, but it's a population risk that's very unique in that there's no smoke in the sky, there's no asteroid heading toward earth, there's no lead measure if you're looking until it's way too late. Right. You don't feel it getting warmer. You don't even feel it getting quieter because we've got an aging population whilst reducing

birth rate, which means that you can have more people on the planet while fewer are being made. So you can almost predict out that. So it feels really counterintuitive, yeah? Yeah. The demography is predict out that. So it feels really counterintuitive, yeah. Yeah, it was a demography is destiny. Yeah, right. Yeah, I definitely think that a big chunk of it is this prioritization of the here and now of pleasure of meaning. Did you see the girl with the list on TikTok? No, in this, this

needs to be it for the Perry Pilled Out that was needs to be a part of it. This girl wrote a 350 point, eight-page long list, and printed them out on TikTok of all of the reasons why she didn't want to have kids. And these ranged from things like literally a parasite living inside of my body to can't where cute heels anymore to enable to do brunch with the girls. And then she printed off like one page list of reasons two-half kids. And now like hashtag girl with the list on TikTok.

It's got millions and billions of plates. Amazing. Yeah. I mean, I guess she's kind of right. But the problem is that the thing you have to have on that, that reasons two-half kids is like inexpressible joy. Well to me, experience of my life. Yeah, which to me does cancel out like brunch with the girls.

Or you can bring your baby to brunch with the girls. Look, when it comes to heels, look at the shoes that you've got on today. Indeed, I never wore heels anyway, I've rated. Sparkly things. So, you know, one of the promises, I had Mary Abbasat on the show a couple of weeks ago, who's just phenomenal. I feel like she's your spirit animal.

And she was talking to me about very similar sorts of things that the promises that women were given previously, you know, the freedom, the liberation. is that women were given previously, the freedom, the liberation. Ultimately, do you think that most women on average are more happy with modern sexual culture than they were previously, let's say 60 or 70 years ago? I think no, but the outliers are quite striking. So there are some, the thing is that having the kind of, let's say like mildly patriarchal kind of structure

where the assumption is that the men do participate most in public life and do the bulk of, well, I mean, it depends on what area you're talking about materially, right? So in subsistence cultures, women do actually do loads of economic work. They just do economic work that is compatible with also looking after little children. So like the man goes out in the field and collects raw materials and the woman processes the raw materials at home while minding the toddlers and like sharing the burden of of childcare with her sisters and cousins

or whatever. The more recent model of the breadwinner where the man goes out and earns all the money and the woman says at home and does all of the housework is kind of a stroke and unusual. It's not that bad. Like actually it's fine if and only if your husband isn't the tyrant. But if your husband is a tyrant, it's completely disastrous. So it's like for most people, it's fine. For most women, it's fine. And probably is actually better than like the current, they say the status quo where women have to still do disproportionate amounts of childcare and housework

and do all the pregnancy, obviously, all the breastfeeding, obviously, post going out to work. This is what Feminist call the second shift that you ended up doing two jobs. That's, I think, worse, actually, the most fun. What would you say you'd worked it out that you were doing a full-time job breastfeeding? Yeah. You were doing 40 hours a week of breastfeeding. Yeah.

That's the third shift. Yeah, exactly. Like crazy levels of work that you have to do Which is obviously, you know joyful meaningful etc. But it like there are only so many hours in the day You like unique It isn't feasible unless you have loads of money available to you or whatever. It isn't feasible to not have a husband father who goes out and does all of that and still be as good a mother as you want to be. It's been.

I'm so interested in paradoxes. Mary taught me about a ton of them. You have to pill, gets introduced, increase in single motherhood, increase in abortions, like paradox, interesting. Another one that I found from Candice Blake, who's over in Australia, is that gender inequality in the pay gap between men and women positively predicts both male and female satisfaction in relationships.

But the more unequal the earning opportunities are for men and women, skewed in the direction of men, not women, the happier both men and women are in their outcomes in relationships. And stayer and dads is a very strong predictor divorce. Yeah, if the woman is the primary breadwinner, men are 50% more likely to use a rectile dysfunction medication. You know, increases in domestic violence. The women are more likely to be, on the receiving end of domestic violence, if they're the primary breadwinner,

because the male partner switches from a benefit affording to a cost-inflicting mate retention strategy. If you begin to feel a disparity in make value, you have two choices. You can either start to raise yourself up or try to drag the other person down and making them fearful of you

was a pretty good way to drag them down. But that's kind of dark. That being said, the patriarchy is so powerful that we've somehow convinced women that they both need to earn the money and that we can stay at home while they bear the burden of children. So maybe this is just a siaop from all of us to not have to do anything except for Xbox now. What we've discovered, all right, so I don't really believe in, okay, patriarchy clearly has like a strict anthropological meaning in that societies where only men are allowed to be in positions of power and authority, have traditionally been described as patriarchal bi anthropologists. We don't live in one of those,

anymore, we haven't lived in one of those for a half a century now, in that, I mean, in this country, we've had like three female prime ministers and so forthright. But I think that there's also a different way in which people use the word patriarchal, which still to some extent applies to contemporary culture, which is that there's this quite deep-seated feeling shared by both men and women, and I think cross-culturally, that masculine things are higher status than feminine things. That's so. And that's why you see this great eagerness actually

of women now that they can to participate in masculine coded things to be... What length? Well, professional work, right but there's been this rush of women into into the public life, interestingly masculine roles, there has not been a rush of men in traditional feminine roles not at all because there's no status associated with them because there's no status associated with them and I think often that's what feminists are describing when they talk about things in patriarchal like they they recognize the fact that there's that kind of status gap.

Remember who's describing that? At least 50% of society is describing that, like, on their own behalf. Right? You know? Like, this is what Richard Reeves' book was so interesting where he talks about heal, right? What was it? Like health education, maybe like administration or something else? Yeah, feminine jobs. Yeah, yeah, more feminine jobs.

Yeah. There are four times more female fighter pilots in the US Air Force by percentage than there are male kindergarten teachers in America. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, because they just hasn't been this rush for men to try and attain feminine status, right? And I think that I don't think that our culture is misogynist.

Misogynists exist. There are some of them out there. But that's not typical. I think though that this sort of deep-seated assumption that women are... Are you familiar with the women are wonderful buyers? Yes. This is the cognitive bias where people will tend to actually prefer to show kindness and generosity to women over men in various scenarios. You see a stranger drowning, you're more likely to jump into the water and save them with their female than if they're male. But both men and women are more positively predisposed to news stories that complement women's outcomes or say that a woman achieved something than say that a man achieved something.

Exactly. And vice versa is true too. Right. Which doesn't fit at all with the idea that we live in like a misogynist culture. I don't think that we hate women. I think though the way that women are sort of regarded all else being equal is as like your mum, like you love your mum. You don't want to be her necessarily.

You don't necessarily respect her. I think that's the common way in which I think that the puzzle basically as to why women are so consistently regarded in a particular way, cross-culturally as being like lovable but also a bit like low status is that women are considered to be kind of adjacent to children. So in the same way that we love children, but we're not going to let them vote. Right? I think that what the human brain does

is it has this like it's like there's men, there's women, there's children. So women are in a kind of intermediary position and very often are basically have kind of childlike legal status. Which is why I suppose ties into something that I've been saying for a while, modern women have been taught the true freedom is having sex like their brother and working like their father. That's the pinnacle. Because it's this like clambering up trying to attain that masculine status, which for some women,

particularly women, you have a more masculine temperament, you know, like some women are more disagreeable and competitive and not maternal, and those women have done well out of the changes we've seen to the sexual revolution, in that they can basically live their brothers now pretty much. Most women aren't like her though, and aren't made happier by trying to be more male. Well, Chelsea Connoboi in the New York Times last year wrote that article, Maternal Instinct is a myth that men created. No, that's not true. Yeah, right. Yeah.

You can go around pretending that's true, to be in the face, but I just don't think it's true. It's such a hydra-headed problem that we're talking about because it's the convergence of the denial of sex differences, this sort of tyranny of the minority, a selection for the most outspoken, gregarious amongst a group to focus on the outliers. It's not even tyranny of the minority as in some underspoken class that's speaking up for themselves, but also tyranny of the minority that appears to have outsized achievements like the male CEOs.

Oh, that's exactly what we've got going on here that will skew data, that people will focus on and use. January, January of February of this year is the highest percentage number of new female CEOs ever in America. It was 34% of new of CEOs in America were female new CEOs. He go, like, that's insane. That's so, that I would guess if you to actually pull from a nature predisposition perspective, that that's over indexing for it. Like how many women actually want that life, that job, CEO sounds like a fantastic title, but what's

the reality of CEO, right? Pauline, I would hate. I would hate that lifestyle. I would hate that lifestyle. Pauline, I would hate that lifestyle. Yeah. You know, it's horses for courses and it gets like this is Peterson fucking two two thousand and eighteen stuff. You know what I mean? Right? Yeah. Like how many times do we need to bang this drum? Yeah. Evidently more because it's not one other thing I wanted to really dig into. What do you

think the fallout of me to has been now approaching Tania's hands? I often hear from men that they are now more reluctant to go to a woman in a bar or whatever that there's this problem of fear of being falsely accused of something and so I think I mean I believe them you know if that if some men are experiencing that, I'm sure though what's gone on is that the men who were already sexually aggressive and likely to actually be, you know, me too, perpetrators haven't changed their behaviour at all, and the men who started being really careful were probably fine to begin with. If you were a rapper, the recent social media campaign probably, well they've got a hashtag on Twitter, I'd better stop going around raping.

Yeah, which is, I mean there's a, I always, I wrote about in my first book and it applies to this, Astellos of Things, the problem of normal distribution, where you have some trait which is arranged on a bell curve. And the problem is that if you apply some intervention, so whatever that is, like a social movement like me to or some policy change or whatever, probably what you want to do is you want to actually target one of the tails, you want to, you know, you're like, oh, you said we've got, you know, we've got a bell curve, a section aggression, and there's this, this like most aggressive end who are causing their end of harm. What we want to do is make them stop. But it's that you can't just apply an intervention to that, to that point on the normal distribution.

Like it's going to shift in one way or another and everyone is going to be affected. You're smearing the entire group with the same solution. So what you end up with is moving the threshold for being like... Reluctant to go up to one in a bar or whatever. Slightly just to mean that like some of the nice guys are not doing it, but there doesn't actually improve. It doesn't affect the rayfests and it doesn't improve when there's experience of it. David Buses book, Bad Men talks about, one man doing a thousand sexual assaults, not

a thousand men doing one sexual assault. Yeah, yeah. You know, to repeat offenders over and over and over again. And unfortunately, as well, repeat victims. There is something about the way that, again, this isn't victim blaming, but it is something about the way that women hold themselves, where they showed this to, I think, maybe criminals in prison or assaulters or men that had assaulted people and showed them a number of women walking and they asked them to pick which one they would attack

if they were going to and they converged on the same women. So, you know, for all that we can say, you know, it's not about wearing the skirt, it shouldn't be about being in the dark alley at the wrong time, all the rest of it, like correct. But there is something about particular women that causes predators to see them as viable prey. Does that excuse it? No, does that, you know, is that them choosing it also now? But like this is just the way that the world appears to be ruthless.

Yeah, and it drives me mad that we tell lies to girls all the time about this because we're so desperate not to appear to be victim blaming That will say oh no, you can you know you can behave like a man You can do whatever you want go back to some random guy's house. It'll be fine And then when it inevitably isn't fine. Well, I oh well You know he shouldn't have he shouldn't have been such a aggressive. I was like yes, obviously, but We don't, you know, I would laugh to just like delete every rapist from the world all at once. I can't do that. Like if the advice that I'm going to be giving my daughters is going to be unfortunately different from

the advice I'll give my sons. What would be the advice that you give them? Slight Fritzons, don't go back to a random man's house that you just met. Like, basic. Okay, like consider it to be completely commonsensical up until, up until even like the 1980s, you know, this is like recent stuff, but basically unsayable now in feminist circles at least, except everyone quietly says it, you know. Well, again, it's the stated and revealed preferences. Yeah. Like how many parents that will proselytise about this on CNN and say that, you know, we shouldn't be telling women, oh, so you're saying that we should just accept the fact that men are

going to do this. It should be, it shouldn't be that women should change their actions, men should change their behaviour. Okay, what did you tell your 17-year-old daughter to do last weekend? Did you say, make sure that you text me when you get home, make sure that you're home before 11, etc. Don't get an unlicensed taxi, whatever, yeah. Stayed in revealed preferences. Yeah, and what drives me bananas is that there are some girls who don't actually have parents,

or friends or whoever, who are privately telling them the truth. You know, all they get, all they hear is the public misdirection. This is like the luxury beliefs of me too in a way. Yeah. And so I feel as if actually we have a GC, people who are speaking publicly, to tell those girls the truth, on the assumption that they're not going to hear it from anyone else. The cultural surrogate mothers in a way. Yeah.

You've got this line between consensual and good, which I think relates to me too, as well. What's that? I think that a lot of what... So, I mean, there's a lot of things that came under the meaty banner. Some of it was just unambiguously criminal and, you know, Havi Weinstein or whatever, got sent to prison for criminal acts. A lot of what came up, though, a lot of the stories that got shared with things that weren't actually strictly criminal, they were just bad behavior. It was behavior that actually in another era you probably would have been called unjentlomantly or something like that. But that vocabulary isn't available to a sort of contemporary

feminist who's really brought into the sex positive message. And so they'll tend to just talk about things being consensual or not consensual. And actually the consensual, not consensual bar is like a low one, it's a legal bar. It's not actually a moral bar really. Like there's a lot of, there are a lot of things that a man can do on a first date or whatever, that are legal but are bad, plenty, but we don't really have the vocabulary to describe them, which is why I try and make, you know, like the feminist case for shibori, we shouldn't have got rid of that as a concept. Like when you have as stark a physical

difference, and psychological differences between the sexes. You know, 99% of men can kill 99% of women with their bare hands and not vice versa. We have to operate with that recognition. Shivalry in those circumstances is obviously in women's interests, even if occasionally it will mean being feelings like a patronized, I who cares. I'm so happy to have the door held open for me and my bag's carried is completely fine.

If it means that someone's not gonna assault me. Yeah. I mean, I quote you and Mary about this all the time that it is a straight line from you should hold the door open for a woman to you shouldn't beat your wife. It is one just continuous, women are worthy of protection and there is an asymmetry between what men and women can do. And again, Rob Henderson's coming a couple of days later, the new, it's like luxury beliefs all over again. The women who come from

societies where their husbands already knew that beating your wife would be a bad idea or they had the support networks where that wouldn't be accepted, were trying to deconstruct a support structure that was needed for the underclass women whose husbands had grown up without a father and who stepped out had beaten them who just presumed that the way that you were supposed to be in a relationship was to hit your wife. Yeah, I mean, I just, like, chest since fans, like the wisdom of it, you know, this idea from Jike Cheston, you come across a fence in a field, you don't know what it's there for,

the progressive, the reformer, whatever vocabulary he uses, says, we don't need this fence that's tearing down, whereas the conservative says, no, let's find out what it's for, and then maybe we might tear it down if it turns out that it really isn't necessary. I mean, just the whole last hundred years has been like non-stop indication of Chessison's principle. Yeah, and I honestly think that most of it actually is to do a technology like much as I love to to complain about my political enemies like it actually

the main thing that's changed for people has not been intellectuals of the 1960s. It's been the dissolution of the family has as much to do with the pill as it does with anything any feminist has ever said. I'm very sort of materialist in the sense. I think the real engine of history is technology. Or as Mary Harrington, our friend likes to say, it's material reality plus memes. Meem first explained later, me and Mary are on board with that. What was it that you told me the last time we spoke? The washing machine has done more to liberate women

than any feminist ever did. That was Phyllis Schlafly's observation. Phyllis Schlafly is such an interesting figure because she was this person. So she was at 60s. When was she been born? She was at her height in the 70s. And she was one of these really interesting women. American, well, so she built herself as an American housewife.

And she was. She had, I think, she had five kids, but she also was like a foreign policy expert who'd worked in, in, not Westminster, Washington, and had, like, incredible degree, actually, a professional expertise, but she always built herself as like, you know, a lowly housewife, whatever. And she led the campaign against the equal rights amendment, which was a second-wave feminist effort to basically enshrine in the US Constitution that men and women are equal and ought to have equal rights. And Schlafly said, in retrospect, not unreasonably, men and women aren't the same. And so actually, if you were to enshrine this in the Constitution, you would frequently end up with having to do things

that are actually bad, not in women's interests. So the example she liked to give, because this was during the Vietnam War, was you wanna see women drafted? Because that's where that ends up. If you say that men and women are the same, then why wouldn't you draft women? Why wouldn't you be sending pregnant women into combat?

Men and women are the same, whatever. And so, quite feminists who used to say, because they were land to war, they say, well, we don't think anyone should be drafted. And I was like, okay, okay. But if you're trying to like future-proof your constitution, which I think very much, the point of the constitution, that does seem to be, and obviously, I mean, I don't completely agree with laughing. One of the things she used to do, which I find so cringe, is whenever she showed up at a public event, she used to thank her husband for allowing her to be there.

Ah! Ah! I don't do that when I get on the good ends. So like, she was, she was on a different time in that sense, I guess. I'm not gonna hold Filla Schlafly up as like, feminist post-girl. But she did, like, she had insights at the time,

on which she has been proven right. And the equal rights amendment was never passed because of her efforts. What do you think about this lack of approach at the moment? Alexander, one of my friends, Alex State Psych, put a study up recently, 50% of managed 18 to 24 have never approached a woman in person in their life. And like even higher percentage, 18 to 30 haven't approached a woman in the last year. Is this downstream from me too? I have a slightly weird take on this, which is that actually the thing you hear about

as sort of, the Zenx people talk about of going up to someone in a bar and this been a way of striking relationships. I think that was a very brief period of history, sort of post-sector revolution but pre-internet, where that was considered normal, and I'm slightly too young to have ever actually experienced that. The normal way actually that people start relationships in the vast majority of cultures is to be like semi-range marriage, right? Like not the fool you've never met this person before, you know, 13-year-olds, whatever getting betrayed, like not like that, but the sort of you're introduced by family members, mutual friends, you're known in the community, you

go to the same church, whatever it is, and then both of your families consent to the marriage and it works out okay. But the expectation of marriage up until relatively recently was that you would have an economic relationship and an reproductive relationship, but you weren't best friends. And actually, I don't think, I don't think my parents are wise used to talk to each other as much as they do now. I think people used to have much more homosocial kind of lives. You'd hang out with other men, you'd hang out with other women, you wouldn't necessarily

hang out a lot with the opposite sex, including your spouse. So this idea that like the going up to a person in the bar is like the normal and natural way of starting relationships, I don't think is historically accurate. That's interesting. So the male aversion felt fear of approach anxiety, which every guy listening is aware of, apart from the psychopaths, right? There is a girl that I find attractive that I either know or don't know or partly know or whatever. Yeah. How are you nice to meet you is kind of like a miniature war that you have to go to and the felt sense of palpable fear is just ripping you apart inside. That isn't or the modern version to that isn't some novel new problem. It was a, in your opinion here, a bar that kind of never really needed to be gotten over in the first place

in some regards because you had seen each other at church for ages or her father owned the farm next to your father's land and you guys had known. People have much more kind of static social lives. So yeah, just approaching some stranger and getting married to her is not. I had this conversation with a guy called Mads Larson, who is a mating ideology researcher, our Senditutes, phenomenal. And he talks about all of the different arrangements that people went through and the romantic to the confluent, which is what we've moved through most recently, has left us with a really interesting vestige, which is previously it was, they

own the farm next door. It was almost like a tactical marriage between the two of you. And then it's no, no, no, no, no, no. You're supposed to, you guys are supposed to be together forever. You know, there is supposed to be deeper meaning instantiated in this. But then as soon as you have the sexual revolution, you have confluence. So for as long as you can benefit me and I can benefit you, I think even me a califa who obviously Paragon of sexual virtue Said on a recent interview that People think that marriage is some sacred thing. It's not. It's just a piece of paper

And if this person isn't helping you grow. It's time to move on So they just confluent like ideology day. You know helping you grow So they just confluent like ideology day. You know, helping you grow. What a front of center. You need to be helping grow. I'm not sure. Yeah. Helping you prepare for your next porn scene.

I don't know, whatever she may. So you have this really interesting thing, which is that both the two most recent cultures have kind of got like conceptual inertia inside of our heads, that we have this sense and we were kind of told and maybe some people think that it's true that you're supposed to find a person who fulfills you, who is your confident, your best friend, your sexual paramour, your the co-owner of your children and the household and all the rest of the things. And yet modern culture is this more confluence thing which is they're supposed to benefit you and help you grow. And these two things kind of bounce off against each other.

And then, you know, if we look back, ancestral, what we're predisposed for, it's fucking neither of those two, right? Like, you can say what you want about the truthfulness or utility of both of those. It wasn't that. And it seems like serial monogamy is what we're built for, some combination of polygyny and serial monogamy. And all of these, the existing base rate of what we are, plus the two most recent cultures, are just like the Bermuda triangle of mating ideologies inside of our mind. Yeah, there's this book called the All or Nothing Marriage, which is about sort of, yes,

this modern perception marriage, where exactly this, you put so much expectation on your spouse that they will be, you know, you will be perfectly sexually compatible, perfectly like, conversational, incompatible, you know, everything is perfect. And obviously for loads of people that isn't going to be true and that's not going to be true for 60 years or whatever that you might be together. And so you end up with this all on nothing thing that like some people have actually fabulous marriages and some people just they can't possibly take the strain and so they collapse. And the authors compare it to Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Well, like if you're in a position, if you're in a situation of economics systems, you basically just see your spouse as like your economic partner with whom you have children, but your expectations are not that high. And then you reach the point where you're so affluent, right, because I'm a regulture, where you kind of regard marriage as, yes, as fulfilling all of these, like, esoteric psychological needs, which is just not reasonable. So again, Mary Harrington, endlessly quotable, she has this saying that we should have polished big romance, that the idea of having these incredible romantic expectations of your spouse

is just pretty much setting yourself up to fail. One woman, me machine. Yeah, she really is. What was your thing? It was you that reminded me of a story that I'd forgotten from my childhood about ladies dropping handkerchiefs. Oh, right, as a way of demonstrating.

Interest. So I had this thing with me and David Busce came up with this solution around women cultivating receptiveness, if they want to improve their dating prospects. Now in a post-MeToo world, we're worried about women's safety, especially sexually. This is something that is kind of difficult to say, but again, if you want to work within the confines of how reality is and how you want it to be, I think that women cultivating receptiveness accounts for the male approach anxiety problem, right?

That, you know, a slightly lingering, a longer lingering eye than you think, or like, you know, smiling at somebody as opposed to doing the, uh, why men love bitches treat him mean, keep him keen kind of approach. Men are going to be so bad at receiving those signals, they don't you think? Have you ever heard that the average man of 130 IQ has lead like emotional social and research to him to eat of a woman with 70 IQ? Like, different.

This is why my husband and I are. So you're saying, well, actually socially retarded? Yeah. My husband and I, my husband calls me a witch because I can like, I'll be able to like sense there's something off of you. You are particularly witchy today with the olive as well. I think it's just women. I think we are just witchy. That's why you were burned at the stake. You can just like sense that something, I don't know, face expressions, whatever, something which most men are just oblivious to. Blink, you know. We're some exceptions, Cleaver.

Okay, so yeah, well, let's take that as the, again, the thermodynamics of the situation, that men are, that EQ is 50% of what a woman's is essentially. If that is the case, leaning in even further to not being receptive is going to make said, blinkered man, even less capable of understanding that maybe you're interested. Oh, yeah, yeah. Right. So I just think that, again, another confluence of the hydra's head of lots of stuff that's going on, the multifactorial problem, women are maybe being a little bit more masculine,

working in more masculine environments, thinking they need to be more disagreeable to be more effective at work, concerned about their unsafety, generally skeptical of men that come up to them, strange men that come up to them in a bar, which has led to absolutely less receptivity from women. And it's like, look, if you are complaining like where are all of the good men at, look around a little bit if you can when you're at your crossfit class

or you're doing yoga or you're doing whatever. And if some guy comes up to you and asks some awkward clunky question but he's kind of cute, like don't just presume that he's asking the question, like use the witch clairvoyance, right, tap into the astral realm or whatever it is that you do and think, oh, yeah. If you heard of the male over perception and the female under perception bias. Is this with sexual interest? Correct. Yeah. That's in David Buses book that men overestimate the degree of interest that women have to

them and women underestimate, which is largely why you have awkward passes by male co-workers and stuff. Well, what do you mean? Like, her eyes, and she saw the way that she looked at me every time we went to the copy machine or whatever. And you know, alcohol exaggerates that. Does it really? Yeah.

So men are more likely to falsely perceive sexual interest when they're drunk. Fantastic. Which again, it just makes so much sense of all the, you know, like, you know, that there was like me too, but for schools in the UK a few years ago. No. It, well. It was cool. Everyone's invited. It was like a website that some girls set up to describe

like bad sexual experiences that they'd had with what they... In school? Well, not also not normally in school. This was the thing. So it ended up being a big headache for teachers and headteachers because parents were obviously really upset understandably and they said you know you should be teaching consent workshops in schools

you should be doing all the things the teachers would like this isn't happening in school very rarely is this happening in school this is normally happening happening Friday night at some house party the parents aren't there everyone's drunk and it's kind of the parents responsibility to stop that and yeah and it's kind of the parents responsibility, you want to stop that. You want to step in. Yeah, and it's like, look, you've got, horny young men raised on porn, plus alcohol,

young women often giving confusing signals. I mean, one of the things that, like, teenage girls just don't understand, bless them, is like, if you say, dress and revealing clothes, because you want to attract a particular man, that the blast radius of that signal. It's dirty bomb. Yeah, I was getting a train recently in London and there was a school girl who was probably

like 16 who was walking ahead of me and she was going up the stairs and she was wearing such a short skirt going to school that I could see absolutely everything. And I almost jogged after her just to say, like, you're lucky it was me who was walking behind you. And I know that you're doing this because you wanna feel, I like, there is a kind of thrill of feeling sexy, the young women experience for the first time.

And they have no idea how potent and dangerous that tool is. So you know, you do it because there's a particular guy who gets the same trainers you who you want to catch his eye or whatever fine. But I could have been a creepy bloke. And this is why I think parents have to be banning their daughters from leaving the house looking like that, basically,

because they have no idea. Teenage girls are just, I mean, teenagers are dumb. The thought of me to conversation around victim blaming and stuff is such a deep hole when you get into it to talk about should things be this way? No. Are things this way? Yes. Do you want to play within the confines of the thermodynamics of this particular system, where you probably should, right? And to thread that needle, especially because I often think about this, Douglas Murray once taught me that it doesn't really matter who makes the best logical argument in a debate if you manage to get two or three big laughs you win. Oh, yes, that's true. And it's almost just...

It's all vibes. Yep, it's just vibe. You're a vibe architect, right? And the problem with this discussion, if you have somebody who is very anti this and is saying that's victim blaming you absolutely you're saying that you're giving men a pass. You're saying that women should be fearful of what they should wear and it's like that particular talking point is so empathetically robust in its signaling, that it almost always wins. Yeah.

Because the most obviously caring argument up front that sounds like the one that sounds right, that sounds like the one that you will get the most support for on Twitter, is so tough to put. It's like, right, yeah, yeah, one that you will get the most support for on Twitter. It's so tough to pay. It's like, right, yeah, no, I don't disagree. But look at the outcomes that we get from this. One of the things that progressives really have on their side, rhetorically, is that if you're a conservative who's saying, look, actually, you know, there was a line that one of my readers sent me from all places, it was a book about making wine.

And the line was, traditions or experiments that worked. You can say that when you're talking about wine making and it's not too politically explosive, but you can obviously apply that to social issues as well. That's so perfect. I know it's not a great line. But what you end up, if you're trying to make that argument, and if you're proposing anything remotely conservative, is that you end up having to defend other cultures or cultures of the past. So you'll say, look, actually, there was a lot to be said for the slightly arranged marriage.

There's a lot to be said for teenage girls being encouraged to dress more modestly, whatever. And people say, oh, what's a you're saying that you support domestic violence? You're saying that you support cholera and imperialism and everything that might have happened during the era that you're talking about. And you have to say, no, no, no, no, no, no,

you just end up at them back foot. Whereas if you're a progressive, you can say, I can see this vision, you know, like in the future we'll have this amazing science where everything is great. And the fact that this has never happened and it's never likely to happen means that you're never in the position

of having to defend anything unfortunate. You never have to talk about trade-offs. I think that acknowledging the existence of trade-offs is a fundamentally conservative trait. Yeah. Thomas Sol, there are no solutions, only trade-offs is a fundamentally conservative trait. Yeah. Thomas Sol, there are no solutions only trade-offs. Yeah, it's really painful, but it's true, unfortunately. You'll have seen a lot of the stats coming out about the happiness or lack of amongst young girls. 60% of girls aged 12 to 16 have regular, persistent feelings of hopelessness and stuff like that.

What's your assessment of the current mental health of young women? I mean, it seems to be really bad. But I mean, there's all the obvious stuff about why, you know, young people that don't go outside and off they don't do enough exercise all that, but that's that's true for boys as well. I think Jonathan Heitz and lots of work on this, that the main thing that's going on for girls is social media, because girls use social media differently from boys. One of the ways that girls use social media is to talk to each other.

Girls are so, like you know, that all, basically all, contagious mental illnesses start among and predominate among teenage girls. And things like, like some of the anorexia, for instance, is like a classic example. All like now, apparently, all these teenage girls have got two reps that they've acquired from TikTok. There was a period where multiple personality disorder and that others were coming out on TikTok too. Precisely. And I think it's because, it's kind of like that witchy thing we were talking about earlier,

like women being very, very socially sensitive for obvious, evolutionary reasons, you know, that women being smaller, not having the kind of physical capacities that men do, the main advantage you have in terms of your own survival and survival of your children is making alliances, particularly among other women, you know, recruiting other women to assist you and your endeavors and whatever requires the social sensitivity. And I think that that can misfire in terms of saving so receptive to whatever getting turrets from TikTok that you do yourself harm, basically, I mean, it's not terrible harm, but like, at a rex year is terrible harm, right? That you might

acquire sort of memetically. And I think also it means that girls, I mean, one of the things that always think about Instagram is like the, it's the image-based social media, which seems to be particularly bad for girls. Twitter is bad for journalists, it sends them completely insane. TikTok and Instagram sends teenage girls insane. I think it's because one of the things that, looking at these platforms, one of the things it does to girls, is it gives them a completely false impression of their intersectional competition pool that normally they would look around at the young women they actually know who are as like playing and normal as them skinny and acne ridden as they are. Yeah, and I think, oh, okay, right. Yeah, this is like this is basically my my like competition pool for acquiring whichever, like equally mediocre looking man.

Whereas now you look at Instagram and you see the most beautiful women in the world, Ebrost and having a plastic surgery and you think that's your sexual competition. So I think it just kind of, I think it just plays complete handbook with their minds. This also explains the social contagion theory for F to M transitions because if the you've heard of the left hand in this argument for trans people right that as soon as you remove the societal imposition and judgment people can truly be the yourselves. If that's the, and that very well may contribute, if that was entirely the case, why is it four girls that all sit together at the same lunch table in school?

Right. Why is it not evenly smeared across the entire populace? It's not, it clumps together. Right. Right. It's also gone from being, like diagnosis of judges for you, I've gone from being primarily a male thing to being primarily a female thing like by a big margin by the huge explosion has been on teenage girls specifically.

There was a study in Finland that I found that I put my newsletter last week that said they could attribute 15% of the negative mental health outcomes of teenage girls to their use of birth control. And I realized this when I spoke to Dr Sarah Hill last year, as she's talking to me about how young forming brains can have particular types of negative mental health outcomes locked in for life if you're on hormonal birth control during this particular period. And I remember thinking about the coddling of the American mind at the time and going, I 100% bet that no one's factored in the base rate of the increase of hormonal birth control and the predisposition that it's caused amongst young girls.

Yeah, I'm sure that that's true. This sounds random, but I, if there's this debate you might be familiar with about whether or not it's ethical to use chemical castration for pedophiles. In some countries they do. So like Germany, I think is an example of a country that will offer chemical castration as an alternative to prison time.

And actually, Oh, it's an alternative. Yes. Or maybe you have it when you're on prison. I'm pretty sure Alan Turing got something similar like that. Which is one of the reasons why I think it's not popular in the UK, right, because Turing is a famous example of it being used against gay men. But a lot of pedophiles will say that they would prefer that, and that actually they're

really tortured by that. I mean, I am generally of the opinion, I think this is scientifically sound, that it is an innate sexual orientation, that is bound in a small number of men, and a lot of them report being absolutely tortured by it, it's awful, it's like the most stigmatised, like you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy, what a horrible curse, right? They would actually choose chemical castration to relieve them of that. And yet there's a general feeling, at least maybe in the Anglo sphere, that there's something really dodgy about using sort of pharmacological punishments. And you can imagine, of course, using it in other contexts as well, you might

sedate, aggressive, you know, whatever. I was talking to a friend about this who works in politics and he's a gay man and I was saying, well, you know, you could use like, you know, that the implants you get in your arm, you could use that to sort of release small doses of this every day. And he said, the implants you get in your work. And so, you know, you can get hormonal contraception either you get in your arm or you get the inter-usurined devices or whatever, which is the creeps. He had no idea because he's like innocent to these masters. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it occurred to me, like, isn't it crazy that we're so,

it seems so outside the Overton window to use pharmacology to like alter the minds of criminal offenders? And we've had teenage girls on these drugs for decades. Like, we know them to be mind-altering, to some extent. Wow. And we put, like, no hesitation about putting an arm in plan, so like a 15-year-old girl. It's basically quite an experimental drug. I mean, the argument against us to say, yeah, but pregnancy is also a pretty like... Pull out comfort for 15-year-old. That, but also a quite an extreme thing to go through full start physically, mentally,

et cetera. So if the choice is pregnancy or hormonal birth control, hormonal birth control has fewer side effects. It's, you know, there are no solutions on your trade-offs, right? And it's rough, man, I think about some of my friends who've got young girls that are, you know, maybe 12 or 13 and are going to be starting to be around boys that can get them pregnant and are going to become sexually active at some point in future, but also know about the risks of hormonal birth control and don't want to condemn their beautiful daughter to a life of potential, you know,

10% more anxiety and depression risk plus the weight gain and all the rest of the stuff. But also really don't want them to get pregnant at 15. And you go, okay, are you again, playing within the confines of the world as it is, not as we wanted to be, but saying, what, make sure that you use protection and make sure that, but like you don't get too drunk and blood, it It's like they're 15 or 16 or 17 or something. You know, you said there about the sexual predisposition of the peter-file being a sexual orientation. Peter Till's got a famous question, which is what do you believe that most people would disagree with? And for a long time, that was mine, that non-offending pedophiles need way more sympathy than we

give them, because I've had a bunch of neuroscientists on the show, and they've put people in FMRIs with arousal responses, and they can show non-offending pedophiles everything. They can throw every sexual kink under the sun at them, nothing. And then they are able to show them something that tickles her fancy. And it's really disturbing, isn't it? It would be so much more like psychologically reassuring, which is why I think most people prefer this explanation, to think that it's just some manifestation of evil or something or it's under people's control, because it's just, it's awful to think.

It's so uncomfortable. Imagine being cursed with that. Yeah, awful. I remember learning about it. I was at uni and I was dating this girl at smart doctor, a medical student girl, And she taught me about this and she'd given a presentation on stage basically saying like, you know, we need to give these people more sympathy

because it wasn't that long ago that gay men were seen basically as the same. Now the difference being that gay men could enact, or not they couldn't, but they were in the right future able to enact it without doing something that was taking advantage of a person that can't consent. Yeah.

But ever since that, I've always had this in the back of my mind as one of those. And yeah, the discomfort, it was the same reason I think that even before the lab leak hypothesis was something that was put forward, people were so prepared to lay Covid's origins at the feet of a malign scientist

because it was so much more comforting than believing that it was the chance mutation of some silly little microbe because one normal failure one at least was just one or normal failure. One at least was just not chaos. Yeah. And it felt like it was more in your control with the right intervention we could have fixed it. Yeah. It's like, no, you can't. Yeah. Yeah, I read someone, I forget who now, but I read someone writing about Israel, this is relevant, I swear. and the failure of the Gaza borders and the fact that Hamas were able to get through on September. And so many people have assumed that there was

some sort of conspiracy at play, you know, that there was either some faction within the Israeli government or the Americans or whatever conspiracy you fancy for deliberately permitting Hamas to do this in order to whatever justify flattening guards or whatever it is. And this writer said, isn't it telling that people will jump to that conclusion rather than the much more likely conclusion, which was normal failure, which is that when you have any kind of complex system, like sometimes... There's a blowup risk.

Yeah. And that that's actually true of everything, like what a horrible thought, but that's actually our entire civilization is basically resting on these very, very delicate complex systems that no one really understands. Matthew Saird wrote in the Times, the bias is called compensatory control.

So when things seem like a outside blowup risk has occurred, we want to lay it at a sequence of events that at some point we could have interjected, a compensatory control. It's almost like magical thinking, isn't it? It's like praying to the gods to send rain or whatever, it's that feeling of wanting to have some kind of external agent who controls all of this

because it's actually so much worse to think that it's that it's random. You spoke about intracextual competition. I've got a pretty spicy theory about body positivity that I want to teach you about. So this is the rivalry theory of body positivity. The TLDR is female support for body positivity is at least in part fueled deep down by female intracexual competition, which pushes other women out of the dating pool by discouraging them from losing weight. I mean, yes, but I also think to some extent it's just cope. It's just trying to... It's just because sexual tractiveness is like,

brutally hierarchical. It just is. For men and for women. I mean, for women, it's more physical for men, it's more to status and whatever, but it is just brutally hierarchical. And no one particularly if you have a generally egalitarian outlook if you're on the left.

No one wants to face up to that, particularly if you're at the bottom of the hierarchy. And so trying to say, oh no, hierarchy doesn't exist actually. I'm trying to persuade men to agree with you. It's one way. Good luck with that. Well, exactly, but it is one thing that you can do. You probably can't persuade men to think differently, but you can, I don't know, get into like Lululele emanates. But no one's ever been gilted into an erection. I don't think. It doesn't work. Well, you can try harder.

But this whole, I mean, there's also a deep principle, there isn't that like human nature is kind of a movable. Not completely. We do have a little bit of control over ourselves, and there are cultural structures that will incentivize some things and not others and whatever. There is room for maneuver, but we basically have some fairly tight controls around us all times. Well, I've got him ahead is kind of, human nature is easier to constrain than it is to enable in that regard. Like it's already operating at max RPM and you can bring that down with social norms and judgment and stuff, but going the whole argument of a M to F transition,

if you as a straight man are attracted to that person, regardless of how they present, you are, that's homophobia, transphobia or whatever, actually don't know which of those two it is. Um, ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha. It just doesn't play within the confines of reality. Yeah.

Right. And actually that's one of the things that I think is so cruel about so much of the sort of discourse around trans. Like there's this line actually, there's this great, there's writer Andrew Longchue who is trans and who disagrees with me on absolutely everything, but I would say he's a great writer. I really, really good pros. And she has this line, when you are trans, you become permanently dependent on the kindness of strangers. In the sense that basically no one passes, it's really hard to pass convincingly,

particularly if transition doesn't add up, it'll always be kind of physically obvious that you're not actually a native female. What you depend on is people playing along. Every single time, every social interaction for the rest of your life, so is not to feel dysphoria. And sometimes people won't do that little children aren't going to do that. Well, like some elderly person with Alzheimer's isn't going to do that. You know, people aren't always going to cotton on that they're supposed to play along. And so it means you have this incredibly fragile.

Yeah, it's a social mind field. It's terrible. Yeah. And what you're basically, and that's what's being inflicted on people when they're encouraged to go through irreversible surgeries, living their entire life dependent on the kind of sub-strangers for like to avoid complete psychological dissolution. Douglas Murray's got this quote that he throws around saying, you know when you've reached true equality because you have to put up with the same level of shit that everybody else does. It's true, yes. And the lack of special dispensation is the exact opposite. And I think it's all about dispositions, but I think if it was me and I was being coddled, I would feel incredibly patronized.

And this is how I think, you know, to even put, regardless of whether the L's, the G's, the B's, the T's, as groups want to be together, it's not like T is just a group or G is just a group, right? Within that, you have a number of different factions of people. And I don't think that that wouldn't be how I would want to be treated. What's your theory on the normalization of cosmetic surgery? I think that unlike other industries, which are more obviously supplied and man-led, one of them. I think that there is a completely bottomless desire for women in particular for beauty enhancing treatment, and they will basically spend as much money as they can, right, on average,

and that the thing that really drives the beauty industry is technological innovation. So like as soon as something new comes on the market and it's typically very expensive and then only celebrities use it and it trickles down whatever. Like I didn't know this for instance, it wasn't that long ago that actually dying your hair was considered to be quite unusual for women who were going gray. That was considered to be kind of in the realms of like quite it. It got extreme but like quite a, you know, expensive time and see whatever. Like it was at the edges of what was considered normal for women saying they're 50s or 60s. Now everyone dies there. Basically, now going grey is a weird statement.

And we've had this like ratcheting up of the things that you have to do in order to be considered well-gruned. And the sky is the limit. And so it's limit. And it's just different by what's available. So now it's not just wearing makeup, it's also fillers, it's also Botox, it's also weird, wonderful facials, whatever, like all the things that you can do, having your nails done is like a completely standard thing, right? It's really expensive to have like perfectly manicured nails all the time. And women who don't have much money will send so much money on this, it's amazing. And I mean, what a wonderful time to invest it in the beauty industry. Because honestly, the tech, the tech that they do is actually incredible.

What do you mean, what? Like... Okay, nails, one example. Men won't know this. The bottles of nail varnish that you can get in the pharmacy for like a few pounds, they'll, the manicure will look really bad and it will last you a few days. So presumably back in the 50s when we used to do that but no one does that now. Maybe 10 years ago it started to become possible to do that, but no one does that now. Maybe 10 years ago, it started to become possible to get manicures that would last for 10 days, but they're quite bad for your nails because they have to like, soar away at it basically when they remove it,

but yeah, it's not really nice, and it doesn't feel very nice. So, you don't necessarily want to do that. Now, you can get nail varnish, which lasts you a month, and it's more expensive and yada-yada. But like, the technological breakthroughs, the Peter Fields always talking about like, now vanish, which lasts you a month, and it's more expensive and yada yada. But like the technological breakthroughs, Peter Phil is always talking about technological stagnation, right? Like we haven't improved on the jet engine and whatever. We have improved so much on the UTEC in that period. It's amazing. And I think it's just because there's a bottomless market for it. People don't actually care about flying across the Atlantic slightly more quickly. You know, that'sless market for it. People don't actually care about flying across the Atlantic slightly more quickly. That's why they want nail banish that lasts for another two weeks.

Yeah. Yeah. And fillers are more natural and never to get wrinkles and yada yada like. Right, so it's a race, it's not only a race to the bottom which women have an endless desire for how women have an endless desire for how much enhancement they will go for. The minimum bar, like the overton window, the minimum base rate of that has also been raised up. And it's because of intersection competition. It's because now if you only did the beauty routine of 40 years ago, you would look relatively bad compared to the other women in your peer group. This is precisely the same, but not disincentivized. Instead, it's just an unspoken about cartel across the board as why women sluts share more

than men. It's a price enforcement mechanism, but instead of it being price enforcement, it's just competition. But that is related to the female rivalry theory of body positivity, right? If you can somehow manage to get a few competitors to eat their way out of your horizontal competitionally, does this bill permit? He's live at Red Rocks, some theater, and he says, if you ladies could only support the WNBA, like you support a fat chick that keeps on gaining weight and is no longer a threat to you, they'd be doing more numbers

than the NBA. It is amazing. Whenever you go on, women post selfies for other women. Because you look at the comments underneath any woman who's posted a selfie ever and it will always be like, baby look amazing, baby look amazing. And the expectation I think is that then when those women post selfies, they get the same thing bad. And it's all very kind of, you know, like, I, it's funny, this is the nature of sort of human instinct, right?

You'll do things with having no idea why you're doing them. And then sometimes you'll look back and be like, oh, okay, like you read David Bust or something. I'm sure you've had this experience and you're like, oh yeah, I've done that. I tried. There I am. And you'll keep doing it anyway.

Well, think about why women by luxury goods. Like why is it that women are so concerned about having a YSL purse, right? It's for the girls and the guys. It's for not for men. A mulberry handbag. Yeah. So there was a really interesting study

that I looked at that showed the gift that highly intersectually competitive women with wealthy spouses wanted the most was a gift card to an expensive department store. So they could choose themselves. Precisely correct, because they want to use the signal of my mate is so invested. Oh, you want to go after my mate?

Yes, yes, yes. He spent five grand on this tiny piece of leather that I carry my phone in. He spent 10 grand on this wedding ring or whatever. Yeah. Right? It's an intersectional competitive threat display of mate investment, even when the mate's not around.

Yeah, yeah. And because men are completely insensitive to their development. Talk about the brands. You think we know the difference between a fucking mulberry handbag and something from like primar? I don't think men know just things that manicures either. I think a lot of the beauty stuff. Like some of it, yes, is orientated towards looking younger. That's always going to be sexually attractive. But I think a lot of the looking really well-groomed

is about signaling to girls and guys because they're the ones who are actually receiving the signals. Did you see my post that study that was floating around last week to do with that hairdressing was floating around last week to do with that hairdressing experiment that had been done. This is phenomenal. So this is where I originally justified using science, my rivalry theory of female body positivity support. A recent study published in personality and individual differences found that women who are high in intracexual competitiveness are more likely to advise women who they perceive as potential mating threats to cut off more hair in an attempt to sabotage their attractiveness.

The researchers studied 450 women who were presented with hypothetical salon clients. Participants were asked to recommend the amount of hair to be cut off for each woman. Women who reported high levels of intracexual competitiveness were more likely to recommend that clients have more hair cut off when the hair was in good condition and the clients expressed a preference for minimal cutting. Another finding is that women advise clients of similar attractiveness as themselves to cut off the most hair. Participants effectively targeted women they perceived as being on the same attractiveness level potentially to try and reduce their attractiveness.

Longer hair is acute to youth and health. Yeah, men love long hair. I don't and health. Yeah, men love long hair. I don't think women realize how much men love long hair. Like if you read the, men are actually incredibly easy to please, right? In terms of like physical cues. But the problem is that there are two parallel status games going on when it comes to female beauty and appearance.

One is attracting men, which is basically just looking youthful, female beauty and appearance. One is attracting men, which is basically just looking youthful, like fine and fertile. And then the other is the much more difficult game, which is the intersectional competition game, which is about making yourself look high status in other ways. And that's where the brands come in,

that's where, you know, like keeping up with fashion comes in, Mendocare about that. But you have those two things going on parallel, and occasionally they'll come into tension, occasionally there'll be some trend. There are no solutions on the trader. Which makes you fashionable, but the men don't like. Yeah, that's interesting.

Yeah, short hair would be an example of that, but it's quite rare for that to be really popular. But as you know, like, baggy clothes. Yeah, I was gonna say like both rungines and stuff. Yeah, exactly men aren't gonna be interested in that. But that might like baggy clothes. Yeah, I was going to say like both rungines and stuff. Yeah, exactly. Men aren't going to be interested in that. But that might like occasionally come around. Guys would be happy with girls just permanently wearing leggings,

like hot leggings, like gym shark leggings or something. Like just just just go out in those with heels. Yeah, like it's very basic. Yeah. But then again, but then I mean also part of what's driving fashion is the fact that gay men are so overwhelmed the over-represented in fashion And they don't have absolutely no interest No, so that's why you have like really skinny women on catwalks and stuff like it's partly because the clothes kind of hang

It's easier if if everyone's a small sample size to deal with the clothes like fitting everyone But I think it's also because the more enjoying this look is just considered to be more beautiful by gay men. You see that Victoria's secrets have made the radical decision to go back to using hot models. They tried 300 pound mannequins. They tried a trans person. They tried a man. They tried the captain of the US socket team. And radically now they're just going to use heart checks. You know, you know, the Jim Brown Luleleman, like expensive Jim, where I can't tell you how much Lewy Lemon I own, it's disgusting anyway. They used to have a rule that they didn't even stock

sizes over like a UK size 12 or UK 14, like the average woman is a 16. That's a smarter version of what Abercrombie and Fitch did where they wouldn't give away their clothes to homeless people, they just burn them. Yeah, they're up. Don't even give them away to unacceptable customers, let alone. Yeah, yeah, no, I really think that Lululema, and actually the guy who found it would say is quite so forwardly, like, I don't want a fat shucks or only clothes, basically. Like, they knew that having it being associated with skinny women was aspirational, but then they changed that in like 2020-ish.

Couldn't survive. Couldn't survive. And now they have, now they have loads of plus size models and stuff. It's a fashion though, it won't last. Louise Perry, ladies and gentlemen, Louise, I love you. I really, really enjoy bringing you on. Your podcast, great, your writings, great.

Where should people go? If they want to watch the stuff that you're doing. So my podcast is called Made in Mother Nature Arc. It's on YouTube, Substacled, Places You Get Your Pockasts. My first book was The Case Against the Suck's Revolution, which came out last year. I'm working on another one as well, which is going to be out in about 18 months, which is on motherhood, fertility, birth rates, all of this stuff. And I just write, I work too much, I write for too many places, like countless places. I'm on Twitter. Everyone should go and read the case against the sexual revolution.

It's phenomenal and I'm excited to see what you do with your next one. Thank you for today. 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,