Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 674 | Secular Feminist: 'Bring Back Christian Sexual Ethics' | Guest: Louise Perry

Episode Date: September 7, 2022

Today we’re chatting with British journalist and author Louise Perry about her new book, “The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century.” In her book, Louise gets into the nitty-gritty of the standard progressive narrative our culture pushes about sex. We discuss the sexual revolution era's promises of liberation, satisfaction, and happiness, when in reality it only brings about pain, confusion, and destruction. We talk about the lie that “consent” is the only standard we should be concerned about when it comes to sex and how the abandonment of Christian sexual ethics has been terrible for women, men, and society as a whole. Through her lens as a secular feminist, Louise gives advice on how we can recover from sexual liberalism. Through both a theological and a secular viewpoint, we discuss how marriage, monogamy, and family are crucial to our society. --- Today's Sponsors: HealthyCell — get 20% off your first order at HealthyCell.com/ALLIE, use promo code 'ALLIE'! A'Del — go to adelnaturalcosmetics.com and enter promo code "ALLIE" for 25% off your first order! Good Ranchers — change the way you shop for meat today by visiting GoodRanchers.com/ALLIE & use promo code 'ALLIE' to save $30 off your order and lock in your price! Raycon — go to BuyRaycon.com/ALLIE today to save 15% off your Raycon order. --- Show Links: Common Sense: "I'm 30. The Sexual Revolution Shackled My Generation." https://www.commonsense.news/p/im-30-the-sexual-revolution-shackled?utm_medium=email&triedSigningIn=true --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise – use promo code 'ALLIE10' for a discount: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed.

You can watch this D-Day Show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. The sexual revolution lied to us. Promising liberation, satisfaction, and happiness. It is only delivered pain, confusion, and destruction. Author Louise Perry argues from a secular feminist perspective that abandoning Christian regulations on marriage and sex has gotten us here. And she's got some fascinating advice.

on how we can recover from the brokenness caused by sexual liberalism. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to Good Ranchers.com slash Alley. That's good ranchers.com slash Alley. Louise, thank you so much for joining us. Before we get started, can you tell us who you are and what you do? I'm Louise Perry. I'm a journalist and author based in London, UK.

And you wrote a book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, a new guide to sex in the 21st century. Before we get into the content of the book, can you first just set us up? Why did you write it? I mean, it's kind of a decade's work, even though I wrote it pretty quickly. I wrote it basically between learning I was pregnant with my son

and him being six months old, which wasn't very clever. Anyone listening who's considering writing a book at the same time as having a baby, I would defied against it. But this was, So, I mean, my first job out of university was working in a rape crisis center. And I've since worked as a campaigner on sexual violence and the law. And a lot of my journalism has been focused around this topic in all sorts of different ways.

So it was something I've been thinking about for a really long time. And having a lot of conversations with young women, all of whom are saying the same things. You know, there is something deeply, deeply wrong with our sexual culture. and the standard narratives available to us, the progressive narrative about the sexual revolution, which says that this was all for women's sake, that it was all about maximizing our freedom and that we should be grateful for it.

I think actually if you look at how young women are actually experiencing the post-sexual revolution era, I just don't think it stacks up at all. So this book is an interrogation of that narrative. Tell us what the sexual revolution is, revolution is. How would you define it? So are these sort of two things? One is the the material aspect of it, the fact that you have the pill arriving in the end of the 1950s into the 1960s and just completely transforming sex and the link with reproduction, right? For the first time in the history of

the world, it suddenly becomes possible for women to suspend their fertility in a way that they can control and that is kind of invisible, right? And it's that important that we call it the pill with capital letters. You know, everyone knows what you're talking about when you're talking about the pill because of its incredible importance. It's not the only material change that brings us here, but I think it is the most significant one and it's where I date the beginning of the sexual revolution. But then there's also all of the ideological stuff that comes along with that as well, because this is coming out of the 1960s and the sort of, excuse me, ferment of the post-second world war era and you've got this really strong push to sort of tear down

everything that's come before and to question everything that's come before and there's this real kind of anti-establishment urge which also applies to sexuality and you know what we've basically been left with post-sexual revolution is that all of the old sexual norms are now suspect particularly anything associated with religion. I mean, this really should be understood. The whole of the post-60s era really needs to be understood as a reaction against Christianity, right? It's kind of a second reformation in that sense.

And what's the only principle that's left standing is the principle of consent, right? As long as everyone is capable of consenting and they enthusiastically consent that everything's fine, everything is on the table, you know. And my argument is that actually the consent framework doesn't work. It is completely pitiful, right, as a means of actually trying to regulate relationships to men and women, which are far more complex and difficult and high stakes than the consent

framework permits. Yes, we've talked about that before. When consent is your only determinant of what is virtuous and what is not, then as you said a lot of things that are actually immoral and exploitative are on the table. Consent is a part of determining what is good and what is not, what is acceptable and what is not, but it's really the bare minimum. It is not the only standard. And that's how you kind of get these maxims of the sexual revolution, or what I would call maxims of the sexual revolution, which is sex work is work. or there's such a thing as ethical pornography or who cares if these women are singing about

these things, doing these things. If they're objectifying themselves, it's okay because they are consenting to that objectification. Tell us a little bit more about the consequences of this consent as the only standard of decency culture that the sexual revolution has created. it. The turn that I use in the book is sexual disenchantment. The idea that sex used to have some sort of special status, some actual sacred status, right, not just in Christianity, all religious traditions have some kind of sacredness surrounding sex and rules about when you can do it and with who and so forth. But what sexual disenchantment as an idea does is it says that actually know sex needn't be any more significant than any other kind of social interaction. It can be

completely morally neutral. If people want to invest meaning in it, they can, but they don't have to. It can just be like shaking hands or whatever other kind of neutral thing you want to imagine, which means, of course, you can buy it, you can sell it, you can objectify yourself as much as you like, that's fine. The problem with sexual disenchantment, I mean, there are two problems with it. One is that If you really are serious about saying that sex is no different from other kinds of social interaction, then you can't continue to have special status for rape, for instance. Right, exactly. Or for sexual harassment or for any of these things, which we know viscerally feel deeply different from, say, theft.

And the law recognises that and all of our social institutions recognize that. But if you really want to say that sex actually doesn't have any special status, then how can you possibly argue that rape should have a special status? And this is, I think, the problem with sexual disenchantment that if you follow it through to its logical conclusions, it actually has horrible, horrible outcomes, which is why basically no one does. Like, no one actually lives as if sexual disenchantment was true.

People might say that they do, and they might rhetorically kind of appeal to it. So you get phrases like, as you say, sex work is work, which is designed to kind of challenge us to say, but what is different about sex, you know, when it comes down to it, isn't it just like working in McDonald's? isn't it just like selling any other kind of labour?

And the problem you get down to in those arguments is that the differentness of sex, the specialness of sex, is quite hard to articulate. It's not something that can easily be packaged up in a sort of rational argument because it's not really to do with rationality, it's to do with emotion, feeling, and the kind of gut-level response that we have as human beings to sexual interaction.

And I think particularly for women, I mean, one of the ways that men, and women differ on average in terms of sexuality. There are all sorts of them, but one, which is interesting and important, is that women have a much lower sexual disgust threshold than men, which is one of those things that you can measure quite objectively by things like sweating and heart rate and things like that. When we feel disgusted, we have all these involuntary physical responses,

which you can test for. And women's threshold for feeling sexual disgust is a lot lower than men's. We get what is called colloquially getting the ick. when you like really just kind of feel horribly repulsed. And I think, yeah, and particularly I think when it's associated with any kind of like sexual aggression, there's that fear combined with disgust,

which I don't think there's a word for. I mentioned in the book that every woman I've spoken to says, I completely understand that feeling. I know it. You feel it like in your bones. It's that strong. Right. But there isn't a word for it.

And it's something that men are much less likely to, to experience. and it all comes down to the fact that, you know, one, the fact that women are just physically vulnerable in a way that men aren't because we're smaller and we're weaker than men are, but also that we're evolved to have quite different kinds of sexuality and quite different responses to things like choosing partners. You know, the nature of getting pregnant is that sex is hugely consequential for women, potentially,

because you've got a long pregnancy, you've got dangerous labour, you've got many, many years of childcare, that's really important. That matters, right? It's no wonder we're evolved to be picky about who we want to have sex with because those are the potential consequences. You don't want to be choosing the wrong man

who's not going to stick around or whatever. Whereas in theory, men can have, men can reproduce every time they have sex with basically no physical risk to themselves. Which doesn't mean that men like are always focused on just having as many partners as possible, not at all. Like male sexuality is very flexible. I talk in the book about CAD and Dad mode.

So Dad Mode is obviously all focused towards marriage and family instability and really like investing in your genetic line, right? Whereas CAD mode is all about sowing your wild oats. That's a phrase that's used in America. Yes, yes. Yeah. We don't say CAD as much, but I think that we know what she means. you're wild though it's definitely familiar yeah um and men can you know some men are more drawn to one

sort of mode than the other but most men are capable of both and it's about and it depends on context and it depends on incentives and what kind of social structures are in place to to to motivate men's behavior in one or other ways and i think what's happened to the sexual revolution that we've we've got rid of so many of the structures that used to exist to regulate sexual relationships, which were oppressive, right, in a sense. And then this is often the argument, the feminist argument that's made against marriage, is that marriage oppresses women, to which I say, yeah, it does, but, you know, it oppresses men as well.

And it also protects the interests of women, and it also protects the interests of men. The whole point of marriage is that it is a restriction. You know, you stand up in front of everyone and you promise to be with this person forever and to be faithful to them and to support them financially, emotionally, socially, everything. And you sign a piece of paper to that effect, which places restrictions on your behaviour. Yeah. On both of you, that's the point. But it also means that you, it provides a stable basis to form your life together and to have children together. And if you're, if you're tearing down those kind of institutions that are in place to encourage men into dad mode, essentially, we shouldn't be surprised to discover that actually,

like male sexual misbehavior is so much, so much easier and so much less punished now. Yeah. Without those structures in place. Because as you're saying, consent just isn't enough. There is so much terrible behavior which jumps over that very, very low bar, the consent bar. Hey, this is Steve Deast. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and

reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this Steve Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. have so much to say and so many thoughts based on what you just said starting at the end talking

about marriage being oppressive what you mean when you say marriage is oppressive is kind of what you explained that it's oppressive in the sense that it is restrictive it is it's supposed to be a structure that inhibits you from engaging in certain kinds of behavior and stops you from doing some things that you may want to do but are unhealthy both for the relationship for your kids, also for society in general, I would probably say that it is more than like repressive than oppressive. I guess when I think of oppressive, I think of unjustly holding someone down, whereas repressive might just be holding something back for better or for worse. I would say that marriage, you know, the institution of marriage anyway is repressive in a healthy way, that yes,

it is holding people back as you explained so well from things that are not supposed to be acceptable in the bounds of marriage. Now, what I'm interested to hear, are you, are you religious? Do you consider yourself religious? No, I'm coming at this from a kind of secular perspective. I mean, I'm, I'm religious in the sense that I think actually all of us are, I think that Christian morality is actually deeply, deeply baked in to Western societies, right? Like 2,000 years of Christian tradition didn't end suddenly in the 1960s. So I think that a lot of what I'm writing about in the book, and I think one of the reasons that the book has appealed to a Christian audience as well as secular audience are Christian virtues, which are universally recognized, even if they're not. not acknowledged as being Christian, if that makes sense.

So things like defense of the weak, humility, these are not actually universal virtues, right? And they certainly weren't considered so in the first century Roman world, right? These are Christian virtues, which I think still resonate. Yes. Which is a complicated way of saying sort of. Yes. So, that's your question.

Yes. And this is a, I mean, I'm a Christian. This is a Christian podcast. And that is part of why this is so interesting. And one thing that you said that really struck me as absolutely true, but also troublesome, maybe you could even argue like this is the entire problem is that sex cannot be rationally explained as special as something different than shaking your hands. But as you said, everyone, whether they say so or not, acknowledges that it is in their repulsion

to something like rape. Or I would say the vast majority of people. They would not say that there should be the same punishment for someone coming up and slapping you on the face versus someone raping you. They know that there is a difference even if they say something ridiculous like sex work is work and it doesn't matter how many sexual partners that you have. It's just liberating and great. They understand that sex is different than, you know, your normal interaction, negative or positive. It really can't be explained though why that is, as you like kind of briefly touched on. You said without talking about like the mental and emotional, the feeling part of it.

But of course, from my perspective, I'm saying no, it's a spiritual. It's the spiritual part of it that I would argue it is because there is something deep and almost intangible in all of us because we are made in God's image. Because he made us male and female because he made us for the kind of sexual intimacy that is only really practiced in a healthy and productive and fruitful way. in the boundaries of monogamous marriage, that is why somehow innately we know and have suppressed through our sexual revolution mores. We have suppressed what I believe God placed in all of us that we understand that sex is special, that sex is for commitment, it is for covenant, that it is a reflection of something much bigger and much deeper and much deeper and much more eternal than we can actually give word to. And I think our disgust, even the secular person's

disgust of things like rape and things like pedophilia, I think it speaks to how God made us, that God placed something in us. And so as you already mentioned, even from a secular perspective, if post-1960s is a backlash against Christian morality, specifically Christian sexual morality, then of course it would make sense that our thoughts about sex have gone in the direction that it has. Because Christianity, as you mentioned, for the last 2,000 years, totally disrupted the pagan Roman world and how they viewed sex also as just something that you do. People are just people that you use. Children doesn't matter. Christianity's disrupted that.

And now that we have kind of rejected it, we're going back to the pagan era and how they're viewed bodies and how they viewed sex. So anyway, I just kind of wanted to give my Christian perspective on that, but I'm curious just kind of what you think about that. I mean, yeah, I think that the, yeah, I don't think it can be underestimated quite how like appalling sexual ethics were in antiquity, right? And if you're looking at the first century Christian introduction of the new kind of sexual ethics, they are, radically transformative. And I think that is really worth bearing in mind when thinking about modern feminism, which is often

set up as being in direct opposition to Christianity and to other religious traditions too, but particularly like in an American and British context, we're primarily talking about Christianity. And I think that's a mistake because I mean there are a lot of different strains of feminism and clearly there are all sorts of internal discussions within feminism which are you know worth having but you know when it comes down to it a lot of basic feminist ideals which I think basically everyone can can agree with regardless of whether or not they call themselves feminist you know the idea that women's um women's interests ought to be protected

um that women's emotional lives matter that women's distress matters you know all this kind of stuff um which is not taken as red in say the roman world right um those ideas about equality and the protection of the weak and so on are originally Christian ideas, even if they're now somewhat divorced from the actual theology. And I think it is an error to see feminism and Christianity is unnecessarily in opposition, even if there might be points of debate,

as they always have been, you know, across the last 2,000 years that have always been internal disputes and so forth. I think it is a terrible error of feminists, some feminists, some feminists, to think that tearing down the old sexual morality would necessarily lead to women's lives improving in any way because actually there are a lot of alternative systems of sexual ethics to the Christian ones and a lot of them are a hell of a lot worse than what prevailed until recently in our society.

You know, one of the arguments I make in favour of marriage, you know, writing for a secular audience who are not who are not necessarily going to be persuaded by the religious arguments right but I say look if we look at this rationing we look at the data there's a lot of data on this polygamous systems are much worse for women and children than our monogamous systems of marriage right polygamous systems are in some sense our kind of natural states most societies on the anthropological record have been polygynous so permitting men to take multiple wives. Our closest primate ancestors are also polygynous. This seems to be to some extent our default that we drift towards. And actually you'll see on things like dating apps, which offers

like a wealth of data on this, you will see that left to our own devices without that kind of monogamous restriction coming externally. People do tend to drift back towards a kind of polygynous system where you have the high status men accumulating lots of wives, girlfriends, and low status men. having none at all. The problem with that kind of society is it tends to produce a lot more domestic violence because households with lots of co-wives tend to produce a lot of conflict, a lot more child abuse, more crime because you have this massive unmarried men who are frustrated and don't have any reason really to tame themselves because that's that's very often what marriage and having children does to men it it it literally we can measure it it reduces testosterone

in men when they have a child at home and they're involved in that child's care their testosterone levels drop in a good way yeah and that it's a it's a it's a softening of kind of um male aggression particularly youthful male aggression whereas in a monogamous system um crime rates drop domestic violence rates drop child abuse drops you know it's in some sense that not a natural system because it's not the one that we kind of tend to do towards by default. And it is the group of people that it places real restrictions on are the high status men, right, who want to take on multiple wives if they have the opportunity to. It's why anthropologists call this the puzzle of monogamous marriage,

why monogamous marriage would have been ever become as successful as it has and as widespread as it is nowadays. And the answer is that yes, it restricts the, high-status men who are normal, you know, in general setting the terms. But it has so many other benefits for a society that it tends to produce stable societies which survive and expand. So I think that you can end up through the more kind of rational data-driven arguments at some of the same conclusions that have been reached by old religious traditions. With the exception, as you say, I think of the argument against sexual disenchantment, which really does come down to emotion. But then, you know, we are human animals, right, in the sense that we are, we are driven

by our emotions. And I think to say that we should be kind of, I think that a lot of what, a lot of the reason that young women are experiencing a lot of distress in a culture of casual sex and porn and all the stuff that I'm describing is because what they're being asked to do is basically suppress their instincts their instincts towards wanting to have emotional attachment in sexual relationships towards feeling anxious

about being with men that they don't know all of the kind of red flags which instinctively crop up that feeling of disgust and fear you know these are very very deeply ingrained instincts in us and they're there for a reason that you know they are self-protective. And one of the things that I reject about sex positive feminism is even though in theory it's supposed to be all about kind of promoting people's sexual well-being and so on,

what I think it does in practice is it actually encourages women in particular to ignore their instincts and to try and retrain themselves to be more like men, to have sex like men, to see this as a liberatory goal rather than saying, no, female sexuality is actually fine as it is, right? It's actually good to want to combine love with sex. It's good to want to commit to one person and so on. These are not bad instincts that women should be trained out of.

One of the phrases that I hate so much that has become popular this century and you see it in the media and so on is catching feelings. The idea that if you're having a sexual relationship with someone and you start feeling emotional attachment, this is some sort of disease that you've caught that you need to be avoiding. And you get these horrific guides in women's mags and so on.

Advising, I mean, it's presented in a gender-neutral way, but we all know what's really going on right. They're advising young women who find themselves in a culture of casual sex don't like it, are feeling unhappy, but also feel as though this is compulsory. They have to go through this. advising them things like don't make eye contact with your sexual partner, take drugs before you have sex to soften your emotional responses, all this kind of, you know, encouraging these women to emotionally mutilate themselves. And my question is for what purpose, right?

To serve the male libido, basically, I think is what it comes down to. I don't think it's this serving women's interest in the least. I've heard from a lot of young women, in particular those who call themselves detransitioners. This seems to be a common theme in their backgrounds in the stories that I have read and also the ones that I've personally spoken to, is that especially those who are young, like, you know, 10 years younger than me. And so they really grew up coming of age during the social media era. and they felt as young women very over-sexualized and felt a pressure at a very young age to be sexual, not just sexually active, but dress sexually, talk sexually, dance sexually on social media, send pictures to boys.

And I'm sure that pressure to some extent has always been there for young women to try to perform in some way to gain the satisfaction and approval of young men. but with social media and just kind of our media and pop culture as it is, it seems like the pressure is stronger, more ubiquitous. And so a lot of these women, what I find interesting, who transitioned so called into being a man, a common theme that I find is that they were uncomfortable as a 12, 13 year old with the pressure to be sexual, with always feeling like a sexual object, feeling like prey and feeling, vulnerable because of that and felt that if they transitioned or they started being more masculine did not make them less vulnerable. There was less pressure. And it's sad because, I mean, puberty involves a lot of discomfort for girls and boys and always has. And so of course, sexuality and the discovery of all of that at teenage years is already awkward and difficult. But it seems like objectification and the sexualization of young people, especially young girls,

is more. It's bigger than it has been before. I don't think it's just leading to confusion about gender and that kind of thing. I think it's leading to a lot of, as you said, disenchantment, self-hatred, self- resentment, just a lot of confusion about what sex is supposed to be, what the body is, who they are, how the mind and the heart and the body all work together and how it's supposed to. Is that something that you've seen? What do you think about? that. I completely agree that that must be a motivation of, well, I mean, so many detransitionists say that it was a very explicit motivation. They were, that, you know, it's always alarming to some degree to come to encounter puberty and suddenly inhabit the body of a woman and having to

negotiate sexual interests and so on, always difficult. But doing so in a hyper-sexualized culture, super pornified, you know, with the expectation that you've got, you've got young boys in particular, but young girls too being exposed to porn from really young ages. We're giving children smartphones into which, you know, these multi-billion dollar global corporations are beaming the most extraordinarily violent, aggressive, horrible sexual images, right, which they're going to be exposed to for a really young age. I mean, one of the things I write about in one chapter on BDSF, is the extent to which just the sexual script has become so much more aggressive, right?

Just things like one survey in the UK, which found that half of young women in the UK age 18 to 24 had been choked by a partner during sex. This was not considered to be a normal part of sex even 10 years ago, 20 years ago. this was like a weird niche thing that most people would never even would never even occur to them to do now. But now we have every porn platform in the world has choking images on the front page. This is completely mainstream. You can even expect to see it on Instagram or Facebook and all these platforms that are supposed to be appropriate for adolescents. No wonder you have some of these girls, you know, arriving in this kind of sexual culture and saying, I want out. And one way of getting out is to not identify as a woman anymore or to do things like

identify as as as as as as sexual or demisexual. Demisexual makes me laugh a little bit because what demisexual is defined as is basically when you you only want to have sex with someone who you're emotionally attached to. And this is presented as being a kind of weird and wonderful special identity. You're right, right. Whatever. And I'm like, no, this is just normal female sexuality that you're describing. and creating a new term.

I mean, I kind of, I sort of have some respect for girls in the sense of, you know, having the confidence almost to assert this, you know, this is my identity. Like, you know, there's nothing wrong with it. Um, is good. You know, better to identify as demisexual than to,

than to kind of go along with the mainstream against your instincts. But equally, you shouldn't have to be coming up with some sort of special identity that permits you to opt out of a culture that is really not geared towards in women's interests. Yeah. You've written about this before. As all of the different barriers,

all of the different mores, restrictions, traditions around sexuality that, as we've talked about, are rooted in Christianity, even if they have become separated from Christian theology, as all of those are knocked down in the name of liberation, in the name of, I don't know,

self-discovery and self-discovery and self-fulfillment, I really see a huge crossover between the like trendy narcissistic self-love culture and all the sexual revolution. There seems to just be a lot in common there. As all of those, all of those restrictions are knocked down, do you see the normalization of something like pedophilia on the horizon? Or do you think that's just a slippery slope argument that, you know, Christian conservatives are putting out there? to try to scare people about LGBTQ people? I think it's hard for those principles not to end up as a paedophilia apologism eventually.

And this has happened post-sexual revolution and has to some extent been memory holds. You have in, say, the 1970s, a push among all sorts of very, very prominent post-mom theorists like Foucault and the signing. Yes. Yes, yes. Signing petition.

you know, for the decriminalisation of paedophilia, writing very explicitly in defence of it. And what they said, it's important to remember this, is that they didn't say that it was okay to violently assault children. What they said was that the consent principle stood. You know, consent was important, and that some children were capable of consenting to sex with adults. And I think this is the problem with the consent framework,

because actually it is over, it is open to manipulation. The fact that we've set the legal bar at 16 in the UK, you know, other similar kind of thresholds across the world, is to some extent arbitrary. We know that, you know, a 15-year-old on the night before her 16th birthday is not radically different from how she is the next day. We have to draw a line in the sand legally and say,

this is the point at which you can consent to sex. And we know historically that that line has been set at very, different points, you know, sometimes really very young. The argument from some of the sexual revolutionaries was just that we should nudge it a little lower and it was still completely in keeping with their principles of protecting consent. And it becomes, you know, there are all sorts of examples like, for instance, pornography with adults pretending to be children or making themselves look more like children. trend. I mean, that's a trend even on TikTok. I just saw something that there's like this trend of like older girls wearing like picktails to get more tips because they look. Yeah. Yeah, they look younger. There's also and this, I don't want to take us, you know, off of what we're talking about, but just so I don't forget. Something I've noticed with a lot of men who say that they identify as women is that at least the ones that I'm seeing, you know, online is that they don't.

Don't dress up like women. They often dress up as little girls. Like there is this one TikToker, I think his name is Dylan, that he is talking about, oh, this is day, whatever, of being a girl. And literally dress it. I mean, this is a man and he's dressed like a child. Like he's dressed like a 12 year old. And this is apparently just acceptable. We're all supposed to celebrate this. I mean, it's hard for me not to see the writing on the wall. It's already getting blurry. Right? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Other example would be like virtual reality porn or cartoon porn or whatever that's designed to look like child porn. But it doesn't actually use children in its production. So it's not directly harming any children or something like cuties. You remember the Netflix show a couple of years ago, which was supposedly, you know, the defense from the creators was that it was about actually critiquing the sex.

of children and, you know, the plot in the end sees the protagonist rejecting the kind of hypersexualization. But it also featured a lot of hypersexualization of real children who actually were really young and looked obviously very young. And this is the sort of thing where within the consent framework, what do you say, you know, if an adult wants to put braces and pig tails on and create porn and if another adult wants to consume it or pay for it, you can't really challenge that within the consent framework at all and yet the vast majority of us feel an instinctive revulsion and know that there's something off about that and it's very hard to explain that feeling if all that you've got to rely on is the consent framework whereas if you

if you're interested in virtue you know if you say that actually there are certain um there are certain virtues on which our sexual ethics should be based and one of those includes the protection of the vulnerable and the recognition that actually any kind of sexual attraction to children is wrong and should be repressed. And if anyone sort of discovers it in themselves, it is, they are, they are obliged to repress those instincts because they're not, they're not virtuous, you know. These are the kind of arguments that I think most people do instinctively feel drawn towards, but which, the new kind of ethical framework just cannot possibly accommodate, which is why I think we end up

inevitably with pedophilia apologism and have done since the 1960s at various points. And I fear we are slipping back towards that again. I agree with you that it is the natural consequence of, again, kind of a backlash to Christianity. Of course, from my vantage point, I'm like, all of this is a rejection of what was kind of the dominant philosophy, which was Christian theology, there's a fascinating book about the invention of children and how Christianity really invented children as a protected category, which again, as we've already kind of mentioned in the pagan world in which Christianity was birthed, there was no

idea of children being a protected class. They not only could be used for all kinds of labor, but also for sexual exploitation, really the person who stood in the center of society was the adult free male, everyone else kind of was free for subjugation. Then Christianity universalized this Old Testament idea that, hang on, all people have souls, all people are made in the image of God, there is a consequence for rape, there's a consequence for murder, there's a consequence for abuse, and then also brought in the gospel, which said, okay, everyone is dead and sin apart from Christ. Everyone is alive in Christ by grace through faith in Him.

That is a radical equality of worth that the gospel of Jesus Christ brought into the pagan world. And that is what revolutionized the West. Still today in the non-Christian world, there is nothing perverse. They see nothing perverse in marrying a child. Still today, probably in a large portion of the world. the non-Christian world, it has never been seen as any kind of parapheria, any kind of predation. It is because of Christianity and the spread of Christian virtues that we have a rightful revulsion to pedophilia. That's not a universal value today. So to me, this is just another

consequence, inevitable consequence of rejecting Christian theology. I don't think we even realize, none of us, Christian or not, realize what is on the other side of a fully post-Christian world. I mean, I think history tells us that I don't think, though, we in the last, you take for granted all of those traditions and all of those moral principles, I don't think that we can even begin to recognize what that's going to look like. Yeah. I wrote an article for Compact Magazine a few weeks ago about, you know, Andrew Tate, have you come across him?

I just recently discovered who he was, like in the past few weeks. Along with all of us, I think. Yeah, yeah, me too. But he is apparently a phenomenon. Anyone who's not familiar, he's a British American kickboxer who has become a bit of a TikTok star. And he is a really good reminder of the fact that just because he is opposed to Christian sexual morality does not mean, by any means that he is feminist. You know, that dichotomy is completely false.

Because what Tate is invested in in his own personal morality is basically consumption, display, you know, being, he's hugely status-driven. He loves his, like, fancy watches, cars, whatever, this is what he lives for. And he sees women as being consumables in exactly the same way. and he has said that he wants to have he wants to have multiple partners children but by as many women as he possibly can he's completely unconcerned with the idea of monogamous marriage and of course he can now do that

I mean we don't actually legally permit polygamy but in practice you can live in a polygamous way with absolutely no restriction in a legal sense and very little social censure either so he's he's able to basically live the life of a kind of, you know, high-class Roman male who, and in the Roman world, absolutely no one would have judged him for it at all. You know, Harvey Weinstein is completely unremarkable in a world that doesn't recognize the, that the violation of the bodies of women

and children, particularly low-class women and children matters. Yeah. Jeffrey Epstein is a, for looking at all of history, his behavior in what he did, for most of history and most places in the world would not have been seen as problematic. Yeah, completely typical. And obviously it has also, you know, within the Christian world, there have been many Jeffrey Epstein's. But I think the point is that they're not, it is possible to critique them within a, within a sexual morality which says that actually the sexual exploitation of the weak is wrong

and that high status men should not automatically assume that they have sexual access to their social inferiors, right? That is a radical thing to say. is a radical thing to say. And I think that actually, you know, in many ways, feminists and Christians are on the same page about that, even if we, even if we don't always recognize that fact. Well, there's certainly a lot of things and I've realized since the revolution has come for the dichotomy of male and female and has decided to try to kind of like obliterate that, which you talk about in your book. But I realized, you know, there's a lot that

I end up linking, you know, I link arms with a lot. lot of feminists on what I would say, because I understand certainly from a secular perspective, why you look at history and you look at the plight of women and you say feminism is necessary and has accomplished good things. Again, from my vantage point, kind of like what I would say is just as Christianity revolutionized the idea and the perspective of children. So it also revolutionized the perspective on women, not just through the gospel and that kind of radical equality that it brings as like sinners and saints. But also like if you look at a passage like Ephesians 5, which a lot of people who identify as Christian feminist today hate because it says

wives submit to your husbands as to the Lord. And of course, we're like, oh my goodness, submission. But I think the radical part of that or what would have been considered a radical part of that, which was not normal for the culture at the time, is when Paul says, husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church. And basically he goes on to say, just as Christ sacrificed himself for you. So sacrifice yourself for your wife. Talks about monogamy, the importance of being a husband of just one wife, of not provoking your children to anger but caring for them. That all, not the submission to your husband part, that probably wouldn't have been radical at the time. The radical part was husbands. You're not free to do whatever you want to do. You're not

free to sow your wild oats. You are to be monogamous. You are to care and compassion for your wife and for your children. Again, and I think, like, Like that perspective on women as people to be cared for, people whose interests actually matter, who have a soul, who aren't just bodies, who aren't just bearing children, although that, of course, is so important. Like, again, a Christian idea and ideal, that over time really changed how society saw women. I see feminism, in my opinion, as getting more wrong than right and actually helping create someone like Andrew Tate because feminism told women that, hey, like, just get on birth

control and do whatever you want with your body. And that is liberation. And that is good. And that is virtuous. And that is great. All you need is sexual satisfaction just like a man can get. I mean, people like Andrew Tate are loving that side of feminism. So like to me, that kind of created the issue. I think that the era that liberal feminism made, bearing in mind that there have always been different strains, right? But liberal feminism is by far, I'd say, the most dominant now. It's kind of the girl boss feminism, the whatever, you know, this is what we see in, in Cosmo and whatever. The error that liberal feminism makes is that it assumes that freedom is the most important goal, that it is the preeminent virtue and that all other virtues need to fall by the wayside. And so,

of course, you know, you say, well, men have always had the freedom to behave like libertines. why shouldn't women have that freedom to why shouldn't women have the freedom to participate in public life in the same way the men do you know all of this and and and it's it's true up to a point but the problem is that the kind of radical freedom project doesn't work

when we come up against the the brick wall of biological difference and the fact that there is a there is sexual asymmetry that is never going to go away the fact that women are the ones who get pregnant, women, we are much smaller and weaker, more physically vulnerable than men are. We have all these psychological differences, like the fact that male and female sexuality is, on average, quite distinct. That's not going anywhere. And I think that what we've seen and that, you know, the negative consequences of the sexual revolution that have played out now, you know, we've done the experiment, what happens if you tear it all down and try and start from scratch again?

well, we've seen it. What happens is that you throw freedom at a society, I think in denial about the existence of sexual asymmetry that this tries very hard. I mean, even in the most recent iteration, tries to deny the existence of men and women as such. I think that we cannot possibly cope with this new kind of free-for-all given the existence of sexual asymmetry

and given that I mean this is the sort of thing that anyone on the left who has any kind of critique of capitalism will recognise this when it comes to free markets and we'll say well if you just throw freedom right like remove all say labour restrictions

or you know any anything any kind of effort on imposing structure and control on a system and just kind of of have at it. Anyone on the left will say, well, no, because there's not an even playing field, right? There are the rich bosses. There are their poor workers. If you say, as you know, remove the obligation to honour the Sabbath, to give one example, of course you're going to end up with poor workers than having to work seven days a week and being, you know, miserably exploited.

And of course, the bosses are going to profit from that, you know. And I feel like we've done the same thing when it comes to the sexual marketplace that we've basically imposed a kind of free market ideology and said everyone should be free without recognizing the fact that there are inherent inequalities which mean that different people will experience that freedom differently. The phrase they're using the book is freedom for the pike is death of the minnows. It just doesn't seem like it has delivered on its promises. I mean, sure, maybe liberation. If liberation is you can just do whatever you want.

if liberation and libertinism are the same thing, which I mean, you could argue for or against that. But it doesn't seem like it's led to satisfaction. I mean, aren't we more, especially young girls, it seems more depressed than ever, more anxious than ever, even more suicidal than ever. And there are a lot of different factors I think that play into that. I mean, in an age when we are constantly told, I mean, young women especially are berated on social media with just love yourself, just love yourself, just love yourself, just discover yourself. You are your own truth. You're enough for yourself. You would think that in an age where that kind of message is primary for women, that we would be happier if that were the solution. If the solution was just do what makes you

happy and do what feels good. Don't care about, you know, standards or rules or restrictions, just be authentically you 24-7, no matter what that means, no matter how much that might hurt you and hurt other people. If that were the way to go, it seems like we would be. a lot happier right now, but actually it seems like we're a lot more depressed than we've ever been. So at what point do people realize, okay, we need to like, it needs to swing back in the other direction. We need some kind of like exit strategy here. This ain't working. We need to turn around a little bit. Like, do you, do you see that happening? Or do you think like we're just headed towards rock bottom? I think it is starting to happen. I mean, I think it's a bit of a complicated

picture because you've got among Gen Z for instance you've got a combination of some members of Gen Z who are really into the sex positive stuff and then you've also got some who are I think reacting against it and there is a bit of a sexual counter-revolution brewing

it's not always happening in the way that you might want or the way you might expect so for instance there are a lot of young men who are reacting against porn and who are swearing off using porn at all they generally are not doing so out of any kind of ethical motivation at all, you know, in terms of concerned about the women who are

involved in its production or whatever, they're normally doing it because if they recognize the fact that porn is really destructive for the consumer and it tends to have really negative impact on your own, your mind, your sexuality. You know, problems like erectile dysfunction are very, very common for men who are using porn frequently. So normally it's coming out of a more sort of self-interested instinct. Yeah. But it's happening. But it's all connected though.

Yeah. It's all connected. When something is like bad for society, it tends to be bad for the individual and vice versa. And so to me, it just is another like it's another piece of evidence as you kind of have argued even from a secular perspective that the like mind and the heart and the soul and the body are connected. It causes sexual dysfunction not just because it's bad for you physically, but also because

it's bad for your mind. it's bad for women. It's bad for society and families and children in general. So, yeah, I mean, it might be self-interested. But as you said, the consequences are good of that kind of self-control. Yeah, yeah. And young women, many of them are coming to the same kind of conclusions as well. You go on TikTok, you know, Twitter, wherever.

It's really easy to come across young women who are saying exactly these things that the sexual revolution was a con, basically. I mean some of them are reacting as we discussed earlier by doing things like identifying as as trans or as non-binary or demisexuals or whatever it might be so they're trying to kind of react against it within the liberal framework yeah others are just for swearing sexual relationships at all like femme cells as the counterpart to in cells is it growing on online phenomenon women who are basically swearing to celibacy because they don't want to participate in this culture. But then, I mean, the point that I make in the book is that actually there is also a lot to be learned from, my last chapter is called Listen to Your Mother, where I argue that actually some of the old sexual norms were there for a reason.

And actually, there is a lot to be, that we can learn from them in a critical way, things like marriage, you know, things like recognizing that actually, um, men and women have got to get along right if we're going to have a future and that you know we very often do many women have have have loving you know most people their most important loving relationship in their lives is a member of the opposite sex you know most straight people um we are perfectly capable of having these loving relationships the problem is that we don't have the cultural structure in place that encourages their creation and their and their perseverance but we we could we could You know, these things do, this option does remain available still. We can still choose to be countercultural and to adopt some of the old ideas, which actually had a lot of wisdom to them. So that's the advice I end up giving readers by the end of the book. Wow.

Well, this was fascinating. And I've loved following you. And I just appreciate your perspective. Even though we're coming from different places, it's kind of what I appreciate about it is because you're not coming from necessarily my same. theological point, which is what makes it so interesting. So thank you so much for writing this book, for taking the time to come on. I hope that everyone goes out and buys it. Where can people buy it? How can they support you, follow you? So it was literally published in the U.S. yesterday.

Oh, really? Oh, this is perfect timing. I don't think I even realize that. Okay, awesome. It's been out in the U.K. for a few months, and it's made quite a big splash in the U.K. But yeah, so it's now available in the U.S. in all good bookshops, I hope and is you. And otherwise, I'm on Twitter at Louise underscore M underscore Perry. Awesome. Thank you so much, Louise. I really appreciate you taking the time to come on. I know people are going to love this.

And again, just encourage people to go out and get your book. So thank you so much. Thank you so much. Take care. Hey, this is Steve Daste. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and

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