TRIGGERnometry - The Sexual Revolution is Terrible for Women - Louise Perry

Episode Date: July 28, 2022

Louise Perry is the author of 'The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century' and writes for The New Statesman and The Daily Mail. She is also the Press Officer for the campaign group 'We Can’t Consent To This', which documents cases in which UK women have been killed and defendants have claimed in court that they died as a result of ‘rough sex’. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 See Triggernometry LIVE at the Edinburgh Fringe for 2 nights only on the 6th and 7th of August! We’ll be joined by very special guests Andrew Doyle and Leo Kearse. Get TICKETS here 👇 https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/triggernometry-live Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod​​​ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A common narrative that you're here is from feminists or from progressives is that the sexual revolution was a great idea and it was a way of counteracting centuries of oppressive patriarchal repression and the problem is just that we haven't like fully implemented it. The original idea to free everyone to prioritise freedom above all other values was fabulous. The problem is that we haven't quite yet done it. We need more freedom.

We need to push that freedom lever. again and again and again until everything comes right. And I think that was the error. I think actually freedom is not the preeminent value. I think it has to be balanced against other values. Like what? Like restraint. Oh, we don't like that word in the 21st century, don't, no. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishol. And this is a show for you. If you want honest conversations, with fascinating people. Our terrific guest today is a journalist and the author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.

Louise Perry, welcome to Trichonometry. Thank you so much for having me. It's really great to have you on. Before we get into what I'm sure will be a fascinating conversation, tell us who are you? How are you where you are? What has been your journey through life? My journey through life.

Well, I'm a journalist now. I wasn't always. My first, well, I'll start a little bit earlier very briefly. I'm born and bred in London. My family are Australian, but I've always lived in the UK. I, as we were just talking about, I did anthropology at university.

And then the first job that I did after leaving university was working in a rep crisis centre, which I was sure is going to come up in relation to the book. I did that for a couple of years, and then I became a journalist, freelancing various places. I now work for a combination that people I find surprising. I'm a columnist at the new statesman, and I also write for the Daily Mail. It's true. And this is my first book, The Case Against Sexual Revolution.

Also, I'm press officer for a campaign group called We Can't Consent to This. And we campaign on cases where women have been murdered and men have claimed they consented to be to legal violence as part of rough sex. I'm sure again, that's going to come up because it all feeds into the book. I mean, the book in a way is a combination of life experience and thinking over the course of, you know, 10 years at least. And we've had a couple of people on to talk about the problems with the sexual revolution in the past. And, you know, it's not necessarily a new critique what the sort of things that you're talking about. But generally it would be people who sort of women wanted women back in the kitchen that, that would people like me.

No, no, but you know what I mean? You see what I'm saying? It was coming from a certain angle and that was the concern. I don't think you're coming at it from that angle. So what is it that you have identified that has been the negatives, particularly for women,

out of some of the changes we saw in the 60s and later? Yeah. So as you say, this is quite a well-trodden path for religious conservatives in particular, who tend to come at it, as you say, from a different angle from me because I am, you know, for all of my heterodoxy, I suppose, I am coming at this from, I say that I start with feminist priors

and I end up at some conservative conclusions, although not all, but some, in the sense that I think that the sexual revolution from the get-go had downsize for women. You know, not to say that anyone designed it, it's not a conspiracy, you know, culmination of a lot of different historical accidents and individual behaviour and whatever. But the common narrative that you'll hear a lot nowadays is I think that people are starting to recognise, including feminists of all different strains, are starting to recognise that there are problems with the sexual culture, recognising, for instance, the fact that porn is really grim,

a lot of young people are really unhappy, not having happy sexual relationships, all of this. I think that pretty much across the board everyone agrees. What everyone disagrees on is the cause of it. And a common narrative that you're here is from feminists or from progressives is that the sexual revolution was a great idea. And it was a way of counteracting centuries of oppressive patriarchal oppression. And the problem is just that we haven't fully implemented it. The original idea to free everyone to prioritize freedom above all other values was fabulous. The problem is that we haven't quite yet done it.

We need more freedom. We need to push that freedom lever again and again and again until everything comes right. And I think that was the error. I think actually freedom is not the preeminent value. I think it has to be balanced against other values. Like what? Like restraint. Oh, we don't like that word in the 21st century, don't we?

We don't, no. I mean, I guess the point that I'm coming at this that makes it particularly a feminist argument is I think that male restraint is the really important thing, which no one wants to. to hear. Well, actually, I mean, I'll be honest with you, I've sort of, certainly in terms of me growing up, the idea that men have to restrain themselves, particularly in relation to women. I mean, as part of the trad sort of way of thinking, you know, that, that is, you know, you don't hit girls, for example, right? Because we can be as equal as we want, but there's certain things that we respect about each other's differences that we don't treat each other exactly the same and

everything. You know what I mean? And there's other things that you do with women that you don't do with men and vice versa. That was, but like you say, that can be experienced by some people is taking us backwards. Yeah. So how does that circle get squared or the square get circled or whatever it is? I try really hard not to use words like backwards and forwards, actually. Yeah. Because sort of what I'm saying, which is, I guess, quite radical, is that the whole, the whole idea of progress I think is nonsense. I don't use the word progressive to describe myself, even if I agree with people who call themselves progressives on some things, I don't use that word,

because I think the whole idea of history having a shape is absurd. It's devoured from Christianity, actually, in a way, like the rule headed to the Kingdom of Heaven ultimately. I think that history is just about change and trade-offs. And even if you can sometimes identify some things that have clearly got better and are likely to get better, something like infant mortality, let's say, none of it's guaranteed. and I think that what the sexual revolution represents is not progress,

it's just a change primarily different by technology and by changes in the economy and by, you know, in all other ways, material changes on which the ideological changes are built. And, yeah, I don't think that the simplistic narrative is right and I don't think vocabulary like backwards and forwards actually illuminates anything. I completely agree with you that it is very common, in all other societies but our own pretty much this idea that, I mean, it's chivalry

is what you're describing, right? It's horribly old-fashioned and unfashionable word chivalry, which has mostly been thrown out because obviously, you know, there are good things that come with it, but there are downsides too. It can be patronising, it can be, you know, enfeebling women in various ways. But I think it was a terrible error to throw it out completely.

Because when it comes down to it, men and women are different in some really important ways. And I think we have to find ways of negotiating that rather than denying it. Do you not think that it might well be that it's all gone a bit too far? Do you know what I mean? Like it started off, you know, progressivism, liberalism, and it had these noble values. And then you end up at a place where you talk about how men and women are the same.

You go, well, that's just scientifically nonsense. It's also the logical end point of that thinking, though, I think. I mean, this idea of equality, this idea of sameness. right, rather than something like justice or fairness or other terms that you might use. I think that there are circumstances in which it makes sense. I think that saying, for instance, women should have access to the professions

is just, I don't think anyone can really argue with that as being an important sort of quality. A few would, not people I'm friends with, right? That's fine, voting rights, all of this sort of stuff. The problem is that those battles have been won, they've been one a long time ago now. And what we've ended up with in recent decades has been a push towards, a more radical push towards sameness, even to the extent of denying the existence of physical differences between the sexes, even to the extent of denying the existence of sexual dimorphism, it's all got quite crazy, right? And I think the problem that we're now coming up against is we've reached the kind of bedrock of biological difference, having chipped away at a lot of sort of, to mix my metaphors, having, having, having,

taken all the low-hanging fruit in terms of like providing women with access to public life, we reach the point where actually we can't quite make everyone the same. Even if you can sort of pretend to, I mean, this is a thing about the modern world. We have, we live in a very, very different way from our ancestors, right? And I think that much of what we see historically as feminist progress, can be attributed to material changes, right? So one of the really important ways in which we differ from our ancestors is that male physical strength

doesn't mean very much anymore, it doesn't matter very much. If you live in an agricultural industrial society, obviously the fact that men are so much bigger and stronger than women is hugely important, if you live in a knowledge economy or service economy, doesn't really matter. We can all work in like gender neutral officers

and not really notice the differences between us. Similarly with the pill, which I argue, you in the book is the technology shock, which explains so much of this history. If you can delay childbearing or if you can forego it altogether, again, you can just operate in the world pretty much as like a man. You might not even go to the gym. You might have like literally no sort of encounter with the existence of male physical strength. It's quite hard to like go into a powerlifting gym and not notice, right? But in general, you can go through life not observing these differences. And it almost becomes plausible to think that gender is fluid

and that all of this is just this like backwards ideas that for some reason our ancestors believed. But that's an illusion and I think it's very brutal and it's built on technology which is actually remarkably new. And I think it's that newness. I mean, women were not able to suspend their fertility for 99.9% of our species history. You know, this is like five minutes ago in historical terms.

And I don't think we've really come to terms with it, which is what I'm trying to do in the book. So what has been the fallout of the fact that women are able to suspend their fertility? So I think that the, I call it sexual disenchantment. I've borrowed that term from an American writer called Aaron's Barrow him, and he's borrowed it from Max Weber, the sociologist. So Weber was describing the disenchantment of the natural world. It was a consequence of the Enlightenment.

that previously people thought that the natural world had agency and spirits and specialness and whatever and then post-scientific revolution, we come to the realization that actually it's just sort of inert scientific forces. I think that this same process has happened, or at least rhetorically has happened, in that it used to be, and I think every culture has elaborate rituals and beliefs around sex,

ways of formalising sexual relationships in marriage or similar equivalent. You know, up until recently, sex within Christianity is, you know, only permissible within marriage or vicious sacrament. It has this incredibly special status, incredibly regulated by the state and by the church. We've got rid of that, mostly,

and now it is quite common to hear people, progressives in particular, say that sex actually doesn't have any intrinsic value to it. It doesn't have any intrinsic specialness, Like if people want to apply meaning to it on a personal level, they're welcome to. But when it comes down to it, it's just a social interaction. You know, you can buy it, you can sell it. It's fine.

I don't think anyone really believes that. I think almost no one actually believes that. And you can tell because people are extraordinarily inconsistent in applying this. So people who, for instance, will say that sex workers work, no problem. It's just like working at McDonald's will not apply that to their own personal lives. or not even apply it to other sort of similar issues in terms of law and policy. So the example I give in the book is sex for rent. All of the major political parties in the UK are united in believing that landlords

who offer rooms in exchange for sexual favours are or should be breaking the law. They're all united in saying we should have firmer laws on it. This is particularly post-COVID because there was sort of a rash of landlords doing this. It's the same in other Western countries as well. these are exactly the same parties, you know, like the Lib Dems, for instance, condemn sex for rent and think we should decriminalise a sex industry. It's the same thing, you know, it's just goods, you know, being exchanged for sexual access. It's exactly the same thing.

And similarly, you know, people who will, again, say the sex workers work, that, you know, really buy into the sexual disenchantment idea rhetorically, very upset about any perceived sexual impropriety in their own workplaces. You know, like having any kind of being touched by a male colleague, being asked out on a date, like that stuff is very serious and is not at all comparable to just other forms of non-sexual interaction. But sex workers work, you know. And I think that I think that inconsistency is a result of the fact that actually sexual disenchantment just isn't true. And basically no one really thinks it's true.

But the problem is that if you are trying to rationalise it all and you, you're, you're, you are applying kind of utility brain to the world. It's quite hard to articulate. It's quite hard to rationalise. It comes from a very visceral place, which is a bit inconvenient if you're trying to apply that kind of, you know, very logical worldview,

the fact that people have emotional responses to things that are somewhat inconvenient, you know. But the truth of it is that people don't feel that sex is the same as other social interactions. People absolutely feel that sex has some unique status, which is of course why. I mean, thinking from a feminist perspective, which is why rape is so uniquely bad,

which is why sexual harassment is so uniquely bad. If you don't think sex is special, you can't think any of those things have special status either. And I think that that idea of sexual disenchantment is bad for everyone, but it's really bad for women. How many discounts does USA auto insurance offer? Too many to say here. Multi-vehicle discount, safe driver discount,

new vehicle discount, storage discount, legacy. How many discounts will you stack up? the banner or visit usaaa.com slash auto discounts restrictions apply why partly because of a physical imbalance between the sexes of the fact that it's only women who get pregnant women have to suffer the side effects of hormonal contraception um women are much smaller and weaker than men which means that any heterosexual encounter if you've got a man and woman alone together the woman's going to be almost always the more physically vulnerable party so there's that kind of risk inherent to encounters that women experience that men can't experience in the same way.

There's also the psychological stuff and that's more controversial because the push towards kind of radical equality within feminism, in liberal feminism, has also included pushing back very hard against the idea that there are any innate differences between the sexes on a psychological level and some of that is coming from a good place, it is clearly the case that in various periods in history, pseudo-scientific ideas about women's intellectual inferiority in particular or emotional inferiority have been used against women, this is clearly true. That does not, however, mean that those differences don't exist at all.

And actually, as decades have gone by and we've got more and more scientific research on this, it actually becomes more and more apparent that those differences do exist, on average, right? The on average thing is something that people often can't wrap their heads around. Well, they can, they just don't want to. Well, people can when it comes to something like, the example I give is like, you know, if we say that Germans are on average taller than people from Spain, people are like, oh, yeah, fine.

No one says, oh, but I know a really tall guy from Spain. That disproves your thesis. You know, this is the nature of bell curves. There are all sorts of ways in which the certain psychological traits differ on the bell curve basis between men and women. The one that's most important for my purposes is the trait called, psychologist called sociosexuality, which is not quite the same as sex drive. You can be, you know, high and one and low and the other, but sociosexuality is about your

desire for casual sex, basically, how much you want to have sex with a variety of people, how quickly you want to jump into bed with someone. Now look, I'm not an expert, but I'm going to guess men are more prone to have the higher rate of that. Cross-culturally, trans-historically, yes. Wow. Yeah. I'm a genius. How did I work that out, Liz. I know. How dare you know she things. Yes, I mean, anyone who's like got eyes and lived in the world can tell that there clearly is that average difference between men and women, even if there are lots of outliers on an individual level. I mean, just because you know someone's sex doesn't mean you know their level of sociosexuality, but at the population level, you see it. You see it, for instance,

in the fact that all, almost all sex buyers, everywhere in the world are male. Because obviously the people who are, is that tale of high sociosexuality is like all men, right? I'm going to say some even more controversial than you, but basically, if you want to understand what men are actually like, just look at gay men, right? How much sex do they have and how many partners do they have on average compared to the average heterosexual man? And you kind of get like, gay men are actually the real men because they're unrestrained by women. Yes, yeah, absolutely. It's really that simple. Yeah, it's how men would behave if women were a limiting factor. Exactly. Yeah. And I mean, it's interesting if you look at the survey data on gay men, which there's quite a lot because it comes out of like, sexual health research and stuff. What you have is actually like a goodish proportion of men who are just as monogamous as lesbians and you have a lot of men

in the middle and then you have a proportion who are really promiscuous and because there isn't the limiting factor of women saying no those men are way more promiscuous than promiscuous straight men can ever be because they just have so much more opportunity

but that But that portion of, like, would-be-promiscuous straight men still exists. It's just they've got the complexity of having to deal with female choice, which makes the whole heterosexual, you know, dating marriage scene that much more complex. So essentially one of the things you're talking about, which is apparent to anyone who's paying attention, is that one of the consequences of many of the technological changes, but also the cultural technologies that we've now developed, is that we have, a dating market, hate that term, but dating market that caters to men's predilections much more

than it caters to women's. And so women who used to trade, this is very kind of biological looking at it, so I hope no one's offended by this, but used to trade sex for commitment, right? Now are trading sex for the promise of commitment from men that don't need to give it anymore. Yeah. Is that fair? Yeah. So what I describe in the book is what I call the sociosexuality gap, the fact that you've got that you've got the male bell curve is that much further towards the high end than the lower end. And interestingly, one of the responses that I've got to this book from some readers is, hang on, are you talking about the sexual revolution in the 1960s,

or are you talking about the sexual revolution of the first century AD, which is a really interesting historical comparison, which I'm not expert in by any means, but what happens during that period is you have Roman sexual norms, Yes, prized chastity in high-status women, but also have vast, vast numbers of prostituted slaves who men of all classes have access to, basically. And the promiscuity and the straightforward violent sexual abuse

visited by high-status men on women and sometimes men who are lower status than them is gone as completely unmarked. Harvey Weinstein, in that context, no one bats an eyelid. He's just behaving completely, you know, normally. And what is very strange about the Christian Revolution is that Christians are unusual in expecting chastity

not only from women, which basically every culture does, and for obvious reasons, because it's about to do with, like, paternal certainty. And they also expected of men. And so the early Christians, like, basically ask the male bell curve to be dragged down to the female level and for men to behave more like women's, actually. and to not buy sex and to, you know, to not cheat on their wives and all of this and to expect monogamy, which is what we know from all sorts of, you know, sever data, loads of other evidence,

is what women on average are most likely to want, to want monogamous commitment. And what I think has happened in our sexual revolution, the recent sexual revolution is that the female belcove has been dragged up, you know, in that the expectation now on women is that they will meet the male demand for casual sex because obviously the sociosexuality gap has to be bridged somehow. And if there aren't enough women who are outliers and really up for it, you know, there's a kind of, it's, you know, I say again, it's not a conspiracy, it's just a culture, it's a networking effect that the incentive structure has changed,

and it is now more in women's interests to imitate masculine sexuality and to have sex like a man. And moreover, to present that as being feminist. and as a form of empowerment, as a form of, you know, self-expression and all of this, the problem you've got is, one, the physical imbalance, the fact that women are suffering all of the costs of this. And two, is that psychological, like, deep down reluctance that a lot of women feel, mostly no, yeah. And, you know, women are much more likely to say that they feel really miserable and depressed after casual sex,

to feel used, you know, all of these kind of negative emotions coming out of these encounters. And this will sometimes be chalked up to, you know, particular men behaving badly, which obviously they do often, but will sort of be seen on an individual level, or will be ascribed to slut shaming and say, well, the problem we've got is that we actually haven't sufficiently freed ourselves. Is that pressing the freedom lever again and again, right? The problem is we've still got these hang-ups about sex. We still haven't completely completed the sexual disenchantment process.

women are still like ashamed of their sexuality, ashamed of being seen as promiscuous, etc. That's why women are completely miserable. I don't think that's true. I think the problem we've got is that actually there's like a, one of the really interesting differences in sexuality between men and women is women's sexual disgust threshold is a lot lower. And that's the sort of thing you can actually measure quite empirically because you can test the disgust response by looking at things like, like sweating and heart rate and whatever. And women get much more easily triggered into that feeling of like ick than men do.

And there's a biological reason for that as well. Yeah, to do with the fact that it is like getting pregnant is extremely consequential for women, right? To the extent that having sex is like potentially one of the most consequential things you can do as a woman in terms of the effect that it has on the fact that you then are, carrying this child for nine months and then have a dangerous labour and then have many, many years of infant care, or attempting an abortion, which until very recently is invariably very dangerous thing to do, right? Or infanticide or, you know, any number of horrible options away at you if you're having sex with a man who's going to leave you if you become pregnant. So clearly women are, like we've got some very strongly inbuilt instincts which are supposed to protect against, ending up in that kind of situation basically.

And I think that what's going on very often for women that I've spoken to is that this, one, there's this narrative of having sex like a man is empowering and the belief that you should give it a go. And the belief, moreover, that if you don't give it a go, it's because you're frigid and conservative and backwards and all these bad things. And two, the feeling that they sort of have to, because the assumption very often is that you have to, sort of run the gauntlet of hookup culture

in order to find a partner that you can't possibly I mean one of the things I advise in the book which I'm told is a completely crazy thing to advise is to hold off on having sex for a few months in the first few months of a relationship because it's a good way of testing whether he's serious about you

it's a good way of not being clouded by hormones if you're trying to like vet a partner and I hear from women I'm like what are you talking about what kind of man is going to wait three months to have sex A man that's actually really into you, I'd imagine. But it feels impossible. It feels like if you go out there on the dating market

and you have that restriction applied, that you can't compete. Well, you can't compete with, you're not going to get as many dates. But the point of dating isn't to get a date, presumably, right? And by the way, one thing before you jump in for us, I would add is, I actually, I don't know what the studies show, but I would argue that this isn't good for men either

and it doesn't make men happy either because actually men always, also feel discussed about hookup culture and sex. It might be like a bit of a status boost and a temporary fleeting moment of joy or whatever. But actually, I don't think on the long run that makes men happy either. I completely agree. I open the book by talking about Marilyn Monroe and Hugh Hefner as the like perfect examples of the sexual revolution and the disparate effect it has on men and women. The fact that she had this, I mean, she had a pretty consistently miserable life for all of her beauty and fame and wealth. And she died prematurely as ever

knows from substance abuse and so on, whereas Hugh Hefner had a grand old time. But by the time he was elderly, he actually was a really pathetic figure. And he never, you know, he enjoyed the period of youthful promiscuity and being famous and glamorous and all of this. But actually, his final decades were quite tragic. And he ended up not ever having, you know, the source, the thing that people actually invariably find real meaning from, which is family and intimacy. and, you know, all of the good long-term things because he just had this like extended adolescence right up until his final days.

And the problem as well is when it comes to the dating apps is that there's only a select selection of men who are actually, you know, seem to be... Who are living the playboy dream, yeah. Exactly. And then the other men aren't getting a look in because it's all superficial and it's all about how you look in photographs. So then all the women are after this tiny sliver of men. the hypergamy thing.

Who therefore don't have to commit? Yes, yes. What's really interesting about this is that, I said my first degree was anthropology. Most societies on the anthropological record have been polygamous in the high-status take on multiple wives and then lower status men have none. Almost no one is polyandrous, no matter what sort of like, some second wave writers try to sort of imagine these like amazing matriarchal society. No, no, no. Human history is fairly clear on this.

Polygamy is the norm. About 20% have been monogamous, including clearly our society in all Christian societies. And one of the puzzle, one of the things, what anthropologists call the puzzle of monogamous marriage is why in earth that would ever come about? Because clearly polygamous societies suit the high status men best. and those men are generally the people who have the most influence in setting the terms of society and laws and all of this.

So why not that they accept a system which basically restricts them? And the answer seems to be because monogamy is a really, really good system in all sorts of completely empirical ways, right? Monogamous societies tend to be more economically productive, partly because high-status men, instead of investing money in more wives,

invest money in things like businesses, and taking on employees and, you know, all sorts of, like, things that are good for, economic growth, has lower rates of child abuse and domestic abuse, because households with co-wives tend to have a lot of conflict for obvious reasons, and has lower crime because you don't have this pool of unmarried and unhappy, you know, in cells, basically, right, who are high on testosterone and very low on responsibility, who are much more likely to do sort of opportunistic crime. So there's all sorts of ways in which monogamy, yes, it restricts, you know, that top slice of playboys.

I mean, basically, that's what they're living on Tinder, right? They're not marrying these women, obviously, but they're having, like, simultaneous relationships or, like, back-to-back, brief monogamous relationships. They're, like, accumulating lots of wives. And it's great for them, in the short term. It's rubbish for the other men, and it's also rubbish for the women, because you end up with women who actually really want to have, like, loving, intimate monochamous relationships and they don't feel like they can get access to them because

that's not how the culture is arranged and like yes you can say no I'm not going to have sex with you for three months you can say that and I do think like it's better to do that and then not like be a co-wife of a playboy than it is to to just like go without but it's difficult because that's not at all what the you know incentive structures put in place encourage you to do what's really interesting in just like proving this this population level difference between male and female sexuality is if you look at university

campuses which are reasonably closed environments, people have having a lot of relationships with each other and don't have very much to do. Campuses where men outnumber women, so women are the rarer sex and therefore have more power to set the terms. I know it's so like brutal talking

economic terms but that like it has a lot of explanatory power. They tend to have more monogamous relationships a culture of monogamity. Well, they're setting the terms. Because they're setting the terms. And then on campuses where you have more women than men, the men are the rarer sex,

then you have more hookup culture. Because these are the average preferences between the sexes and this is how you see it map out. But hang on, haven't we evolved beyond the need for this? That's what I've been told. You know, we're polyamorous now, aren't we? I mean, what's so interesting, right, about polyamory is that on the sexual,

disenchantment thing like the polyamorous community are desperate to like make sexual disenchantment true but you go onto any platform on you know reddit Twitter whatever and where people are talking discussing their experiences of polyamory and you always come across people who are desperately jealous and really struggling with it and being like I know I'm being really irrational I know I'm being really old-fashioned I need to like free my mind from the shackles of whatever like monogamous tyranny but they can't quite do it because actually it comes down to it and we are We can, unlike other animals, you know, we are able to overcome our natural instincts a bit. Like, you know, look around. We clearly live extremely different lives from those of our ancestors and other primates.

But, like, there's a limit. There comes a point where actually there's like a, there is a bedrock of biology. And it's actually really, really hard to resist your instincts to that degree. And you will just end up unhappy if you keep plugging away at it. Do you know what, when I visualize the process that I sort of think, think about we're discussing here and more generally when it applies to other issues it feels to me like because I have to say this every time we talk about like I come from a liberal back blah blah but it does feel like and I value freedom to me that is a very important value I've written

a whole book about it right but also I feel it's almost like we've sat there for decades sowing at the change that we thought were constraining us but actually in the process realized that we were actually also so in the branch that we've been sitting on at the same time. Yeah. And what we've ended up with is a lot more freedom to fall down to the ground and smash into it. That's sort of how it feels like to me. Do you see what I'm saying? Yeah, Chesterton's fence, right?

It's the G.K. Chesterton's idea that, you know, a reformer comes along and sees a fence in the middle of a field and is like, why not is this there? I'm going to tear it down. And then the conservative says, if you don't know what the point of the fence is, you're the last person you should be tearing it down. because who knows what it is at the fences, what tasks the fences before me. And I think that we are kind of learning that the hard way a bit as a culture.

Like there were certain, there were reasons for some of these things. And this is one of the problems you get with the progress narrative that if your whole view of history is premised on the idea that people in the past were like bad and stupid and that every year, you know, things get better and people get wiser and whatever. Like five minutes ago, you see all this stuff about like,

do you remember that rash of, of op-eds about how the sitcom Friends was like impossibly problematic. Yes. You know, it's like 20, 30 years ago, right? And we've already, and we're already condemning people who are not even in middle age to, like, the dustbin of history in terms of their, in terms of their ideology. I mean, this is so rapid, this level of, like, regeneration and level of, like, reinventing, having to reinvent society constantly.

And also, I think there's a hubris to it as well, you know, the idea that we should be able to just design society on the back. of an envelope and that that's going to be better than anything that's gone before. I think in reality what we're actually faced with is thinking about looking at real other societies and comparing them because these are actually the realistic options available to us. The utopias have never existed. And I think the problem with some feminist efforts in this regard, like towards communal child rearing, for instance, or political lesbianism, I mean, it does work for some people.

political lesbianism, to be fair, is completely internally coherent. Like, if you look at the sociosexuality gap and you look at the male propensity for aggression on average and all of this stuff and say, I want none of it, like, you can do that. I see the reasoning. The problem is that we then have, what, max 100 years and the species dies out?

It's like anti-natalist in an extremely profound way. If we want to make it work, and also if we want to recognise the fact that, you know, Most people are heterosexual. Most people want to and will become parents. You know, like the nature of human life necessitates connection and dependency. We can't just operate as these like attipyced individuals and hope for the best. Then we have to find a way of managing those connections and dependency.

And I think that my last chapter in the book, and probably probably my most controversial chapter, is called Marriage is Good, where I make the feminist. argument for monogamous marriage, as actually of all the systems we've experimented with as the most durable and the most likely to defend the interests of women and mothers in particular. Back in the kitchen, they go. To me, the really tragic aspect of all of this is that a lot of these people who would identify as progressives and say there is no difference between men and women, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

There is a cap on female fertility that men simply don't have. Yeah. And once you get to a certain age, it becomes more and more and more difficult. So this idea that you can have it all, you're actually robbing a lot of women of the chance of becoming a mother, which is an awful thing. It's surprising, isn't it, how little progress we've made in that regard? Like the, I say progress advisedly. Like the technological interventions, which we've tried really hard to use to lengthen the female fertility window, they're not very good.

IVF is not very good. You know, it actually is surprisingly ineffective. Surrogacy is an ethical disaster, right? Like all of these efforts to try and tame mother nature and basically give people absolute freedom. Because this is what you come down to in the end eventually. If your preeminent value is freedom, you are at some point going to encounter. like biological impediments to your freedom and you have to try and chip away at them

like if that's what the ideology directs you to do and I mean what that means in practice is sometimes using technology with all of its unintended consequences as all new technologies have trade-offs sometimes using the bodies of poorer people that's what the surrogacy industry does right or sometimes trying to you know

master our monkey brains right try and do things which we feel like we ought to be able to do for you know whether that be have sex like a man, whatever it might be, and then suffering the emotional fallout from that. And yeah, the fertility window is one of them. It's not going anywhere. And it is another source of sexual asymmetry

to the extent that particularly because women tend to date men who are a little bit older than them. So, you know, women entering their 30s and so on have that sense of time constraint that the men just don't. And so the playboys, they can have a whale of a time for quite a long period before they have to start worrying about whether they've ruined their chances of having a family.

But then they're stringing along these women who, you know, wasting time and coming out of it really, really bitter and miserable as a consequence. Yeah. So where does this go, Louise? Because it's, you see, if we were a self-contained society that lived on a planet and it was just us, we could do all sorts of books. bullshit that we want. But when you're talking about, for example, political lesbianism, in addition to all the things that you talk about, there's another factor here, which is

there are societies that don't have such a big problem with toxic masculinity and all this other nonsense. And as someone who actually thinks the West, other than some of the craziness that is going on, is pretty great and worth existing and defending and living and so on. One of my concerns has been that a lot of these so-called progressive changes actually make us a lot weaker and more vulnerable and more appealing for domination takeover by hostile cultures. So how do we sort of address some of these things and to make sure that, A, men and women are happier because I agree with you completely, what's happening is not good, especially for women, but also for men. But also how do we address it at the level of society? So we actually are

able to defend ourselves, project our power abroad, have a confidence in our society that we seem to be losing because we're constantly beating ourselves up about how we're not utopian enough. Yeah. Great. Thank you. So I think there is possibly a sexual counter-revolution on the way. And I say that with some trepidation because I obviously think that the current scenario isn't good.

And I think that there has been a sort of the swing towards greater and greater freedom has had all sorts of costs and all sorts of costs and all. of this that we've talked about. I also recognise about that a sexual counter-revolution could be seriously ugly, depending on what it looked like. All counter-revolutions are ugly. Precisely, yeah. So, I mean, what you're seeing a bit among Gen Z is, I think, a bit of a bifurcation. You've got some Gen Z who, you know, absolutely love, like, gender fluidity and sex-positivism and all this stuff. You've also got a surprising swing to the right, because normally what happens in recent decades

is that every generation gets kind of more left wing, but that's not true actually of this one. And you've also, I think, got a definite swing back against porn culture, not always from the sort of feminist ethics perspective, not always because I think everyone knows that

the way that porn is produced is really not fair trade, but because coming from groups like no fat that see porn as deleterious to men, which it is, but you know that's not the only objection I you know there are all sorts of other

like I think on the whole that's sort of promising but I'm also aware that there are lots of other ways in which you could have a sexual counter-revolution Islamism is one example a move back towards fundamentalist Christianity I think probably not in the UK but definitely in the US I mean we're speaking just after

Roe was overturned and you've got various states they've introduced some really draconian laws on abortion that go way beyond what the modal American thinks. I mean, the modal American actually is pretty much agreed that first trimester is okay

and then only with serious medical problems or rape or whatever. Whereas you've got some state legislatures that have gone far beyond that, which is, I think, always the risk when you've overreached. Well, right, if you're out in the middle of the streets with pink hair celebrating every abortion that happens,

you're going to do that. People are going to react to that. I think particularly with social media, because you've got this amazing capacity to signal boost the crazies on both sides. Absolutely. Which inflames the crazies on both sides. And then you end up with this really extreme

and dangerous polarization. And you can totally see that with sex happening much more. But see, what I would argue there as well, I mean, I do agree with you. I think both sides of the culture or whatever is people from one side laughing and mocking the people who are crazy on the other side. But what you also have is a cowardice on both sides about speaking out against their own extremists.

Yeah, yeah. And that's actually for us, that's where we're coming from. You know, from our perspective, we were both sort of left-ish comedians going, what the fuck has happened to this industry and the world where, like, comedians have to, like, censor themselves and whatever. But people don't want to do that. Politicians don't do that. They don't call out, you know, if you're on the right, you're not going to call out.

the people who stormed January of the 6th, because you know that you're going to lose a portion of your voter base. And likewise, on the left, you're not calling out all these social justice crazies. Yeah. You're not calling out BLM burning down cities. You're not calling all that out. You're just staying silent.

And then, of course, people are going to assume that you agree with it. And then they're going to push back against it in ways that I agree with you completely. It's going to throw the baby out with the bathwater. And it's one of the reasons I wrote the book because, you know, I'm coming from... I don't know if I'm still on the left.

it's a complicated question, but you know, I'm coming from, I grew up reading The Guardian, I worked for New Statesman and the Daily Mail. Like, I still feel a great affinity with left, and as you say, there is a complete mismanagement of the left's crazies, and similarly on the right. It's a completely symmetrical process. And I think the problem with, I think that there has been a massive swing much too far in the, like, Libertine direction. And I think that the, I think the counter swing, I think feminists have to participate in it. In the sense that if we say, for instance, that if we don't permit any heterodoxy whatsoever within feminism, if you squish any contrary in voice and you reject any efforts to try and negotiate this process,

then you end up with no female voices in it. I mean, this is one of the things, for instance, has happened in evolutionary psychology. The evolution psychology was condemned by feminists, you know, many decades ago as being inherently sexist. And there aren't any women now, right? I mean, no, sorry, there are. But it's like, it's basically a no-go zone for feminists,

just to voice your support of evolutionary psychology as I do. It's like a very eccentric thing to do. And you get a lot of flack for it, as I have obviously got, inevitably, I knew I would. But then we're, what happens is that you don't have a role in this discipline. There's in that there are no feminist voices within it. The most, you know, the most, um,

the most sexist voices can just run riot, basically. And I think that, yeah, there has to be this effort at sort of, not just indulging in the status games. I think that so much of what goes on in this polarization process is people don't want to criticize their in groups, they don't want to be tarred for whatever misdemeanor. like, you know, traitorous misdemeanor because you get punished so much more for being a traitor

than you do for being an enemy, right? They're so concerned with their status within the group that they tell lies because it's the way that you maintain that status and I think that we can't do that anymore, it's too serious. Yeah. Moving on, I want to talk to you about pornography because we live in a culture now

where pornography is becoming ever more mainstream and you can talk to a wealth of commentary and indeed some people who worked in that industry who will say, what's the problem, you know, this is a natural act, people watching it, consenting adults, blah, blah, blah. So what is the problem with pornography? I think those voices are getting a little bit more sparse, actually. I mean, yeah, absolutely.

You can easily find people who often have a financial stake in the industry who say that it's fine. You know, Pornhub worked pretty hard to project an ethical image through various schemes, whatever. Like there's an effort. I think it's sort of failing, though. I think that the, particularly from the Gen Z, the kids who've actually grown up on this stuff

and who had smartphones when they were 11 or whatever and had access to all the world's horrors in the computer in their pockets, right? I think that they recognise that this is, there's something really dystopian about porn. I spoke at the Oxford Union earlier this year on a motion to do. with porn and I won very unexpectedly because I thought that I thought I'd be slaughtered by all of

these sex positive kids and I did get some very hostile questions from the floor but I won the vote and I think that's because actually there is a recognition from those who've lived it that porn culture is dreadful I mean I think porn culture is the only people who are really profiting from porn are the people who actually own their platforms who are invariably men there's this quite a using the book that, you know, as tech comes to dominate all of our lives, including our intimate lives, you end up with this situation where some people are above the algorithm and some people are below the algorithm being influenced by it. And porn is one of those things where almost everyone is below the algorithm. You know, obviously if you are actually involved in creating it,

consensually or non-consensually, right, clearly you're influenced by the industry. But also people who use it and also just anyone who has sex with anyone who's ever used it because it has this way particularly with young minds of of molding people's sexuality i think there's this there's this false model of sexuality which is sort of linked to sexual disenchantment where you understand sexual desire to be a fixed quantity both in terms of um quantity and also quality and that what porn or other sexual relationships to whatever is it just sort of provides event it just like provides a release for that sexual energy and like you return to equilibrium but actually what's what's clear and what has been made clear actually by the experiment of online porn is that that's not true

like there are um watching porn inscribe certain arousal patterns in the brain you know and the and the porn platforms are designed to do that. They're designed to lead the most compulsive users down this kind of rabbit hole of seeking out more and more extreme stimulation, stuff that no one would ever have thought of, you know, if left to their own devices, you know, age before the internet, even the age before magazines or whatever, no one would have dreamed up some of the absolutely absurd stuff that you can find on the internet for porn. And this is because the internet, you know, provides you access to the global hive mind, but not just that, it's because there is profit

to be made from this stuff. There's a minority of men. I think it's like 2% of men who watch porn seven hours or more a week. And they actually account for like a very large proportion of the porn industry's viewers and profits. Like there's a perito distribution, right? They're not a happy group of people. Like if you're watching that much porn, you can't but really damage your real relationships is very likely you'll end up with erectile dysfunction. I mean erectile dysfunction rates among young men have just skyrocketed in the last 20 years and I think there's this is like a very obvious cause of it. It's very hard to have like a normal sexual relationship. You're very likely to end up watching really weird

stuff including child sexual abuse images. I mean there are psychologists and clinical psychiatrists who are who are treating men who've been found guilty of child sexual abuse image possession saying that actually they're seeing men now who would not previously have ended up doing this because they wouldn't, they're not like, they're not true paedophiles in the sense that this isn't like their sexual orientation.

What they've ended up doing is just going, you know, clicking and clicking and clicking and clicking and ending up watching the most depraved things imaginable because they've got sucked into this, you know. It's called limbic capitalism is a term that's used to describe this area of capitalism. It doesn't just apply to porn,

obviously. It applies to, like, junk food, social media. Things like apps, the reason that apps are often brightly coloured and kind of glistening, you know how they make them glisten, is because it makes your brain think that it's water and fresh fruit. Like, those are stimuli that we find really, really attractive. All of this stuff is designed to, like, to, like, hit you here. You know, in the bit of the brain that actually are not necessarily consciously aware of.

And porn's a really, really good example of limbic capitalism, because the whole thing is just set up to arouse a human body to the extent that it actually almost disables your moral reasoning because going back to sexual disgust, being sexually aroused partially disables your disgust response, because obviously to have sex you have to get close to people. And, you know, normally you're disgusted by strangers, right? Like being in someone's armpit on the tube is disgusting.

But clearly to have sex, you have to override that. So there's like an exchange process. And the disgust response is really closely linked to moral intuition. So it basically means that if you're really sexually aroused, as the platforms are designed to make you so, you can't reason morally in the same way that you normally would. And so a lot of people, including women who use porn, will talk about going to these platforms,

watching stuff that in normal times they would think was appalling. like obvious acts of coercion, whatever, and then they orgasm, and then they push the laptop away, and they're like, oh, my God. But they come back and do it, because the whole thing is designed in that way. And I think that to compare, you know, people will talk about, like, oh, what about erotic art,

and what about, you know, magazines of the 60s or whatever? I mean, there were clearly problems with magazines of the 60s, but it's a completely different base. It's a completely different base. And I think that allowing the online porn industry, to run rampant has just been this ground experiment, particularly on the world's children. And I think as a results are coming in, it's becoming clear that this was a really, really dangerous experiment.

Louise, one of the issue that a lot of the women who watch our show have always wanted us to talk about, you touched on earlier, which is surrogacy. Yeah. I don't really know much about it. I've never really had to think about it. but as we know with some other conversations that women like to have, women are really angry about it. So what's going on there? I mean, I think that the problem is, there are a bunch of problems with surrogacy. Surrogacy is basically where someone is carrying your child for you, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, normally paid, but not necessarily. So there's so-called altruistic surrogacy, which doesn't involve payment. In this country at the moment, the law is that you're not allowed to pay someone. And it happens because you are physically unable to or you don't wish to carry and give birth to a child and you want someone else to do it for you. Those are those the two reasons? Yeah. And there are also two subcategories in the sense that there's traditional surrogacy which involves the surrogate's own egg. Right. And then there's gestational

surrogacy where you have an egg donor, whether that be from a commission, you know, one of the commissioning parents or from a third party. Okay. So they basically put a fertilised egg in you? So you're just a carrier and that's it. It's not your DNA. Yeah, yeah. I mean, one of the reasons that that's happened is because traditional surrogacy arrangements, the surrogate is just obviously the mother in every possible way, right, except legally. And so you ended up with a lot of disputes over custody because surrogates changed their minds, like surprisingly often, surrogates change their minds. You say that. I mean, like I said, I've never thought about this issue before,

but my wife has had a baby, well, we had a baby a couple of months ago. And I can't imagine Like I can't tell the baby over No I know I know I had exactly the same thing Because I've got a 14 month old Oh okay congratulations thank you

And yeah I had exactly the same like You can sort of get it in theory That before you know If you've not actually gone through the process I've had your baby But once you've gone through it You think Yeah because your emotional bond to that child

It's just you know Unless you know clearly there are cases Where say women have terrible post-traumatic stress from the birth or they have postnatal depression or you know like there are clearly sometimes cases where it goes wrong and the bonding doesn't happen as it ought to but in a healthy relationship you know that bond is so strong and it has to be i mean again it's going back to evolutionary thing like newborn babies are completely helpless they absolutely need well you've carried this creature inside you for like i feel sick thinking about it to be honest right now yeah yeah yeah it's probably why i've

never thought about it before yeah it is awful actually yeah yeah and that to me i mean i mean There are a lot of objections you can make to the surrogacy industry. The fact that what often happens is you've got like seriously poor women kept in basically like farm yard condition, you know, in the third world, creating babies for people in the first world. It's like a serious handmaids tale. There are some really, really, really horrible examples. There are also examples which are not like that, much more sort of, you know, organic surrogacy. where you have, you know, grass bed, right? Yeah, where you have, say, altruistic arrangements or whatever.

Yeah. Or women who are paid better. Like, America has a flourishing surrogate industry in states like California. So how much these women get paid in places like California? Do you know? I think potentially quite a lot. And I don't know the numbers off of my head. Like, sometimes quite a lot.

And often these women who don't necessarily have a lot of other options. I mean, it's quite common, for instance, for women whose husbands are in the military to do this because it's a sort of money you can earn, they're strapped for cash, and it's a sort of money you can earn, like, you know, at home. I mean, it's a seriously weird job in a sense that you do it literally all of the time, and you have, like, none of the employment conditions you would expect from literally anything else. It's a very strange job, but, you know, there is obviously, like, a radical feminist, a Marxist case to be made, that this is the most disgusting thing, like form of exploitation at the biological level

that you can imagine. And there's clearly a huge power imbalance based on money. I agree with that. But to me, and it partly comes down to just the experience of having a baby myself, I just think that the idea of setting out to sever the maternal bond, you know, obviously sometimes the maternal bond has to be broken.

You know, if you've got, like, a child that has to be taken into care, right? It's a tragedy. it sometimes has to happen or if a mother dies and the baby has to be raised by someone else these people make the best of it you can find ways of getting through

but obviously it's an awful thing no one wants it to happen but with surrogacy that's the point you set out for a woman to carry a baby to term give birth to this baby and then break that bond potentially never see the baby ever again

and I just think it is that thing isn't it of like denying our animal selves like resisting the most intense emotions that we can have as human beings. And, you know, one of the most, the strongest emotions you can have is maternal love. And I just think that the mutilation of that is terrible. And it applies no matter, the circumstances.

It applies to altruistic as well. I mean, there is some situations. So, you know, say a sister is carrying a baby for her sister or something. It's very complicated, clearly, in terms of the family relationships. You know, maybe if she's continuing to have a relationship with her child slash niece nephew, that's like the best possible version of it. That's almost never what it actually looks like, though. That is, I mean, I'm not a woman, I don't know, blah, blah, but to give birth to something and then just hand it away like it's a parcel? Yeah, like it's commodity. I mean, it is human trafficking,

isn't it? Because you're not actually being paid for the pregnancy. You're being paid to hand the baby over. And I suppose this is one of the solutions to the fact that we need to extend the fertility window. Yeah, this is, this is exactly, this is a great example of just like chipping away at any limits on human freedom, rather than saying, look, life is tragic sometimes, you know, I have, I have huge sympathy for people who can't have children, they're biological children for whatever reason, but also, you know, if, if, if the impediment to your freedom, and your desire is, you know, breaking the maternal bond for money, I just think that is, I think that's too much of a cost to pay.

But also the other thing that I think about here is the fact that actually for a lot of people, and I see this, I don't know what the data is, but anecdotally I see this for a lot of women, the fact that they're not able to have a child biologically is a consequence of choices that have been made prior and quite often under many of the things we've been talking about in this interview, where society has told you that you can have things that actually you can't have. Yeah, yeah, it's usually age-related physicality. Right, and in that process, you've pursued things that don't have the long-term outcomes that you actually want because you've brought into the idea that we live in a world that we don't live in.

It's tragic, actually, Louise, what we're talking about. It really is. And it worries me a lot because, you know, I was saying to you before we started this interview, most of my family are female. I have three younger sisters. I have a ton of female cousin. It's like me and my dad are the only ones holding the fault for masculinity just about in the family. And when I talk to them, these problems are manifest in many of their lives, not all, but in many of their lives. And that's in Russia and Ukraine and Armenia. That's not here in the West where it's far more advanced. Yeah. It worries me a lot this stuff. It really does.

So other than the evil right-wing backlash that you're expecting, how? How do those of us who are trying to be sensible about all of this make efforts to address it? I mean, there is a lot to be said for some of the norms that were torn down. Not all of them by any means, but, you know, marriage as an example, there was a reason for this stuff. You know, marriage has proved itself to be a particularly good basis. But you're talking like you're a funeral. You know what I mean? You're going, well, he's in the ground now.

We'll miss him. I know. Yeah. But. Yeah, yeah. How do you resurrect this stuff? Well, is it resurrect? Is there something new that we have to, you know, find a way to maybe it's not about resurrecting marriage, just acknowledging that it's good? Like, there's got to be a way, right? Because, I mean, let's be objective.

We're pretty screwed if we don't find a way through this. And you have a child, I have a child, they're going to be growing up on this world. I don't want them to be experiencing the stuff that young people are experiencing now. Yeah. There's got to be a way, right? I take hope in the fact that I have had so many responses to this book along the lines of like, thank God for saying you're saying this, that I've been thinking this all this time. And I think that, I think it is possible, despite all the material constraints, despite all, you know,

I think that when everyone is simultaneously thinking something and not saying it, and then suddenly you're allowed to say it, I think things can change really quickly. there's that you know there's that tipping point where actually it becomes permissible and I think that there has been a feeling that if you voice any of this you're going to get smacked down you're going to get accused of being a you know religious conservative whatever which is one of the reasons I felt the need to write the book because I I have a like a I have a strong enough record on feminist campaigning and front line work and you know that I I'm not afraid of people saying that I'm a fraud,

I'm not a real feminist or whatever, because I just sort of laugh it off. So I feel as though I felt a bit of responsibility to put my head above the parapet and say it, and I have got a lot of criticism, but I have equally also got a lot of positive responses, particularly, you know, from readers saying, yeah, this is what we're all thinking.

So that's my little, limer of hope. I'm not generally a very optimistic person, but... There we go. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Before we talk about everything else, about where to find you online and all of that... And before, bonus locals questions, of course. Of course. We always finish with the final question, which is, what's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? I'm going to mess up the optimistic note that we tried to end on. Sex robots.

I think sex robots are on their way. I think they shouldn't be. And I think there's a very like pro-male reason to say that they shouldn't be. I mean, the concern about sex robots has generally been, for a feminist perspective, the idea that you're kind of training men who use them to think of women as being inert and whatever, encouraging violence. I'm sure that's probably true. For me, though, I think the problem, one of the really big problems with sex robots as well as that is that you've got skyrocketing amounts of young men who are not having sex relationships at all,

who are going into their 20s, 30s, remaining virgins, hooked on porn, you know, all of this. And more than that, also just not living productive lives, you know, not holding down jobs, not like, not making any progress in their lives, just stuck in this kind of miserable adolescence. And I think sex robots would just supercharged that. If they ever became, you know, affordable for these men and became like sufficiently convincing,

which they are on track to. Because what sex robots basically do to the monkey brain, you know, to the evolved mind, is they give you a completely false sense of like your own success in the world. You can be, you know, you don't have to go to the gym, you don't have to clean your room, you don't have to have to have a job, you don't have to own a house, you don't have to do any of the things that will actually make you

a happier and more enriched human being because you've got your sex. robot who will give you the impression that actually you're a stud, right? And I think that there's a, it's like super stimuli times a million, right, the sex robot. It's like the most, the most perfect encapsulation of that, of that phenomenon and that risk. And yeah, I think that we need to, I think we need to ban them basically, like whatever mechanism is necessary. Very interesting. Well, it's been a positive, optimistic. uplifting interview.

But Louise, you know what? I have to say, I really, first of all, respect you for writing the book. I really am very, very impressed with how carefully you've thought about these things and how much you have to say. And I do hope that you continue to write on these issues. And we'd love to have you back again next time you've got a book out or anything you particularly feel like you have to say. I actually think that some of the stuff we talked about today is probably going to be shaping

the world for many decades to come and very. powerful ways. And a lot of us are going to have to think extra carefully about how to navigate all that if we're going to get to a better place, which you don't think we're going to get to anyway. So thanks for coming on. The book is, of course, the case against the sexual revolutions. Sexual revolution, rather, where can people find you online and follow your work if they want to get more depressed than they already are? So I also write for the new statesman and I write for Daily Mail. Great. Are you on Twitter? I am on Twitter at Louise. M underscore Perry.

Perfect. Louise, thank you so much for coming on and thank you guys for watching and listening. We'll see you on locals for a couple of bonus questions from you for Louise. But in the meantime, thank you for watching and we'll see you very soon

with another brilliant episode like this one or Rorscho. And for those for you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys. How does a single woman find a guy who isn't totally porn adult? Thank you.