The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 331. The Case Against the Sexual Revolution | Louise Perry
Episode Date: February 13, 2023Dr Jordan B Peterson and Louise Perry discuss the current state of feminism, the corruption of porn, the gray areas of consent, and the failure of the sexual revolution. Louise Perry is a journalis...t and author based in London. Her first book, “The Case Against the Sexual Revolution,” was published in 2022. She is the director of The Other Half, a new non-partisan feminist think tank, and the host of Maiden Mother Matriarch, a podcast about sexual politics.
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Louise Perry, my guest today, is a UK-based journalist, author and columnist writing on the
topics of sexual freedom and the current state of feminism and the feminine.
Her recent book is The Case Against the Sexual Revolution revolution published in 2022. So a new book, it notes
the emergence of a widespread disillusionment with sex, particularly among the young male
and female alike, and discusses the long-term psychological and social error of a life
of hedonistic urges in the midst of the upheaval of traditional marital
concepts. Louise is also the director of the other half, a new nonpartisan feminist think tank,
the host of Maiden, Mother, Matriarch, a development and progression, a podcast about sexual politics.
Hello Louise, thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today. You wrote a
rather controversial book recently. Let's talk about the book. I'm just going to
walk through the chapters and give everybody a preview of where we're heading.
So chapter one, sex must be taken seriously.
That doesn't sound like much fun. Number two, men and women are different. Well, that'll get you
in trouble. That's for sure, too. So, some desires are bad. Loveless sex is not empowering.
Loveless sex is not empowering, consent is not enough, of people are not products. I
suppose most people on the left, even the radicals would agree with that
statement, but the rest of it pretty much runs counter to I would say the
juvenile delusions of our present culture. I was interested today. I was
going through your book again and I noticed once again that you
started with the story of Marilyn Monroe and Hugh Hefner. And now I was just talking to my wife
about that the other day. I think it was probably in a conversation motivated by the fact that this
podcast was coming up. And we talked about the emergence of pornography
during our lifetime, you know, and when we were both of us around 60 and when we were young,
the standard pornographic recourse, you might say, was playboy.
But that soon multiplied like a Hydra and and first of all there was Playboy, and it had some
pretensions to something like culture.
And there was a certain style associated with it, and a certain, what would you call
it, veneer of sophistication.
You know, it was all jazz and penthouses and New York and freedom and youth and sexual activity
between consenting adults, all free of other entanglements, but completely conscious of
what they were doing.
There were high-brow interviews and sort of in jokes. So Playboy was quite effective at generating a kind of late rat pack cool around itself.
But then the next iteration of the pornographic Ascent was Penthouse, and it was the harder
core version of Playboy.
It got a lot more gynecological, let's say.
And then Hustler hit after that, and everybody knew at that point, no matter what their
attitude was toward Playboy, that we'd stepped into a new sort of swamp of monstrosity.
And then, of course, it wasn't long after that 15 years, maybe something
like that that porn hit the internet and then away we went. So let's start talking about Marilyn
Monroe and her. I mean, she embodied this feminine archetype of sex kitten, I guess, the femme fatale too, but she's more on the
sex kitten end of things.
And she's still an icon.
And she's an icon that even gave rise to figures such as Madonna.
I would say because Madonna played with Marilyn Monroe image a lot and with a fair bit of
success.
But it's not like Marilyn exactly had a good time with it. So she died very young, by her own hand.
And why don't you tell a little bit more of her story?
Yeah, she had a fairly miserable life from start to finish.
One of the reasons I decided to open the book
by talking about Marilyn Monroe and Hugh Hefner
is partly because just through good luck
from my perspective as a writer, they were born in the exact same year. Mae'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n my and Heffner for his success for Playboy magazine, that they lived extraordinarily different lives
and they experienced sexual liberation,
so-called, in completely different ways.
Marilyn Monroe grew up in foster homes,
with victims of victim of child sexual abuse
and domestic violence as an adult.
And as you say, Diabai, here in hand,
longstanding substance abuse issues, etc.
Heavner didn't suffer in that way.
I mean, I do think that actually by the time Hevna grew old,
he had lost the glamour that he had as a younger man.
I think that he is evidence of the fact that even the most successful playboy has a shelf life,
not as short a shelf life as as the
sexually liberated woman does. I mean really in reality with a modern Western
lifespan, you're talking maybe a quarter of that, you might be really sexually
desirable, which is why I think it's risky to place all of your self-esteem on that value or indeed to best your career, best your life
around being sexually desirable because it's really not very long.
Well, you know, that's a good place to take a slight detour. A lot of your book makes a moral case, and moral cases aren't particularly popular now,
but there are some interesting ways of discussing morality technically that I think might be worth
delving into.
So, one of the things that people who are watching and listening might be interested in knowing is that people pursue
different mating strategies.
So to speak, that's how evolutionary psychologists,
or biologists describe it.
And you can make the same case in animal kingdom
to some degree.
And there are short term mating strategies.
And that would be associated with an ethos
of the glorification, let's
say, or the practice of casual sex, so sex without relationship.
And one of the questions that you might ask is, are there pronounced differences between
people who tend to pursue short-term mating strategies versus long-term mating strategies.
Now long-term mating strategy would be accompanied by the formulation of a relationship of mutual
support.
That's what makes it sustainable.
And the answer is, well, yeah, there are market differences.
One of the hallmarks of anti-social personality, and so that's the personality characteristic set
that is associated with criminality,
is a proclivity towards short-term mating strategies,
and that is associated with early onset
of sexual activity and multiple sexual partners,
and then in its more pathological form,
a predatory or parasitic lifestyle in relationship
to sex.
And so that has been elaborated more recently into the analysis of so-called dark tetrad
personality characteristics.
That's an emerging model of the malevolent and pathological personality.
And that involves Machiavellianism,
which is manipulative narcissistic,
which is virtue-free attention seeking,
it's a good way of thinking about it,
psychopathy, which is predatory parasitism
and sadism, which is positive delight
in harmed other people.
And all of those delightful characteristics are associated with a striking proclivity for short
term mating. And that brings up the stark realization that it's a form of exploitation.
That's a good way of thinking about it. And it's fundamentally the exploitation of women,
because here's a good way of defining women since we don't know how to do that in our society anymore.
We might as well start with basics and throughout the animal kingdom,
and this is true all the way from sperm and egg up to fully embodied being,
the female is almost inevitably the sex that pours more resources
into reproduction.
So that means that women have a higher, bear a higher cost for sexual reproduction in
case.
Anyone still too stupid to actually understand that might as well make it explicit.
And what that also means is that if there's exploitation going on in
a sexual relationship, it's most often, although not always, the male who has less at stake
exploiting the female, who has far more at stake. And it's enticing for young women to
believe, I suppose, if they want to pursue hedonic pleasure that
they can escape from that reality, but it's very difficult, too.
So that's one element.
Then the next element with regard to morality is, if you're playing a game that only works
in a short term for others, but also for yourself, Then that's not a very good game.
And, you know, the point you were making was that
Marilyn was playing a particularly short game.
And even Hugh, who had less to lose,
and arguably on some dimensions more to gain,
he was still pretty damn pathetic by the time he hit,
I would say, what, mid-50s?
I watched one of his late TV shows
where he was touring Europe with his three blonde bimbos
who were not the world's,
they weren't the sharpest knives in the drawer.
Let's put it that way.
And it was Hugh and his three blonde clones
traipsing painfully from full glamorous restaurant to full glamorous restaurant through
Europe, engaging in conversation so pure oil and painful that anyone with any sense would
have run away from the table screaming after five minutes.
So he turned into his own parody, and that was quite clear.
I mean, anybody with any sense at all, no matter how much
they might have been enamored by his young and hypothetically glamourous self, if you had looked at
that with a cold eye a few decades later, it was looking, it was looking pretty oldest boy at the
Fratt party. It had that whole stench about it, I would say. So, all right, so back to Marilyn, you said that she had a pretty brutal upbringing and
it was exploited pretty early on.
You might as well tell the story about her, the famous photographs that launched Playboy.
Yes, so Marilyn was the first cover star and also the first naked centrefold in the first issue of Playboy. But the naked photos were acquired without her consent. She'd taken them, well
she'd had them taken many years before when she was much younger for very little money
just because she was desperate. She'd signed the release with a false name, but somehow
Heffner got hold of them and paid the photographer rather than her in order to publish them in
Playboy.
And she wasn't even sent a free copy and was apparently very upset about it.
Heffner ended up buying the crypt next to hers at the cemetery in Los Angeles,
where they're both buried, obviously buried many decades after she was.
But they never actually met in real life.
So this whole kind of relationship between the two of them
was very much initiated by him.
And I mean, this is the point that I want to make with them.
Talking about Marilyn Monroe, she is very typical
of female sex icons in having this kind of tragic backstory,
multiple forms of exploitation by lots of people, most of the men. And yet she
is held up as this iconic figure of the sexual revolution, which we're supposed to believe
was a good thing. Right. And my argument in the book, it is of course the case against
a sexual revolution. My argument is not that it was entirely bad. I don't think you can paint
any huge historical event as entirely bad or entirely good. But I think that it was entirely bad. I don't think you can paint any huge historical event
as entirely bad or entirely good.
But I think that it has been falsely presented mostly
by progressives through rose tinted spectacles.
And this is my attempt to counter that.
Yeah, well, there's no doubt she was an iconic figure
and still is.
And part of the reason it's hard to say exactly why. I mean, there's something
obviously hyper-attractive about her. And I heard her interviewed once in a radio station where she
said she could walk down the street. I believe her, her genuine name was Norma Rae. Is that right?
Norma Rae. And she said she could walk down the street as Norma Rae. No would look at her or she could walk down the street as Marilyn and then people would just be attracted
to her like mad. And so I want to run a hypothesis by you. You know, given that, that backstory
for female sexual icons and this is often the case for girls who get dragged or who
agree to participate in the pornography industry that, you know,
they're often abandoned girls who have a history of fractured relationships and abuse.
Now, so here's a hypothesis.
You know that girls without fathers hit puberty one year earlier, eh?
That's a real biological mystery, But here's a hypothesis.
So imagine that you're bereft of male companionship and productivity and protection.
And maybe that's because your culture doesn't have enough men.
Sometimes that happens after wars, for example, or maybe you're just in an economic niche or social niche where
you're unfortunate, you know, so. Now, why would you develop a year early from a puberty
perspective? Well, the answer is, one of the ways that women can attract male attention,
obviously, and therefore, in principle, companionship, protection, productivity, all of that,
and therefore, in principle, companionship, protection, productivity, all of that, that might come along
with the real relationship is by being sexually attractive
and available.
And so, if there's a dearth of males in the local environment
then early puberty could easily be a way of increasing
the probability of catching a mate early enough
so you don't starve to death,
let's say. Okay, so then imagine that there's a psychological equivalent to that, and this is where that wave-like femme fatale archetype might kick in, and so if you're
appealingly, vulnerably beautiful and available, and then you have that magic that can go along with that when
it's transformed into something truly archetypal, which Marilyn did extraordinarily well.
You know, there's a bit of a little girl about her. She had a very girly voice, and that's how
she sang, and she had a kind of innocent naï innocent naive provociveness that was amplified paradoxically
by her overt sexuality.
She had some of the appeal of a helpless child and some of the appeal of a truly mature
woman.
That can be a very deadly combination.
I think the fact that it's a deadly combination is also a kind of adaptation. So you can imagine that girls who are abused might turn to that
pattern of seductive behavior because if they turn on the charm full throttle in that
manner, it increases the probability that even in their desperate economic straits,
they might be able to attract a male.
And of course, with Marilyn, that was elevated
right to the point where she became literally
the poster girl for that approach.
And then I mentioned Madonna a little earlier.
And when Madonna first came on the scene,
I thought, she's kind of interesting.
She seems to be taking this Maryland-like archetype,
but toying with it consciously. She was a businesswoman, pretty canny. She seemed to be in charge
of her own image. I thought maybe she had a grip on the archetype, but it isn't obvious to
me at all that she did. Madonna know, Madonna's life has been characterized
by a continual pattern of sexual attention seeking.
And she's also, I would say, turned into her own parody,
even in her, I think she's in her late 60s now,
if I remember correctly, she's still doing, essentially,
she's still doing photo shoots
that are leveraging pornographic attractiveness.
And that, I mean, that requires a lot of maintenance
and makeup by the time you're at her stage of life.
But it doesn't really look to me
like it's aged particularly well.
And that's the problem with short-term mating strategy
is that it's not a good iterating game.
You can't play with other people continually.
You have to have multiple partners.
And it's not a good pattern for your whole life course.
That's partly what makes it both immoral and unwise.
It just doesn't work across the decades that you're going to be alive.
So...
Yes.
Alright, so back to Maryland and Hugh.
On that point, I decided to call my podcast Made in Mother
Matrix arc because it's my hypothesis that one of the features
of late 20th, early 21st century culture is that the normal
life progression that women are supposed to pass through from
Made in to Mother togearch has been interrupted.
And we now have a very widespread problem of women desperate
to remain in maiden mode permanently.
And Madonna is a beautiful example of that.
She can't.
She can't find it within herself to accept
progressing from maiden to magearch.
And I think that's a lot of, I think the key cause of that
is the fact that we don't attach status to mothers and to
to made trucks in the way that we once did. I think that all of the status is loaded onto the maiden role.
But it's necessarily, as you say, a role that you can't spend your entire life in. And I think that explains a lot of the psychological dysfunction that women suffer from. Yeah, yeah, well, I think that's right.
So what we have is the domination,
you basically laid out a three-part archetype.
And it's a archetype of transformation.
And I've talked to some pretty bright women
on my podcast, and a number of them
have commented that as they progress along their careers and
they're as they accrue
productive status so let's say as mothers and matriarchs they don't necessarily
attain a commensurate status particularly among young women
Interestingly enough and maybe that's because the women are competing.
I suppose a woman can be attractive as a mother
and a matriarch, so the maidens might take exception to that
because it's a form of competition.
But I do think too that our culture hypervalues,
the maiden image, especially when that's allied with,
it's not virginal maiden that's exactly held up as an icon.
You know, even though people like Madonna will play with the idea
of virginity as something attractive, it's only there as a
sexual magnet, and it's only their tongue and cheek in some real sense.
And then our culture, because it's a consumer culture, and also because it concentrates
on teenagers a lot, because they have disposable income, and it's really the case that our
culture can consumerist oriented when teenagers started to develop disposable income. It's not surprising at all that the consumer market tilts towards the made-and-architype
because that's where there's spare money to be vacuumed up.
So that's sort of a perfect storm in some sense.
But yeah, so our developing hypothesis here in the podcast, and obviously you've thought
this through to a great degree, is that part of the reason that the sexual revolution claiming absolute sexual freedom is pathological
is because well, it enables the male exploiters, and that's not good at all, but it also isn't
a good medium to long-term game.
Well I would say either for women or men, I mean, if you develop a long-term partner in
a woman and you're a man,
you might want a woman who has enough sense to move from maiden to mother to matriarch
and to do that in a manner that facilitates the development of the relationship across
time. And maybe, I wonder too, if a woman who does that really well is as she progresses across
that three-part track also to some degree integrates the previous stages as she moves forward.
Because it might be the case that if you're a successful matriarch, maybe that's at the
point where you become a grandmother or something like that, that you've also integrated
mother and even maiden and are still capable of playing those roles when that's appropriate,
but are no longer only limited to them. And I'm not saying that's an easy thing to pull off because
you know, it's not that hard to be, it's not that easy to be, you know, outstandingly sexually
attractive, male or female by the time you're in your 60s, let's say it gets to be, you know, outstandingly sexually attractive male or female by the time you're in your
60s, let's say it gets to be, you know, old ages fighting against that pretty hard, but
that doesn't mean that that can't be held forward as, you know, an unattainable ideal to
which we all might strive or at least hope might make itself manifest. And I think that's
actually, I think that's actually a possibility,
that you can move towards something
like a full integration.
Like Russian dolls, I think,
is the perfect image for it.
You know, the Russian dolls contains
the younger, the smaller counterparts in the whole.
That's what that's the aspiration.
I mean, I think part of the reason
that we're so focused on the maiden role
is partly as you say, because it's a very consumerist kind
of product.
I mean, the strange paradox, we're on the one hand,
I'd say, Western society is increasingly
gerontocratic in the power and assets primarily
are disproportionately held by the old.
But it's also still a very, very youth-orientated culture
in terms of politics, in terms of fashion, beauty,
all of this kind of stuff.
You have that kind of strange tension
where young people are simultaneously incredibly
culturally powerful, but not actually very economically
powerful, which probably actually exacerbates
the feelings of tension there.
I think another reason for it as well
is I think that women's lives tend to be more clearly
segmented by reproductive stage in a way that maybe men are less so.
I think that men's lives change a bit less when they become fathers, when they become
grandfathers.
And I think that part of the resistance to this natural progression comes, among women,
comes from the fact that so much
of feminism of the second wave has been about trying to be more masculine in every way,
in a way that I think is ultimately detrimental to women. That's why I called chapter two
men and women a different, because I think we have to just start from the premise that
men and women are fundamentally different. There is a sexual asymmetry that is never going
away. There are psychological, average psychological, but nevertheless, at the population level, they matter.
There are these differences between men and women. And actually, I think that any kind of
productive form of feminism has to start from that recognition that those fundamental differences
aren't going anywhere. Yeah, okay, so let's focus on that now.
So now we're off to chapter two.
I'm going to make a countercase for a minute,
and then let's hash that out.
All right, so we mentioned at the beginning of this podcast
that the fundamental biological differentiator,
or one of them, because there's a number, is
that what makes a creature female, rather than male, is a disproportionate contribution
to reproduction.
And so you even see that with the sperm and the egg.
The egg is way, way bigger, across the biological universe than the sperm.
And that means the egg has more resources than the sperm.
And that is echoed at every stage
of sexual interaction in animals and human beings.
There's a few exceptions.
In summary guards, like I think male seahorses
care for the young, for example.
They basically have something approximating a pregnancy,
but that's enough of an exception
so that most people who are biologically informed
know about it, it's extraordinarily rare
for a male, for the male to take on that role.
And so women are the half of the human race that bears disproportionate responsibility for sexual reproduction.
Pays a higher cost for it.
And that seems to shape everything, including mating strategies.
But here's the killer. And so we could also say that's been true for the entire course of reproductive history
after the emergence of sex, which emerged a very long time ago, biologically speaking.
But the pill hit, you know, 50 years ago, and was made widespread very rapidly, and what that did in principle, and to some degree in reality,
was give females voluntary control of their reproductive function, really for the first
time in biological history.
And so that opened up a new question, and this is a question.
If a woman has full voluntary control over her reproductive function, why isn't she now
just a man? That's one question. Or what exactly distinguishes her from a man? Because one thing
that distinguished her was her differential role in reproductive burden, and now that's been
differential role in reproductive burden, and now that's been ameliorated arguably to some degree.
And then also, if reproductive function is now a matter of
voluntary choice, why can't sex just be fun and free?
And I would say we've been wrestling with those two
questions for 50 years, and longer than that.
Insofar as there's been some form of reliable contraception, but it wasn't very damn reliable till
the birth control pill kicked in. And so I think it is an open question
to what degree can sex just be, you know, fun and fancy free. And also it's an open question
to what degree aren't women just now the same as men.
And so, well, any comments on that whole line of inquiry are more than welcome.
Well, that's the promise right of the sexual revolution that we, that by introducing this new technology shock, we do erase the differences
between the sexes.
And I think that to some extent, if you live a very modern life, it's not just the pill,
obviously, that's changed in the last 60 years.
We also have very different ways of working.
People are much less likely to do manual work, at least in the West than they used to be.
We live much more mixed lives. i'n gweithio, ac yn yw'r sgwysio, ac yn yw'r sgwysio, ac yn yw'r sgwysio, ac yn yw'r sgwysio, ac yn yw'r sgwysio, ac yn yw'r sgwysio, ac yn yw'r sgwysio, ac yn yw'r sgwysio, ac yn yw'r sgwysio, ac yn yw'r sgwysio, ac yn yw'r sgwysio, ac yn yw'r sgwysio, ac yn yw'r sgwysio, ac yn yw'r sgwysio, ac yn yw'r sgwysio, ac yn yw'r sgwysio, ac yn yw'r sgwysio, ac yn yw'r sgwysio, ac yn yw'r sgwysio, ac yn yw'r sgwysio, ac yn yw'r sgwysio, ac yn yw'r sgwysio, ac yn yw'r sgwysio, ac yn yw'r sgwysio, ac yn yw'r sgwysio, ac yn yw'r sgwysio, ac yn yw'r sgwysio, ac yn yw'r sgwysio, ac yn yw'r sgw, ac yn yw'r sgw, ac yn yw'r sgw, ac yn yw'r sgw, ac yn yw'r sgw, ac yn yw'r sgw, ac yn yw'r sgw, ac yn yw'r sgw, ac yn yw'r sgw, ac yn yw'r sgw, your sex to body for anything, you're just living the life of the mind really, you could believe that
those differences are trivial. And I think that's where we've had some very strange political ideas
around, for instance, having biological males competing women's sports, you know, is seen to be
a completely logical thing from people who do have essentially those lives who probably haven't
actually competed in sports. I mean, you'll notice that female athletes tend to be opposed to this ymwch yw'n gwybod yw'n gwybod yw'n gwybod y ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd way and I think are likely to for the foreseeable. I don't think artificial worms are just around the corner, I think actually they're a spectacularly
difficult technology to develop. And also because we still have the same brains
essentially, the last day in age ancestors did. We spent 95% of our species
history as hunter-gatherers is humanity's first and most successful adaptation.
And I think that we can't, no matter how intelligent we are, no matter how desperately we try,
I think it's very, very hard to erase those differences at the psychological level.
And the response interestingly that I've had to this book since it was published is obviously
hugely controversial title, the whole premise is hugely controversial.
But interestingly, I haven't had nearly as much criticism as I thought I would.
And I've actually had positive reviews
even from left leaning outlets and so on.
I got an amazing review in the observery.
I think it's because actually an enormous number of women
across the political spectrum who have been offered
this promise of you can live just like a man.
You can have sex just like a man.
They're profoundly miserable,
and they do recognize that actually deep down,
that promise is an empty one.
And I think there's the emotion that I've had most often
for readers is just a sense of relief
that someone is saying it,
and that it seems as if there's now permission to say it,
because I think that the effort of trying to pretend that many women
are the same is ultimately ruin us to both sexes.
Yeah, well, you see this weird phenomenon emerging on the left in particular, and I think
it's particularly right in university campuses where you get a combination of compassion and low conscientiousness and high openness,
driving a particular political mindset.
And so the compassion means, well, we're going to accept everyone and the low conscientiousness means,
well, we're not bound by anything approximating duty.
And the high openness means, you know, we're creative and curious about every form of potential self-expression.
And then that produces this idea that all sexual drive, you have a chapter in your book called,
not something like not all desire is good.
And so we'll talk about that a little bit. We have this, there's this absolute
clamoring insistence that every form of sexual desire and behavior is to be
valued, celebrated, and promoted, and that if you dare oppose that, you are,
there's something immoral about the opposition. So that's merely a consequence,
let's say, of your bigotry. But, and so, you know, and you pointed out in your book that you
often get artistic types like Andre Gead, let's say, and left wing intellectuals pushing
for full sexual freedom. And some of that's high openness and some of that's low conscientiousness, that's for sure. But then there's a kickback that's really
interesting to me because it's the same radicals possessed by exactly the same
set of ideas who make a very radical counterclaim. And the counterclaim is
something like, well, every form of sexual behavior must be celebrated,
and it's nothing but a testament to the ever blossoming range of human freedom.
But every form of sexual interaction between particularly young men and young woman
is so dangerous right to its core that there's nothing more important than full consent. And that consent
has to be documented verbally and maybe even beyond verbally, formally, for even interactions
as that were once as casual, let's say, as dancing. And so at Princeton University, for example, there was a push to make men ensure that even
when they're dancing with a girl who agreed to dance, that it was incumbent upon them,
multiple times during the dance, to ask verbally to ensure that that once established consent
was still continuing.
Now, you know, if you weren't being cynical about that,
you might say, well, that's a stumbling attempt to something approximating awake politeness,
because if you have any sense when you're dancing with someone, one of the things you actually want
to know is, do they really want to be doing it? But it's very peculiar to me and illuminating that this insistence
on negotiated contract for every step of a potentially sexual interaction is being
insisted upon not by Christian apologists for traditional morality, but by the same radicals
who are out there dancing three-quarters naked in the street in their dog costumes,
and insisting that, you know,
every bit of sexual expression is to be lauded.
My suspicion with what's going on there,
with this rise of sort of a very bureaucratic attitude
to sex, should we say, this idea of asking
for consent at every stage and so on.
I mean, the funniest example, which I mentioned briefly
in the book, is an idea cooked at West University students
that you would have a sign of contract
before you had casual sex, and you take a photo of the pair
of you with your contracts and so on.
And the joke, obviously, is, why not get dressed up
in a big white dress?
Why not invite all your friends?
You know, it's this sort of reinvention of marriage.
I think that that's basically what is going on.
Right, for the day, that's the one.
I think what's going on with this reintroduction of these new rules, post-MeToo,
is that complete sexual freedom is not actually a sustainable system.
And what we've had for many centuries, millennia, up until the 1960s, really, is a very complicated
tapestry of laws and norms, which regulate sexuality and which particularly regulate heterosexuality.
Because what you're dealing with when it comes to heterosexuality is
great imbalances of physical strength, the fundamental imbalance of reproductive roles,
and also personality differences, and you know, all of this, which make it very, it's just
inherently very difficult to deal with mating smoothly. There is a lot of heartache, there is a lot of risk.
There is a lot of heartache, there is a lot of risk. And what we have in most societies is this complex dance
of marriage customs and thinking more recently
in the West, to shop our own and asking
of the father's hand and all of these things, which
are supposed to basically control sexuality.
I mean, the progressive account of this is that they repress
people's sexuality to which I say yes they do but they do that because they have to
because that is it completely untrammeled sexual freedom is not possible
because of you can't run a society like that and because you will inevitably have
people coming into conflict with one another if that's permitted so you need people
to be men and women to be repressed. I think that's what marriage does. But in a
good way, you know, as a necessary step towards having productive relationships. And I think
there's an attempt to kind reinvent that with this new bureaucracy, but it's not nearly as good.
Yeah, yeah, well, okay, so here's the rule is that responsibility abdicated is vacuumed up by tyrants.
And so if young men and young women aren't regulating their own sexual behavior, then tyrannical
bureaucrats will definitely step in to have fun on that front.
But you brought up two points that we could pursue.
And one is an analysis of what actually constitutes consent.
And then we could start with that.
And then the other one was,
let me see if I've exactly got this.
Oh yes, inhibition and oppression,
let's say, of sexual desire.
See, this is something that has to be handled conceptually, very carefully.
So there's different models of socialization that permeate the, let's say, the psychological
community.
And one of them is an ethos of something like inhibition and repression.
And so the Freudians sort of fall into that camp that the super ego inhibits the id
and squashes it down, I'd say,
and that part of what makes you a social being
is your ability to suppress and inhibit desires
like aggression and sex.
And I don't think that's true.
I only think that's true when it's gone wrong.
So here's an alternative viewpoint.
This is the viewpoint of people like Jean Piaget,
who's great developmental psychologist.
He thought of the developmental process
as one of the integration.
Now, you already put forth a three-stage model
of female development, and you could think about that
as a continuing model of complex integration.
And so the reason that sex becomes regulated
isn't because it's now being inhibited.
It's being regulated because it's being integrated
into higher-order games.
And so it's being integrated, for example,
and maybe can even be celebrated
within this confined area of,
or regulated area of integration.
It's becoming integrated with the more mature realization
that sex outside of an iterated relationship
is actually a net negative,
even for the parties involved,
even if they're primarily motivated
by their own hedonism and then hypothetically their own will.
And so it isn't inhibition that's regulating sex, and it isn't top-down social control.
It's the necessity of integrating sex, which can be just a unibentional desire into a
much more sophisticated symphony of social interactions.
Now, when that fails,
inhibition is necessary, right?
So if you have someone who's acting
in an anti-social manner,
parading their sexuality,
insisting upon the short-term gratification
at their own expense and not of others,
then compulsion might have to be brought to bear.
But that indicates a failure of the proper developmental pathway, rather than a manifestation
of a necessarily oppressive patriarchy.
And that's a much more positive vision of the regulation of sexual behavior.
It's more like ordered freedom, rather than inhibition.
And that also opens up another positive idea,
which is that we've thought,
coiled with the idea that the birth control pill
meant that impulsive hedonism could now rule,
and that that would be the highest form
of sexual expression.
And the idiot artists who jumped on that bandwagon
were certainly of that mind.
But what we're seeing instead is that young men and women are turning in all ever-greater
numbers to a very casual pornography, especially with regards to the boys, to the abandonment
of any relationships whatsoever.
And then interestingly enough, it seems to much less sexual activity in general. I think it's 30%
now of Japanese, I think it's 30% of Japanese young people under 30 are still virgins, 30%
and similar figures in South Korea. And you can see the same proclivity emerging in the
West. So what's happening paradoxically is that by removing
all the principles from sexual interaction, not the inhibitions, but the principles, we're
actually dooming the sexual enterprise rather than facilitating it even for the hedonists.
So anyways, it's very useful to know that there's an integration model rather than an inhibition model, right?
Because it also stops those who might oppose the sexual revolution from just being finger-wagging
conservative moralists.
Because you can say, no, no, you're going to have a way better sex life in every possible
way if you actually fall in love with someone and have a long-term relationship and I think the psychological the statistical data on that are pretty clear to.
Most single people don't have a lot of sex.
The phrase that I use in the book to describe this is that phenomenon where you on the one hand have hypersexual public life.
You can walk down any street and see women in lingerie on posters or watch TV and there's very explicit sex scenes etc.
So on the one hand we've had this amazing ramping up of sexuality in public life, but on the other hand exactly as you say
we have what's come to some sort of school the sex recession the fact that people are having sex later less frequently.
I think what's happening generally is people are having probably more casual sex but they're having sex less frequently. a'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddoddodd On the one hand, we have this astounding availability of sexual stimuli at the click of a button at any moment.
Anything that you can imagine is available the internet immediately.
And that seems to be demotivating people to actually seek out meaningful sexual relationships,
which in the long term are vastly better for us in every possible way.
But we have a culture enabled by technology, which is very, very short term in every way.
So people channel towards that kind of immediate relief that disincentivizes proper.
Yeah.
I think the rule is something like unearned, surphite turns into revulsion.
Right.
It's too much of a good thing, means that it's no longer a good thing.
And that goes along with an idea too, that there's something like optimal deprivation.
Right? I mean, look, let's say you've just had a big banquet and someone sits you down and says,
well, now you have to eat five pounds of dessert. It's like the first of all, that's not going to
be a very attractive proposition. And second of all, it might actually make you ill, is that everything has to be in proper
proportion. And one of the things we really haven't contended with it all in our society
is how much desperation is necessary on the sexual front to drive young men and young women
together. And the answer is not zero. and the problem with pornography, one of many problems,
is that it drives desperation on the male front down to zero.
Now, I know perfectly well from my clinical experience that the standard state of most
young men, especially under 20, let's say, is pretty much terror in the face of a woman
who they're very attracted to.
And the reason for that is that, oh, there's all sorts of reasons, but the primary reason is
the probability that any given male, even one who's very attractive, let's say, in multiple ways,
is going to be rejected by any given female, especially a high-value female who has a lot of people attracted to her, is extremely high.
So, there are classic psychological experiments
showing this, you know, if you send attractive undergraduates
out to talk to other undergraduates
to offer sexual access, say, well, you know,
would you be willing to have coffee with me?
Would you be willing to give me your phone number?
Would you be willing to come back to my apartment?
If the girls offer that, then whoever they're offering
that to on the male front will take them up on their offer.
But if the boys offer that, even when they're attractive,
the probability that their advances will be rejected
is extremely high.
And so young men face the uncomfortable situation where even if they're competent and will turn
eventually into useful men, which isn't the status of most very young men, the probability
that they'll be rejected is extremely high.
And then it's also the case that there's little that's more psychologically impactful than such rejection,
especially if it's undertaken by someone
to whom there's a genuine attraction.
So that means that boys are paralyzed into terror.
I think that's not too exaggerated to term
by the mere fact of attractive women.
And so they slough that off and they make derogating jokes and so forth, try
to get over that, but it doesn't change the basic reality.
That also means that a certain percentage of males, and it's not low, really, it could
easily be like 30% or just paralyzed into utter stasis by the possibility of rejection, especially
because they haven't been fortified against it with their dependency inducing upbringing.
Unless they're driven forward by a certain amount of desperation, some of which needs to
be sexual, they're never going to break through that barrier.
And so then they can satisfy themselves momentarily with pornography.
And then that turns into that host of problems you already described as, now they're training
themselves, maybe right from puberty, to be impotent, cock-hold-voyers, essentially.
So that's not good training. Then they're training themselves to
view women as targets of short-term gratification. So that's like training in psychopathy.
And then they're also interfering with their ability to establish a relationship and also to
perform sexually in a real environment. So all that seems like, you know, like a five-dimensional catastrophe.
And that's going to get a lot worse in the next year, by the way,
because we haven't seen anything on the pornography front
compared to what's going to be coming down with the advent of AI,
because now what's going to happen real soon is that this is already underway.
So imagine a sign-up service where you can
talk to a very attractive young woman. And she's an AI. So she can be as attractive as you
want her to be and tuned exactly to your preferences. Okay, so now there's already a service offering
this by the way. So now you have a friend. And that friend can keep track of your conversations.
And especially if you're alone, some are isolated.
That might be the best friend you've ever had.
And certainly the most attractive person you've ever talked to.
Now it's not real, but men are pretty damn visual.
So it's got a long ways towards real. And then, you know, for your subscription fee, you can talk to the woman nude and then
the whole avenue of sexual display is open to you.
And so God only knows what that's going to do.
Yes.
Sex robots with the next step where you have a...
Yeah, yeah.
Well, and then the integration of those two things.
Yeah.
Yeah, that'll be great.
And then you get this going.
Even in a situation where young men can feel as if they are winning at life, right, with their
sex robot who's been in them all the cues that suggest fitness.
But in fact, you know, they don't need to wash, they don't need to have a job, they don't
need to do anything productive with their lives,
because the sex robot doesn't care.
Only fans, I think, is a step along this path,
because what only fans often...
Yeah, definitely.
...is not just pornography, it offers a parasocial relationship,
it gives the impression to customers that this woman cares about them,
remembers his birthday, remembers his children's names, all of this stuff.
But it's an old obviously a marriage and it's one that's purchased.
And it can be completely the role of the destruction.
And that's...
Right, well, and that's narcissistic exploitation on the part of the females
with anti-social personality traits.
And often, what would you say,
aided and embedded by quasi-psychopathic pimps,
electronic pimps.
And, you know, those only found women
that you made a very good point there.
Those are actually androids, right?
Because they're not women.
Now, you might say, what the hell are you talking about,
Dr. Peterson?
Obviously, they're women.
It's like, no, they're not.
They're machine women hybrids.
And the machine is the technology that can broadcast
their image to millions of people.
So you're not a woman anymore if you're in a million men's
bedrooms at the same time.
You're a woman machine hybrid.
Now, it's virtualized, obviously, because it's
too dimensional, and it's not embodied in the form
of a robot.
But the idea that that's not an Android means
that you're an idiot.
That's what it means.
It's obviously an Android.
And there is definitely that form of parasitism
on the female part.
You know, these women have embodied capital.
That's a good way of thinking about it.
So they're young.
They don't have economic resources,
but they're young and beautiful.
And that's an economic resource.
Make no mistake about it.
In fact, it's the highest possible form of wealth.
And this is another thing that the Marxist types
get real wrong with their economic analysis.
Because if you took, let's say, a hyper rich 80 year old woman,
and you said, well, you give away 99% of your fortune and now you inhabit the body that
you had when you were 20.
And then we could add to that the possibility of being stellarly beautiful, the probability
that that woman would trade everything she has for that opportunity, assuming she hasn't
become disenamored of life is extraordinarily high.
So that also means that on the female side, and this is happening continually, female exploitation
can take place with regard to men, just like male exploitation takes place with regard
to women.
And those women are not doing other women a favor either by
monopolizing the marketplace, let's say.
No, I think that one of the ways in which women are hurt by the pretence that is widely
practiced, that men and women are psychologically the same and that male and female sexuality a sy'n cylodd ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn male sexual desire for women, there is the short term and the long term. And they are not at all the same, and that being very highly desired on the short term
track does not necessarily translate into being very highly desired on the long term track,
in fact, sometimes quite the opposite.
And I think that the main error that women are making with thinking that only fans is a
quick buck, not only is the fact that only fans is enormously unequal and actually there are
very few people on it who are making any real money and generally the ones who are making lots of
money with already famous before they join the platform and so on. It's also the fact that there
is the internet is forever and these images are out there and it damages your long term mating
prospects to have been on only fans. And actually, I mean, it is clearly the case that female beauty is incredibly valuable resource.
But I think maybe the way in which it needs to be understood
distinctly from economic power is it is to some extent
for Careus.
You can acquire enormous power as a beautiful woman
through access to typically male political and economic
power.
But it doesn't last forever. If you're able
to secure a very high status husband for instance and he commits to you for life, you've translated
your beauty into real and lasting power. If you're not able to do that, then you will very
quickly age 35, age 40, age out of having any access to that kind of power and then you
will potentially be paying the cost based down the line. So there are some women who've become very wealthy on only
fans, but in general, I would say that it's very, very poor strategy. And, you know, as
ever, it is presented as a kind of short-term boon.
Yeah, well, it suffers from the same pre-dow distribution problem as any productive enterprise,
creative enterprise, which is a small minority of people will rake in all the money, like a tiny, tiny proportion.
It'll be a tenth of 1%, they'll make a spectacular amount of money, and everyone else will strive
away in the dirt, scrabble away for virtually nothing.
And then, as you said, even those women who have managed to make that successful are dooming themselves in all likelihood, do remaining only attractive to psychopathic and exploitive males,
because the rest of them won't be particularly happy with that background.
So yeah, it's not a good iterating medium to long-term strategy.
Let's talk about consent a little bit, because that's a tricky issue.
And it ties back to this notion we were discussing earlier about the proclivity of the radical
left to insist upon something approximating a contract, which I do think is very comical
that that's the same as, well, maybe consent means getting married.
And actually, I think you can make a case for that.
So, you know, what you see that happening on campuses very frequently, and we should delve into the details
of this is that a young man and a young woman
will sleep together, but it's usually at a party,
and it's usually a drunken party.
And so, one of the things that people don't know
maybe because they don't want to is that
almost all criminal behavior that involves coercion is facilitated by alcohol.
So half of people who are murdered are drunk, half of the murderers are drunk.
There would be almost no domestic abuse, violent abuse, without alcohol.
It's an unbelievable facilitated.
This is why the temperance movement was in many ways a feminist movement,
I would argue. That's not how it was normally expressed, but the temperance movement was very much
about domestic violence. Right, right, right. Well, in on campuses, date rape, etc. And unwanted social
sexual advance and alcohol go hand in hand. but of course you have the liberty and culture on
campuses sexually and also behaviorly and so many campuses are simultaneously hot beds of
sexual investigation and trouble and drunken Dionysian partying. And I think there's a time and a
place for that and that's probably when you're. And hopefully you manage to wind your way through it. But as a basis for stable society,
it falls short. But here's one of the problems it really brings up. So now you have women,
and hypothetically, they have control of the reproductive function, and they can go out and drink, and then they can find themselves waking up in the morning
and not even remembering,
because alcohol really interferes with memory consolidation,
not even at relatively minor doses,
not even really remembering how the hell they got there.
Now, especially if they're women
who've been mistreated in the past,
and that's not uncommon,
there is a real question that emerges about whether or not they consent it.
And it's very complicated because it's certainly one of the strategies that desperate young
men use to entice foolish young women into their beds is to get them drunk.
And anybody who doesn't know that is a blind fool.
And so, now, and so if you have a party and you're a college student and you're male and
you invite some women over, including the ones that you might be attracted to, and you serve
copious amounts of alcohol, and you know perfectly well that if you get a young woman drunk,
you're more likely to get her into bed. Are you manipulating her?
Or is she an autonomous entity fully capable of making her own sovereign decisions, who
knows the ground rules of the game when she enters the door and is there for responsible
for her own actions?
And the answer is a little a column A and a little a column B, and that makes the whole
issue of consent
extraordinarily complex.
If you consent well drunk and you regret it the next day, is that true consent?
And of course, that's being fought out in legal minefields all across North America.
And I think the reason it's being fought out is because it's actually a complicated question.
What does it mean to give consent?
How old do you have to be? Like, if you have three drinks, can you give informed consent?
Well, maybe you couldn't for a medical procedure. Could you, if you had one drink? Well,
I studied at the effects of alcohol for years
on cognitive ability and function.
And it's a highly dis-inhibiting drug,
which is why people like it, because it removes
the regulatory constraint from hedonic behavior,
including aggressive behavior, slots of fun,
and it amplifies sociability for many people.
It's got an opiate effect that's pain killing and a stimulant effect that's like cocaine,
and it's an anxiety reducer.
So it's a killer party drug.
And so you add some alcohol into the mix, and you think, well, did the young woman give
consent?
And the answer to that is, well, what the hell is consent?
And then one answer is, well, you have to have a legal document,
and then you think, well, you might as well just get married to that,
because that's the whole point.
But here's an open question. Like, I really wonder,
I really think this might be true.
Marriage is consent.
That's what marriage means. Marriage is consent.
That's what marriage means.
Marriage is full informed consent, and it's the only form of full informed consent.
All things being equal, given how dangerous sex is, in the most fundamental sense, given
how socially destabilizing it is, given how difficult it is to integrate into a full personality
across time, given how much is at risk for children and women in particular,
that the issue of consent is so important that it basically devolves into something approximating marriage by necessity.
I agree. The only provisor I would place on that is that one of the, I would say one of the really profound successors of 20th century feminism was in reconceptualising rape, which in most traditional
legal systems is understood as a crime against a woman's male kin, reconceptualising it as
a crime against the woman herself, which therefore makes it marital rape explicable in a way that it isn't in the old model.
It clearly is the case that it is possible to be raped within marriage.
I think it's also absolutely the case that any...
We are forced to draw bright lines when it comes to the law.
We're forced to say that the Asia Consent is 16,
that ex-amounted alcohol in the bloodstream constitutes
about the legal driving limit, et cetera, et cetera.
We're forced to draw bright lines.
We have to also recognize, and we all know intuitively,
that those bright lines are fallible,
and that there is a huge amount of grace base
between what is legally permissible and what is good.
And I think that the problem with basing any kind of system of sexual ethics on consent
as a bare minimum is it it becomes impossible to talk about the gray space. And what you
often find actually is women, particularly during me too, women who would talk about distressing
sexual experiences, which actually normally didn't meet the legal threshold for being a'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r
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gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r sexual interest in them, and it's not the other way around. And that bias is exaggerated by alcohol.
So you have men who are very drunk and who really do read signs of sexual interest from women
who are in fact not sexually interested in them and who are incapacitated by alcohol,
and it all ends up being, we're talking about teenagers who have it raised on porn and
have it, you know, it's a complete disaster, like the whole cauldron mix is basically perfectly
designed to produce these scenarios.
And often you have women who are coming out of these scenarios
feeling really distressed, but they don't have the moral language
to talk about it, because they don't want to talk about it.
They don't want to use terms like chivalrous.
They don't want to talk about gentleman.
They don't want to talk even about morality and good and bad.
What they have in their vocabulary toolkit is consent.
And so you will say that XYZ encounter wasn't consensual.
That's not the best way of describing what went wrong.
And trying to just further embed the consent model,
which often just what consent workshops are really,
is just their attempts at ideological interventions.
The idea is that we sit kids down
and we tell them in words if one syllable don't rape each other. But of course we know that's not how social
interactions work, that's not actually a kind of intervention that's really
going to make a difference because there will be rapists aren't listening for
anything. And also because that's the complexity of sexual relationships is just so
so too difficult to sum up in that kind of simple message. But that's all we've
got. And so this emphasis is just on reiterating and
reiterating. If you start talking about unwanted sexual advance as a failure of something like
chivalry, you sound like a transplant from the 13th century, but it's definitely the case. It's
also definitely the case that unsophisticated males are not very good at reading what would
you say.
Anything but explicit signals of no, right?
Sophisticated people can tell by a polite glance, let's say, whether or not interest is being
manifested.
And then they play a very slow incremental game, which is
romance, by the way, checking each other out for consent at every stage.
And you cannot replace that with a rule-governed system.
The attempt to do that is, first of all, going to be intrusive and tyrannical and awkward,
and second, it's putting the card before the horse.
The unsophisticated people aren't going to be able to use that system anyways.
And then you have like three people.
You have a crowd in the bedroom.
You have the young man and you have the young woman and you have the whole idiot, the
lengths of DEI bureaucrats.
They're trying to mediate the social relationship and that's just not going to work at all.
And here's another thing I've been thinking about.
I talked to my wife, who I know you talked to on her podcast,
about this quite a bit.
So here's an interesting idea.
So males compete for status and the essential dimension of
competition that differentiates them from women, I would say,
is something like productive economic generosity.
It's something like that.
Now, it's not like women aren't productive,
and it's not like they're not generous,
but the ground rules are different.
Women are looking to equalize the economic disparity
that's attendant upon differential cost for reproduction.
And so men are evaluated on the basis
of their potential for economic
reciprocity and generosity. And that gives them status, males. And so women peel from the
top of that hierarchy. Basically, they let males compete it out on the economic front
and then women select from the top down.
And the higher the status, a woman has, the higher the status of the mate that she can
obtain.
Now, that brings up a question, which is, what gives women status?
And that's a really hard question.
Because, first of all, we know that economic viability is not one of those things. So male economic viability and sexual success are correlated insanely highly.
It's like 0.6, 0.7, crazily high.
One of the most powerful single variable relationships that you can find in all of the social sciences,
far higher than the relationship between intelligence and life success, for example.
But the correlation between female economic fiability and sexual attractiveness is lower
than zero.
So it's actually slightly negative.
So it's a massive sexual dimorphism.
So then you ask, well, what gives female status?
And well, one of the answers is obviously associated with beauty and reproductive capacity and sexual attractiveness.
Those things all tangled together extraordinarily tightly.
But that's not the only thing I don't think.
And so this I think is really worth thinking about.
So imagine that you have an attractive girl and a variety of relatively high status men
are chasing her.
Now you might ask, well, how do they evaluate her status?
And I think they evaluate her status by her ability to say no.
So imagine a high status person offers himself or herself to you.
And if you're of lower status, you're going to say yes right away.
But one marker of higher status is, well, no, I don't need what you're selling. Yeah, but what I'm
selling is great. Yeah, but I have so many offers that I'm not inclined to take your offer, because
I have options. And it's no on the part of women that signal,
I really believe this is the case.
It's voluntary no on the part of women
that signals their status.
And so I don't think young women know this at all,
because they want to know how to compete with men,
let's say, in the power game.
And that's a tough question,
because women are smaller,
and they're not as physically powerful.
And economic prowess isn't as attractive to them and it doesn't make them more viable on the
marketing, on the mating market. So the whole game that women are playing is way different
than the game men is playing. So you might say, well, how do women equalize the battle? And I think
a huge part of that is by reserving to themselves the right to say no. And you see this, people
are stumbling towards this realization even on the radical leftist front because they
keep saying no means no. And it's like, well, yeah, I wish it was that clear, but at a
drunken, frat party, what constitutes no is not self-evident, but a clear no on the part
of a woman.
And I also think that there's every reason to think
and plenty of evidence that that's also one of the things
that makes men desirable in the face of,
that makes women desirable in the eyes of men,
especially if the men might be enticed into pursuing
a long-term mating strategy.
You know, they'll push on women and see,
well, will you say yes right away?
And if the answer is yes,
especially true for high status men,
if the answer is immediately yes,
then the guy assumes, well, you're not,
your status really isn't that high.
You can't say no to me.
But if the woman says no, even to you,
the guy thinks, oh, well, you know, look at that.
You can imagine there's some narcissism not, even though I have everything to offer
that I have to offer, she's just not falling over, you know.
Maybe there's something there that requires further exploration.
You know, when you even see this in female pornography. It's so interesting because the classic female pornographic story is, you know, there's
this extremely attractive, highly productive man who's got a real capacity for aggression.
He's a pirate or a surgeon or a whirlpool for a vampire or a billionaire.
Those are the fundamental female pornographic tropes.
And he has women at his disposal.
But this woman is shielded off from him, and they dance around each other for a long time,
which essentially means that she's saying no, and he's finally enticed into a relationship
with her where he sacrifices all, you know, his access to all other women.
And then they have hot steamy sex. And so most of female pornography is extended for play.
And that's this romantic dance of no followed by a very spectacular consummation.
And that certainly mirrors the optimal female reproductive pathway, obviously, because otherwise
it wouldn't be the hardest
pornographic fantasy.
But it's based in, I really think it's based in reality.
And so I don't know how it is that you communicate to young women that, especially if they are
of high female statics, but even if they're not, that the most potent art tool they have
in their armament with regard to statics, with regard to being taken seriously,
is their ability and willingness to say no?
Mm.
A question that I've had a lot since the book was published
is there a sexual counter revolution underway?
My answer to that is a guarded yes a bit. I think what's happened is that we've
ended up in this very historical unusual situation where female virginity is not prized,
basically every society, hugely praises female virginity and female sexual restraint.
The ability to say no for all of these reasons because illegitimate child is a disaster Mae'n gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn g and technological shift, and we now have attempted to
reconceptualise women as being sort of
like slightly smaller men who basically have the same
sexual drives and preferences and so on.
We know that this isn't true, but we've given it a good go.
And many of the young women who read my book
have been raised with this expectation
and have attempted to have sex like men
and have invariably found that it actually makes them miserable. But we also get trapped in this
painful strategic impasse where when the expectation is that you will have sex very early on in
a relationship and that withholding sex is not socially permissible, it's a weird sign,
it's a sign that you're unusual
that you're not playing by the normal rules.
It puts you at a disadvantage.
If you are a young woman who doesn't want to be putting out
on a first, second, third date,
you're already disadvantaged in the dating market,
or really stuff until recently.
But one of the things that I've noticed going
and giving talks all over the country
is I've often had women come up to me afterwards
and say that they they they like my message
they agree that they are that they have are implementing this in their own lives that they are
not having casual sex that they are not giving into this social pressure. And one of the things
I've noticed about these women is they tend to be very beautiful. And I think that that's
not coincidental I think it's because they are the women who have the greatest power within this system
and are therefore the ones who can most easily opt out of the current set of expectations
and can say no without suffering a penalty for it.
So I think those women, many of them are already doing that because they've gotten onto the fact that this is actually a miserable system
which causes them harm. And my hope is that that will accelerate
as other women imitate them.
Well, you know, if it's the beautiful high status women
who begin that trend, the rest of the women will fall.
Because trends always start in the aristocracy
and trend downwards.
Now, okay, so here's another thought.
And this has to do with the built-in antagonism,
let's say, and hopefully eventual cooperation
of the sexes on the sexual front.
So women are checking out men all the time,
and women have all sorts of tricks for doing that.
They might be provocative, for example,
because they want to test a man to see if he can control his temper, and no one likes to for doing that. They might be provocative, for example, because they want to
test a man to see if he can control his temper and no one likes to talk about that. But any smart
woman is going to do that because she wants to find out if her partner, she wants someone who
has the capacity for aggression, but she wants someone who can control it because a man will be
provoked by children. And if he can't control his temper, then he's going to be aggressive.
And so she has to check that out. And you don't check that out by having a formal conversation.
You check that out the same way children check out their parents, which is by harassing
them and seeing what happens. And so, and then men check women out. So maybe one of the
things a man wants to do, if he's going to commit to a long-term relationship, is he wants to find out, well, does this woman have what it takes to actually commit to
a long-term relationship?
And what that means in part is that he has to know that she's capable of controlling
her impulsive desires, right?
Because otherwise, she's going to stray.
And that's actually a worse problem for men than it is for women.
And we should return to this idea that rape is a violation of male property rights in a moment
because I want to explore that a bit. So you can tell a woman has control over her impulses if she can
say no. Right? I mean, it's a way of testing. So imagine that you're a young guy with plenty to offer
and you're a hot young woman and you meet and you're pretty attracted to each other. Now, both
of you are going to fall under the sway of short-term temptation, obviously. Now, the question is,
are both of you or either of you capable of being mature in your regard for your iterated
future self and the potential of a long-term relationship.
And the way the man checks that out is by seeing if the girl will say no.
And maybe he checks that even harder because he does everything he can to seduce her.
And she still says no.
You know, and it works.
And he knows she's interested. And she still says no. You know, and it works. And he knows she's interested and she still says no.
Well, then he can conclude that she's capable
of keeping her pants on, let's say.
And that's actually something that you need to conclude
if you're going to commit to a long-term partnership,
obviously, on the male front because you want to be assured
of paternity.
And so, you know, these are very intense games that men and women play with each other,
and there are no holds barred games because everything is at stake.
But again, it devolves down to this issue of being able to say no, even under intense
temptation and provocation.
So I don't know how it is that we start teaching young women, or we can
just start by not lying to them about absolutely everything, which is what we do now. But I
don't know how it is that young women can be taught that the most potent weapon they
have is their ability to say no, you know, and that that's actually a weapon of formidable force and that it does
nothing but converse status upon them. You know, and the fact that you said already that what you see
is that it's the obviously high status, high desirable women who are figuring this out first
is an indication of that because obviously they're the ones that that are going to be able to wield that power in the most effective possible manner.
That doesn't mean that it's not useful for women farther down the hierarchy.
And you know, you also said something about women are enjoying to believe they have to be sexually accessible to make themselves successful on the dating market.
But I don't believe that's true at all. I think that's a myth.
I think that if you have nothing else to offer at all,
but immediate sexual access, that might be your only gain.
But if you have anything at all to offer
and that is what you offer, you're actually going to be thrown
out of the mating game really quickly
because the guys will just be turned off
and they won't call you back.
You'll get what do they call that ghosted? I can no-time flat. really quickly because the guys will just be, they'll just be turned off and they won't call you back.
You'll get what do they call that?
Ghosted?
I can no time flat.
You know, and the girls might ask, well, you know, I gave the guy what he wanted.
Why didn't he call me?
And the answer is, no, you gave his impulsive libido what it wanted.
And that's what you established a relationship with.
But you completely sacrificed any possibility at all
of being attractive to his more mature
and potentially long-term productive and sophisticated self.
You make yourself attractive to that by saying,
not on your life, Joker, I'm taking myself too seriously
for that and my future children and even our future relationship.
And all that's signaled by no.
And then it's complicated too, A, because you get the prude problem.
A Nietzsche observed a century and a half ago that a lot of what passed for morality was nothing but cowardice.
People are afraid to do something, afraid to be aggressive, afraid to be sexual, and they
passed their fear off as morality.
Proodes are sort of like that.
They don't want to have anything to do with sex, but it's not because they've made a moral
decision or because they have strength of character, it's just because they're afraid.
Because that's true, it's easy to parody women who say no, or men for that matter,
as prudes, as old fashioned conservative prudes who are just terrified of sex. And sometimes
that is true, but you can be sophisticated as hell and say no. And I don't think there's
anything more attractive to a man than a sophisticated woman who knows how to say no
Like that's that's top of the stack as far as men are concerned and they'll do any they'll do everything to test the
The what would you call the thickness of that boundary?
So I don't know how you tell that to young women. I don't even think men can probably
I don't know how you tell that to young women. I don't even think men can probably.
It's because the pill disrupts it all, right?
Because the pill, it doesn't reduce to zero,
but it does massively reduce the risks associated with sex,
the physical risks, not the psychological risks.
And so with those physical risks were removed,
I mean, I have a fascinating quote from a woman
who was in the 1960s, from the Pillaride. Mae'n gwaithio'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r ffasynnaethu'r fasyn And with that no longer available, and what we're dealing with here, of course, is the agreeability gap between men and women.
Women find it difficult to be assertive.
And if they can't call on that kind of very clear risk as an appeal, then what are they
left with?
No, I just don't want to have sex with you.
And that's a really painful thing to say that it wouldn't hurt feelings.
There's also, I think, an element of women being slightly physically frightened.
Right.
Well, I boil down the personal rejection then, eh?
Yeah. Yeah. Which is a pain for things that have ever...
Right, because that's the only excuse you have left.
Yeah. Absolutely.
Well, here's something else that's worth pondering.
You know, you talked about one of the advantages of the sexual revolution was
the transformation of the idea that rape was a property crime, let's say,
into a crime against
the woman herself. And I would say, look, I have plenty of sympathy for that perspective.
And I think it's fundamentally true, but I'm going to push back because, you know, all of this
is all very complicated. You know, it isn't obvious to me that that offers women enough defense.
You know, and so the counter argument might be if untrammeled sexual access to a young woman is a crime.
In order for that to be recognized as a crime properly, it has to be viewed as something that will bring the males on her side to her
defense in principle.
Now maybe not, right?
Because you could say, well, maybe we could set up a society where merely, quote, transgressing
the rights of a woman to say, no, is sufficient.
But it's not obvious to me that that's sufficient.
Like maybe sufficient means not only do you violate the integrity of the woman in a fundamental
sense, but you enrage all of her male protectors.
And then that's enough of a barrier because God only knows how much barrier we need.
And obviously, well, you just laid out a bunch of problems, especially now that the
pill introduces, and we should stress that. The problem that women have in saying no once
they're on the pill is that it's instantly personal. And that means the woman has to deliver a pretty
hard blow. And that's especially problematic if she's somewhat potentially interested in the guy.
Right? How do I say no without hurting his feelings, alienating
and making him into an enemy, looking like a prude? And I mean, when you're 16, how,
you don't know the answer to any of those questions, like, you're not sophisticated enough
to, and I saw this in my clinical practice all the time, you know, I had lots of women
in my clinical practice who were abused serially. And they were generally stunningly unsophisticated in their conduct, and I'm not trying to blame
the victim.
I'm just saying that sophisticated women, and those are often those who've been, they've
had a lot of good relationships with men, brothers and fathers in particular, sophisticated
women, signal to men who are getting a little pushy in
no uncertain terms very early in the pushing game that no is the answer, right? And they
do that. If you do that really early on in the investigation, you don't have to use
much force. But unsophisticated women, they can't do that at all. They don't know how.
And then what happens is they run into an unsophisticated guy.
He's too dumb to pick up any clues.
And then by the time she really wants to say,
no, she's already on the bed, I'll give you an example of this.
You know, I had one client who was coerced in her account
into a sexual encounter by a door to door salesman.
You know, a typical pornographic fantasy setup.
So this young guy is going around door to door selling,
whatever he's selling.
So he's not one of the world's highest status males.
Let's put it that way.
And I suppose he's probably got all sorts of fantasies
running through his pornography, pornography, adult brain.
And so he comes to the door and she's in the house and she's a reasonably attractive
young woman.
And he's friendly.
And well, the first thing she does is invite a man.
Now that's stupid.
She's alone.
She doesn't know who he is at all.
And she invites a man.
Well, he thinks, oh my God, what is she,
you know, maybe she really likes me,
and you already said that men,
and this is especially true
if they're narcissistic and immature,
radically overestimate the degree
to which a woman's attention
is signaling sexual availability for obvious reasons.
And so he's thinking, oh my God, this is my big chance.
And so then he starts to press her
and she has no tools that are disposal at all,
because she has no idea how to signal no.
And let's say she's agreeable and neurotic
with a bit of a history of abuse.
And the next thing she knows,
she finds herself on the couch, three quarters undressed.
And then the question is, well, is that rape?
And well, that's the question.
That's when the police come in and the lawyers come rape? And well, that's the question.
That's when the police come in and the lawyers come in and you spend the next three years
trying to figure out whether or not that's rape.
But it's a...
So, my point with all that is that it's an open question how much protection women need
from the males around them.
And then it's an open question exactly how to construe the crime of irresponsible
access to a young woman, woman from a psychological and legal and social perspective. Like maybe it's
not just a crime against the woman, you know? Maybe it's a crime against the broader community.
And I don't, like, it's not like I'm saying I know how to adjudicate that, because I don't, but it's hard to get all the necessary barriers in place. And if that wasn't true,
we wouldn't have this huge debate about consent on campuses.
I have a slightly unusual view of the relationship between Christianity and feminism.
view of the relationship between Christianity and feminism. In general, feminist modern feminists set themselves up in opposition to Christianity, particularly on the issue
of abortion, the Hamids tell kind of neopurit and outfit being the uniform now of American
feminists and so on. I am of the view though that actually feminism is an outgrowth of Christianity and that the fundamental
idea in Christianity, which is so different from other religious traditions, that weakness
is strength, that the first shall be lost, that there is something valuable about being
small and vulnerable rather than something despicable about it. I think that feminism completely
relies on that idea, which is by no means shared by all cultures, and certainly wasn't shared a'r ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn f vulnerability as something to be despised potentially, and which sees prostituted slave women
as entirely available for male sexual consumption that cannot really conceptualize the idea
of a slave woman having been able to be sexually violated.
It's just not kind of within the moral system, it's not understandable.
Into that comes the Christian idea of sexual equality at least at the spiritual level.
And the idea, therefore, that actually even a woman who doesn't have male kin available to defend her against sexual violation,
which of course a slave doesn't, she is nevertheless worthy of that protection.
It kind of socializes, maybe the wrong word, but it shares that duty of protection among the community.
And among women, I think that's basically what feminism is.
And says that actually we should be bestowing on these friendless women the same protection
that a woman with high connected male kin has.
It's a very difficult system to enforce.
To some extent, we try and use police, criminal justice system, whatever to do that job. It's a very difficult system to enforce. To some extent, we try and use police, criminal
justice system, whatever to do that job. It's a hard job to do, but that is basically the
modern project. And I think it is born out of Christianity.
Right, right. Well, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that's right is that what you're attempting
to do is to replicate the protection that a very well-constituted family and community
system would have for a woman who's highly
functioning.
You're trying to replicate that in abstraction in the entire social structure.
And so that's why you have a legal structure that says, well, women have the right to bodily
integrity.
You're really trying to replace that protective structure with the force of law.
Yeah, and I think that's an entirely laudable exercise.
The question that we have to wrestle with is the question that you brought up at the end of that,
which is that if a woman is unfortunate enough not to have, you know, let's say close male associates,
brothers, friends, fathers available to her, to what degree is it even possible for the
available to her, to what degree is it even possible for the more abstract state and the body of laws to replace that?
Might be a goal, but it's very difficult to realize in practical terms.
Is there anything else that's rattling around in the back of your mind that you think
might be worth making a case for at the moment?
I suppose that the, if there's one unifying idea within the book, it's probably summed up
in the, in the epilogue, which I called Listen to Your Mother.
I didn't crucially call it a Bayer Mother.
I called it Listen to Your Mother.
I, you know, give your mother the opportunity to present her a view of things.
Because I think that basically everything that's in the book actually is incredibly obvious
and ought to be incredibly obvious, and it only isn't because we live in a very strange time,
which has constructed some very strange ideas about sexual politics.
And actually in order to, I think, to navigate these waters effectively,
simply listening to women who've lived it already and who
have your best interests at heart. If there's anyone in the world who's likely to have your
best interests at heart, it is probably your mother. Simply listening to that woman is
really the only piece of advice that ought to be needed, because all of this is really just about rediscovering some of the, I would say,
eternal truths about men and women, which we've...
Yeah, well, I'm kind of hoping that the women that you describe as post-madeans, so let's
say, mothers and matriarchs, could seize the reins on the social media front and start educating young women
who are both motherless and fatherless
in the most fundamental sense about some of these truths.
My wife who's been Tammy has been starting to do that
with her podcast, inquiring into the nature
of the divine feminine, let's say,
and speaking to people like Janis Fiamengo,
who's a real scholar of bitter and resentful feminism, let's say.
But also trying to have an intelligent discussion among older women who have a bit of wisdom,
often hard one, about what a viable long-term life path might look like.
Like you sketched it out bit, you know, this transition in terms of narrative role, let's
say, from maiden to mother to matriarch,
but that's a very vague, this is not a criticism,
but a three-word description is very vague,
and it isn't obvious at all that our culture's good
at providing an image of what does it mean
to be a mother in the highest sense?
And it's really complicated, because one of the problems a lot of my female
clients had was they were very productive economically and very brilliant.
And it's clearly the case that cultures get much richer and children are much more well
educated if women have access to educational resources and if society can tap into their
broad economic productivity.
That seems like a net good, right?
But then it puts women in the uncomfortable situation of, well, how do you devote enough
attention to your husband and your children, probably in the reverse order, and how do you
handle your career, and that needs a lot of discussion.
The answer seems to be that most of the women that I've seen who've had viable lives is that
they don't make career advancement their number one goal.
And one of the things you see emerging as a consequence of that is that women are pretty
likely to start small businesses, but they generally do them part-time.
And they're generally not as hyper-successful as a minority of men.
But the reason they're doing that is because they're trying to balance marriage and children
with economic productivity.
And that's challenging and presents lots of opportunity, but it's not straightforward
to conceptualize, and women have only been able to do that in some real sense for about
60 years, right, since we had reliable birth control. conceptualize, and women have only been able to do that in some real sense for about 60
years, right, since we had reliable birth control.
So it's not surprising that there has to be a discussion.
And then so that's on the mother front and then on the matriarch front, well, I think the
problem's even worse is like, well, what's it like to be a grandmother who's had a life,
you know, family, a relationship, a career who's been productive at that, who's now entering into
the final third of life, let's say, what does that look like if it's rich and fulfilling
in terms of social role and personal relationship and sexual behavior?
There's an absolute dearth of Conversation on those fronts and you know, you're obviously spearheading
What the rectification of that in some real sense, but it would be lovely to see a lot more of that
Anyways, the people who are listening Louise Perry's book is the case against the sexual revolution
very you know punchy title and
One of the things Louise said today that was
interesting is that her books actually been met with a lot of positive responses, you know. And so
that's pretty interesting, you know. I feel the tide is turning in many ways. This might be a
cardinal pivoting year 2023 because a lot of these things, you say your books about the
painfully obvious in some sense
It's like well, you know society is pretty unstable when the painfully obvious is now
both debatable and even
Objected to but your book is definitely
Shot in the opposite direction. So thank you very much for talking to me today
Thank you so much and to to me today. Thank you so much. And to all of you, bet, you bet.
And hopefully we can meet when I come to the UK.
That would be good.
That would be fantastic.
And to all those who are listening and watching,
thank you very much for your time and attention
to the Daily Wire Plus crew for facilitating this
and the camera people who are here in Austin, Texas
is where I am today.
Thank you for helping us do this.
And well, we'll continue this conversation on the Daily Wire Plus platform. Thanks, Ken Louise.
Hello everyone. I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest
on dailywireplus.com.
dailywireplus.com.