The Absolute State Of Dating Today - Louise Perry (4K)

Chris Williamson 0:00 There's a Wall Street Journal column about marriage as a mirror of human nature that says 40% of young adults say marriage has outlived its usefulness.

Louise Perry 0:10 Hmm.

Chris Williamson 0:10 What do you think is going on?

Louise Perry 0:12 I mean, I'm not surprised, 'cause these are young adults who've, like... I think, so I think in London now, and this would be true in lots of parts of the West, um, about half of kids will reach the age of 15 not living with their biological father. Half. So I guess these young people just look around and they're like, "Well, it's, like, evident to me that marriage isn't working." So-

Chris Williamson 0:37 Mary Eberstadt's got this idea about, um, motherhood and family life as a mimetic desire.

Louise Perry 0:44 Hmm.

Chris Williamson 0:45 That the dearth of mothers and families causes fewer people to see them, which causes fewer people to want them, which causes fewer people to, to, to, to, to, to all the way down.

Louise Perry 0:55 I think that's definitely true. And you can see that in data actually with, um, like if your sister or your close friend has a baby, you're more likely to have a baby in the year or two following, and vice versa. So if, if the people around you are not having children, you're less likely to have children yourself. I think, and that's, it, I think that's so interesting because there's always been this assumption by demographers up until birth rates started really crashing in recent decades, that people would just spontaneously decide once they had access to contraception or whatever, to have 2.1 kids, that that was, like, the natural settling point for the human species, that we'd all, we'd all reach there and we'd just stay there.

Chris Williamson 1:35 Mm-hmm.

Louise Perry 1:35 And that's clearly not true, because so many countries now are falling way below replacement. And I think it's because actually there's no law of nature that says that people should want 2.1 kids. People look around them and they're like, "Oh, okay, everyone here has one or zero or six." And then that becomes, as you say, the mimetic desire. I think that becomes what's considered normal. And humans are completely obsessed with what's normal. Which is why I'm just genuinely quite, generally quite skeptical of the idea of, um, of people having this, like, absolute agency or abso- Yeah, I mean, we, we do clearly have, we do clearly have free will. But I think that what we consider to be desirable, normal, the life template is so incredibly dependent on what other people around us think.

Chris Williamson 2:25 Mm.

Louise Perry 2:26 Um, which is, I think exactly why we've got into this downward spiral in terms of fertility.

Chris Williamson 2:32 There's a... I love your analogy or y- your conception of prudishness

Chris Williamson 2:38 and licentiousness, that there's, we kind of flip-flop between the two.

Louise Perry 2:41 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 2:43 Which one do you think we're in now?

Louise Perry 2:45 Uh, licentiousness transitioning to prudishness, I think.

Chris Williamson 2:50 Okay. Is this like the, uh, peri-pilled equivalent of the hard men create strong times-

Louise Perry 2:54 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 2:54 ... weak men, weak times, blah, blah, blah?

Louise Perry 2:57 Loose women create... (laughs)

Chris Williamson 2:59 Yeah. (laughs)

Louise Perry 2:59 Yeah, right, okay, okay. Yeah. Maybe. I mean, I think it's kind of natural to have... I think there's always a bit of a rollercoaster within culture, because you reach a point where, um, you know, whatever particular excess becomes obvious, and then people start quietly thinking, "Hang on, I don't really like this." And then some people start saying loudly, "I don't like this." And then, you know, everyone kind of joins in.

Chris Williamson 3:25 Mm-hmm.

Louise Perry 3:26 You know, so on forever through history. Um, what's different about this one, of course, is that we invented the pill. So previous periods of licentiousness, they didn't have the technological means to sort of go all the way with it.

Chris Williamson 3:42 There was a glass ceiling on how licentious you could be without incurring a ton of costs.

Louise Perry 3:46 Yeah. Like, you always had some people, some wo- I mean, 'cause it's women who, like, carry the, literally carry the consequences of, um, of sex outside marriage, right? There were always some women who, either because they had to, 'cause they were in prostitution, 'cause they were poor, or because they were, like, crazy aristocrats who just could be eccentric and get away with it, who would, who would behave unusually. But most women in the middle, you know, having sex is probably the most consequential thing a woman can do without contraception. So most women would take that decision very, very seriously, for obvious reasons, up until the '60s, and then it's all out the window. And we can't un-invent that. Like, the pill is not gonna get un-invented.

Chris Williamson 4:33 Mm.

Louise Perry 4:34 Even if all these... I mean, there is a little bit of a reaction of the kind of, what I think of as the Goop class, right? (laughs) Like, like women who are really into-

Chris Williamson 4:43 Here we go.

Louise Perry 4:43 ... women who are really into wellness.

Chris Williamson 4:45 The Goop class?

Louise Perry 4:47 Yeah. Like, really into, into-

Chris Williamson 4:49 Goop?

Louise Perry 4:49 ... Gwyneth Paltrow. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 4:51 What's, what d'you, why is Goop... What's she got to do with Goop? What's that?

Louise Perry 4:55 Because there's this recognition, which I think is true, that hormonal birth control is bad for you, basically.

Chris Williamson 4:59 Mm-hmm.

Louise Perry 5:00 And so there's a, it's, it's not coming from traditional Catholics or anything like that. It's coming from women who are, I think, justifiably concerned about the health effects-

Chris Williamson 5:10 Mm-hmm.

Louise Perry 5:11 ... who are doing things like fertility tracking rather than hormonal birth control. Like, that's happening, but I don't think that, I don't think that heralds a mass sort of rejection of the pill.

Chris Williamson 5:22 O- okay. There's, can you dig into the Goop class for me then? What are they doing?

Louise Perry 5:26 (laughs) So, like, Natural Cycles, for instance, if you've heard of this.

Chris Williamson 5:29 I have, yeah. Yeah. Sarah Hill did a great, uh, talked about a great study that was done to do with, uh, attraction to the partner when you were, uh, t- got together on the pill versus off the pill, et cetera, et cetera.

Louise Perry 5:40 Yeah, I know... (laughs) Okay, so two things. I know, I know quite a lot of women who have, who have, who've abandoned hormonal birth control and have ended up doing whatever kind of well, more like wellness-maximizing means of fertility. And you can also do things like tracking your, like, making your exercise regime gel with your-

Chris Williamson 5:57 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I've seen that.

Louise Perry 5:58 ... your menstrual cycle and things like that. Yeah. So there's a whole, there's a whole wealth of, like, technology-enabled, um-... uh, reproductive wellness available, which is- which is good. I have nothing against it. Um, I also know so many women who've got pregnant from doing that accidentally. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 6:12 What, from their exercise routine?

Louise Perry 6:14 No, got preg- (laughs)

Chris Williamson 6:16 (laughs)

Louise Perry 6:18 Um, it doesn't work that well. It doesn't work that well, like realistically.

Chris Williamson 6:24 Natural Cycles is a thermometer under the tongue, right?

Louise Perry 6:27 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson 6:27 Okay.

Louise Perry 6:27 I mean, it's- it's like a more sophisticated version of just tracking that Catholics have done forever. Um, but like there's quite a good chance-

Chris Williamson 6:38 Who knew it was-

Louise Perry 6:38 ... you could get easily pregnant.

Chris Williamson 6:38 ... it was just Catholic technology all over again.

Louise Perry 6:40 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 6:40 Okay, so prudishness, prudishness to licentiousness, and you think that we're, what, sort of tumbling just over the top of that super sex-positive into what's coming next?

Louise Perry 6:51 I think that- I think that we're, yeah, I- I think the reason my book did unexpectedly well is because, yes, we're at that tipping point where everyone's been privately... Well, not everyone, but a lot of people have been privately thinking, "This is weird." And then they... and then someone starts saying it and you're like, "Yeah, this is weird."

Chris Williamson 7:10 Mm-hmm.

Louise Perry 7:11 I think that that... I think that's probably the point that we're at. I, the only thing is though, I don't know if it's gonna be as radical a period of prudishness as we've seen historically because we've got the pill, one, right?

Chris Williamson 7:23 Mm-hmm.

Louise Perry 7:23 So that's like a completely different material situation. And two, because we've got the internet, we've got porn, like is that really going to be... My suspicion is probably what we'll see is we'll see elites reacting against the licentious period. We'll see, you know, the GOOP class, like the-

Chris Williamson 7:43 (laughs) .

Louise Perry 7:43 But also the male equivalent, you know, the... I mean, you know this, that impulse control is such an important element of living in our kind of technological landscape.

Chris Williamson 7:54 Mm-hmm.

Louise Perry 7:54 Like if you can't put down your phone, you're never going to do well-

Chris Williamson 8:00 Do anything.

Louise Perry 8:00 ... professionally. Do anything, yeah. So the people who are best able to resist all of the various temptations, including sexual temptations, of our new material conditions-

Chris Williamson 8:13 Mm-hmm.

Louise Perry 8:14 ... are the people who are most likely to find themselves in the elites.

Chris Williamson 8:17 I'll tell you what's interesting, conscientiousness is moderately heritable like all-

Louise Perry 8:21 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 8:21 ... uh, psychological dispositions, and yet what you're saying here is that the people who are going to best be able to control their reproduction are the people who are high in conscientiousness, which means that you're going to select for people low in conscientiousness who are going to be having more kids on average.

Louise Perry 8:37 (laughs) Yes. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 8:39 This is the future, talking-

Louise Perry 8:40 Yes.

Chris Williamson 8:41 Talking about the- the decline of, um, of birth rates, you know, all of the people who are, uh, anti-natalist or anti-children or family creation, but also from the left, need to read one book on behavioral genetics to realize that if you want your particular philo- philosophical ideology, uh, political ideology to keep going, in the space of 100 years, it's just going to be Ashkenazi Jews and Mormons and- and, uh, you guys are gonna be... Because again, political ideology is like 60% heritable.

Louise Perry 9:15 I agree with you, and people have been worrying about this for like 150 years. It's just that that... Like you're familiar with Francis Galton?

Chris Williamson 9:22 Yes.

Louise Perry 9:22 He was the, you know, the father, the father of eugenics. He- he was like... A- a- as far as I'm aware, I mean this was before they even knew what a gene was. He was the first person to sit down and draw up family trees and realize that what he called genius was heritable. And that-

Chris Williamson 9:43 Wasn't it hereditary genius? Was that not his first thing?

Louise Perry 9:46 That sounds right.

Chris Williamson 9:46 Yeah.

Louise Perry 9:47 And so particular families were particularly likely to generate these, you know, prominent figures. And obviously the sort of methodology he was using now seems really archaic-

Chris Williamson 9:57 Mm-hmm.

Louise Perry 9:58 ... and how do you measure genius or whatever. But he was basically right. He was basically... Recognized that all of these things were... Uh, basically every psychological trait is heritable to some extent. And I mean, that's where... The- the thing that people forget about the eugenics movement is that it was, it was progressive. It was like self-consciously progressive. That's how people understood themselves. And it was often anti-religious, it was anti-conservative. It was seen as like this brave new scientific frontier that so many people were into. Like it's- it's... I've been, I've been, um, reading about this at the moment for a piece I'm writing, and the popularity of eugenics in the early 20th century is like mind-boggling and has mostly been memory holed.

Chris Williamson 10:42 Branding problem.

Louise Perry 10:43 Yeah. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 10:43 Just needs- needs a new branding problem.

Louise Perry 10:45 Well, I mean, we... Well, what they were talking about mostly, the geneticists of the period, was using the state to either encourage some people to reproduce or discourage other people from reproducing. And there were some really... Particularly in the States, the use of forced sterilization.

Chris Williamson 11:02 Did you come across that, um, that particular lady who had had, I think it was, uh, the statement was, "Three generations of idiots are enough."

Louise Perry 11:10 Exactly. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 11:11 Yeah, you saw that one?

Louise Perry 11:11 Exactly.

Chris Williamson 11:12 Yeah.

Louise Perry 11:12 I can't remember her name-

Chris Williamson 11:13 Yeah.

Louise Perry 11:13 ... but yeah, that was like im- important case law in the States.

Chris Williamson 11:16 Mm-hmm.

Louise Perry 11:16 Um, and yeah, like, uh, really a lot of people were sterilized during that quite brief period in America. Not so much in the UK, but of course it was the Nazis that just completely... Made that line of thinking completely unthinkable.

Chris Williamson 11:29 Branding problem, I'm telling you. So looking at this sort of licentiousness, prudishness paradigm, which I think is really important, I think it's... Anything that kind of has a flip-flop seems to be accurate to me 'cause it always swings back and forth.

Louise Perry 11:41 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 11:42 I found this article that said, "Looking for no manse: Study finds teens want less sex in their TV and movies." Have you come across this?

Louise Perry 11:50 No, that's what I'm saying.

Chris Williamson 11:50 Very interesting. So-Younger

Chris Williamson 11:52 generations don't think sex is necessary to the plots of most movies and TV shows. That's according to a recent study from UCLA. Researchers interviewed 1,500 individuals between the ages of 10 and 24 about the way that they're interacting with media. Those between the ages of 13 and 24 were asked if they thought sex was needed for the plot in entertainment, and 47.5% of respondents said it was not. They also said they wanted to see less romance on screen, 44%, and more content centered around platonic friendships, 51.5%. In a video UCLA released in conjunction with the survey, 16-year-old respondent, Anna, said, "When there's media with too much sex in, me and my friends often feel uncomfortable." She later added, "I feel that it is way too graphic." The survey also quoted pop star Olivia Rodrigo's answer to the question of whether or not she watched the HBO series, The Idol. "I don't have the desire to. I remember walking out of Barbie and being like, 'Wow, it's so long since I've seen a movie that is female-centered in a way that isn't sexual or about her pain or her being traumatized.'" What do you make of that?

Louise Perry 12:53 Interesting. Um, so is it just the girls who are, who are reacting against it, does it say?

Chris Williamson 12:57 I'm not sure. Uh, researchers say-

Louise Perry 12:59 Because it's like, I mean-

Chris Williamson 12:59 ... 1,500 individuals.

Louise Perry 13:01 Okay.

Chris Williamson 13:02 Uh, no, it seems like it was, it seems like it was both, uh, males and females that were saying that.

Louise Perry 13:06 I have got three possible explanations come to mind. The first is it's the girls not liking porn culture. Fair enough.

Chris Williamson 13:12 Mm-hmm.

Louise Perry 13:13 I think that it's not hard to find women, young women, who've been raised in this, you know, who had the internet a- access from the get-go, who absolutely hate porn culture, like, hate what the boys are expecting from them, all of this.

Chris Williamson 13:26 Mm-hmm.

Louise Perry 13:26 It might be that. It might be, um, differential fertility rates already having an impact in terms of the conservatism and religiosity of young people, because, you know, um, like in America, for the first time in 60, 70 years, you've actually seen a decline in pro-LGBT attitudes among young people.

Chris Williamson 13:52 Wow. Where's that coming from?

Louise Perry 13:54 Well, my guess is that it's coming from the fact that basically since the pill, more-

Chris Williamson 14:00 There's only conservatives that are having kids.

Louise Perry 14:01 ... more conservative, more religious people are having kids, yeah. And then that's already starting to play out in terms of the younger generations being more religious and conservative.

Chris Williamson 14:07 We're seeing that male-female, uh, liberal-conservative divide amongst-

Louise Perry 14:12 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 14:12 ... kids as well though, right?

Louise Perry 14:14 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 14:14 So presumably, if you split that polling down, but it seems like everybody's shifting a little bit further right.

Louise Perry 14:20 That's plausible.

Chris Williamson 14:21 Yeah.

Louise Perry 14:21 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 14:22 All right. And what was the third one?

Louise Perry 14:23 Uh, like xenoestrogens. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 14:28 (laughs)

Louise Perry 14:28 It's possible, isn't it?

Chris Williamson 14:29 Everything... All roads lead back to Alex Jones, ultimately.

Louise Perry 14:33 Yeah, I mean, he was sort of onto something, wasn't he? I mean, uh, but it is possible that the sex recession, so-called, is partly hormonal, is partly caused by... I mean, it might partly be caused by women being on hormonal birth control, which is changing their sexuality.

Chris Williamson 14:50 Mm.

Louise Perry 14:50 It might also be caused by men being lower T.

Chris Williamson 14:54 So, the low testosterone for men, do you wanna hear my real horseshoe theory for this?

Louise Perry 14:58 Okay.

Chris Williamson 14:58 Right. So, I learned this whilst talking to Dr. Sarah Hill, who wrote This Is Your Brain on Birth Control. Right. And, um,

Chris Williamson 15:06 she taught me that male testosterone levels are mediated by the fertility of the women in their local ecology. So, if you are a, uh, male in their 20s, but you happen to be around a bunch of other men or a bunch of other grandmothers perhaps, or a bunch of children-

Louise Perry 15:24 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 15:25 ... your testosterone levels drop.

Louise Perry 15:28 Interesting.

Chris Williamson 15:28 And what you have are women who are very highly artificially suppressing their fertility. So, men are able to smell the T-shirt of a woman and be able to pick the one, the one that they're most attractive to, is the w- attracted to... Is the one who is currently at that stage of her cycle, uh, sh- she's currently fertile, et cetera, et cetera. They can see... They've done studies where men watch women's silhouettes walking.

Louise Perry 15:52 Mm.

Chris Williamson 15:53 And the women who are currently, uh, during their seven-day you-can-get-me-pregnant period, they're the ones that they're most attracted to. The fucking silhouette of the way they walk displays the current-

Louise Perry 16:04 And h- and high heels replicate that. That's the idea.

Chris Williamson 16:06 Mm-hmm.

Louise Perry 16:06 The high heels make you walk in that distinctive way-

Chris Williamson 16:09 Move, jiggle in that way.

Louise Perry 16:09 ... that make you, that make you look like you're ovulating.

Chris Williamson 16:11 So, you have this recursive, uh, uh, feedback loop of hormonal birth control-

Louise Perry 16:15 Mm.

Chris Williamson 16:15 ... causes women to select for men who are more providers rather than protectors.

Louise Perry 16:19 Mm.

Chris Williamson 16:20 They want provisioners, right? They want the, um, academic and the resources more agreeable.

Louise Perry 16:25 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 16:25 They then either come off or don't come off birth control, but find that they're... Come out of this fucking hormonal fugue state, "Oh my God, who am I in a relationship with?" But you also have this effect on men, too, not only socially, in, "I notice that lots of women seem to be attracted to Timothée Chalamet, who's painting his nails and kind of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah."

Louise Perry 16:43 Yep.

Chris Williamson 16:44 But the genuine physiological, hormonal response to men just being around lots of women who are on hormonal birth control. Now, processed foods, not enough time outside, not enough time with vitamin D, not enough time with friends, da-da-da-da-da, but there's a big X factor apparently amongst, uh, testosterone researchers, who don't know why men's T levels have dropped-

Louise Perry 17:09 Mm.

Chris Williamson 17:10 ... the amount that they have. Right? It's about one percent a year, every year, since, I think, 1950.

Louise Perry 17:16 Wow.

Chris Williamson 17:16 So it's like... And then that goes to 100, and then it's that again, and it goes to 100. So, it's not how we're in minus fucking, uh, testosterone soon. But, uh, yeah, so hormonal birth control has a lot to answer for, I think.

Louise Perry 17:28 It's a really tricky trade-off, isn't it? Because, uh, like, there are clear downsides to having a bunch of low T men, you know, in terms of, in terms of fertility, in terms of men and women just fancying each other and like having functional relationships. But also, like high testosterone is also associated with crime and violence.

Chris Williamson 17:48 Yeah.

Louise Perry 17:49 So, which, you know, do we choose to have a society of kind of-... sexless, incredibly like online...

Chris Williamson 18:02 Placid, sorry people.

Louise Perry 18:04 Yeah. Who also are quite chill. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 18:08 Yeah.

Louise Perry 18:08 And don't cause like enormous problems. I don't know. That's like, that's like a genuinely hard thing to choose.

Chris Williamson 18:14 Yeah. You could almost look at it kind of like, uh, disposition sterilization-

Louise Perry 18:19 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 18:19 ... in a way.

Louise Perry 18:20 Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 18:23 Fuck. Yeah, but-

Louise Perry 18:24 And then we have problems with like, like this is a real problem with the military. I'm sure you know. Like massive recruitment problems.

Chris Williamson 18:31 I thought that was because everyone's fat and got diabetes.

Louise Perry 18:33 Well, that too.

Chris Williamson 18:34 Right.

Louise Perry 18:35 But also not being interested in it.

Chris Williamson 18:37 Or men just don't wanna wage war.

Louise Perry 18:38 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 18:39 We can do it from modern warfare or, um, I'm on Reddit.

Louise Perry 18:42 It's probably also partly to do with lack of like faith in the nation, like-

Chris Williamson 18:47 Mm-hmm.

Louise Perry 18:48 ... being less patriotic in general. Like the, the pool of potentially great soldiers just gets smaller every year. And it's sort of fine, I guess, to get away with it because if we're not actually in a hot war and if we have loads of technology, but y- you can imagine a scenario where that becomes an enormous problem.

Chris Williamson 19:03 Mm. What-

Louise Perry 19:04 Like mass mobilization, I don't know how we'd actually fair.

Chris Williamson 19:07 The, uh, Chinese government banned K-pop. Do you see this?

Louise Perry 19:13 Yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson 19:13 'Cause they didn't want-

Louise Perry 19:14 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 19:14 ... what was it they called them? It was like sissy men. "We don't want any more sissy men."

Louise Perry 19:19 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 19:19 So it was all of the Chinese male role models were like ou- super high tea jacked dudes.

Louise Perry 19:26 Mm.

Chris Williamson 19:26 And they didn't want this BTS like soy, like culture infecting them. Or that's how they s- that's what they saw it as.

Louise Perry 19:37 Something I learned about that from, um, I had a, um, Rana Mitter who's a professor of Chinese history and politics at Oxford on my podcast. I didn't know this. Um, in China, there's a very strong association between communism and masculinity. And actually it's the old pre-communist like Confucian soy boys basically. (laughs) You know, the sort of, the sort of like intellectual, indoorsy-

Chris Williamson 20:02 Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Louise Perry 20:03 ... that's associated with pre-communist China.

Chris Williamson 20:06 Mm.

Louise Perry 20:07 And so some of the reaction against feminization through K-pop or whatever-

Chris Williamson 20:12 Mm-hmm.

Louise Perry 20:13 ... is associated with, um, anti-communist movement.

Chris Williamson 20:17 So this sort of Gen Z

Chris Williamson 20:19 pushback against romance, this is what I thought was super interesting, right? So we've got, uh, y- your spectrum of prudishness and licentiousness.

Louise Perry 20:27 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 20:28 But it's not just the, uh, short-termism of, uh, physical desires being satisfied. There's also another level to this which is to do with romance and how central your connection to another person, a significant other is, right? 'Cause that kind of fits on the prudishness licentiousness scale, but it's also not exactly the same. Like that would be something that's slightly different. Like how important is it that you find a significant other? And-

Louise Perry 20:55 Mm.

Chris Williamson 20:56 ... I think that at least a little bit of that UCLA study probably is Rachel Zeigler, Ziglar as the new Snow White saying, "W- we don't need a prince to come and save her." She didn't have a prince. She had a stalker. Um, like sh-

Louise Perry 21:12 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 21:12 ... a sleeping beauty can't consent. Uh, like I, I wonder if it's not just a pushback against the sex side of stuff, but the no-mance, right? Just against romance culture in general. Uh, HSBC got Emily Ratajkowski, the tennis player to come and do, uh, Fairer Tales: Uh, Princesses Doing It For Themselves, which was a rewriting of Cinderella, Rapunzel, and Snow White where instead of waiting for a prince, the princesses went and started their own businesses on their own-

Louise Perry 21:44 Mm.

Chris Williamson 21:45 ... and invested their money wisely. So I think, (laughs) I think because HSBC is really where we go for like modern fucking dating culture.

Louise Perry 21:54 Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 21:55 So yeah, I just think that this Gen Z pushback against what may on the surface appear to be about sex, may actually run deeper.

Louise Perry 22:03 The thing is that they're sort of right. The sort of a, a man, a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle old line. Or the line from Gloria Steinem I always thought was really clever which is, "We became the men we once wanted to marry." I.e. second wave feminists were able to do that. And, uh, I mean, I always, I always think there's about the sort of, the disposability of men in modern culture, which is totally real. You know, the, the, like that basic red pill position is true. There is this problem of men basically not feeling having purpose, not feeling needed, whatever. W- women not feeling as if they need husbands because like they kinda don't, you know?

Chris Williamson 22:44 Mm-hmm.

Louise Perry 22:45 If they don't have to... If they're not having children, or even if they do have children, you know, they can participate... Like it turns out that actually women being slightly more conscientious than men are, for instance, and slightly more agreeable than men are, is actually really great in a sort of laptop job-

Chris Williamson 23:02 Yep.

Louise Perry 23:03 ... economy.

Chris Williamson 23:03 Brain based instead of brawn based.

Louise Perry 23:04 Yeah. Like women are actually slightly better. Not, not at the, not at the tech nice. You've still got overwhelmingly male CEOs and things like that, but in the kind of the, the median range, women are actually kind of better employees-

Chris Williamson 23:16 Mm.

Louise Perry 23:16 ... in service economies.

Chris Williamson 23:18 Mm-hmm.

Louise Perry 23:20 You know, the problem that men are facing is not actually feminism as such, although feminism has kind of accelerated some of these phenomena. It's just, it's basically technology and affluence. In highly technologically sophisticated and affluent societies, men who are not in this incredibly, you know, far right tale, super successful, intelligent, whatever, just normal men have less to do. We don't need brawn. Like when, when we invented the internal combustion engine, the importance of male muscle power-... dropped like a stone.

Chris Williamson 23:59 Diminished.

Louise Perry 24:00 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 24:00 Yeah, and then as soon as you had equality in terms of access to education and employment-

Louise Perry 24:06 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 24:06 ... and you'd pivoted already from that brawn-based to brain-based economy, it turns out that women have a kind of, a genetic unfair advantage with the current working environment.

Louise Perry 24:15 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 24:15 Which meant that the, you know, like... L- l- this is something that the manosphere or the red pill never really gets right, like when they talk about how, uh, women in the past and the culture that they applied to their dating made them happier, they forget the fact that women were largely financial prisoners-

Louise Perry 24:35 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 24:35 ... of their partner, because they had nowhere else to go. So yeah, maybe they were able to remain loyal and make better sandwiches, but how much of that was by choice and how much of that was Stockholm Syndrome? Uh...

Louise Perry 24:47 It's probably better, I think... Well, so the big problem with the status quo right now, where we have, you know, women are actually earning more than men are at most points along the income distribution, just not at the very top.

Chris Williamson 25:01 Yeah.

Louise Perry 25:01 Like the gender pay gap is basically a result of the fact that you've got a handful of male CEOs who make an enormous sums and they get-

Chris Williamson 25:06 You see that the current PM-

Louise Perry 25:08 ... stay-at-home wives.

Chris Williamson 25:08 ... of Iceland, the country, not the, uh, fucking company-

Louise Perry 25:12 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 25:12 ... uh, is on strike along with all other Icelandic women at the moment over the gender pay gap.

Louise Perry 25:16 Right.

Chris Williamson 25:18 Anyway-

Louise Perry 25:18 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 25:18 ... you were saying? Yeah, along-

Louise Perry 25:19 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 25:19 ... pretty much, pretty much everywhere out- outside of Iceland and CEOs...

Louise Perry 25:22 The gender

Louise Perry 25:23 pay gap is an artifact, one, of the fact that there are some, a small number of very, very high-earning men, and two, of, it's basically, it- it's basically a maternity gap. It's actually-

Chris Williamson 25:31 Right.

Louise Perry 25:31 ... just the fact that having children-

Chris Williamson 25:33 Motherhood tax.

Louise Perry 25:33 Yeah, having children means that you can't operate in the workplace in the way that a man can. Like at the very least when you're very pregnant and you've just given birth, you know? But women are choosing not to do that, right? So if you, if you, if you don't have children and you are a sort of typical woman in terms of being slightly more conscientious, slightly more agreeable, having all of these, you know, being more, probably mean more punctual, being a better employee, you do basically have more of an advantage in the workplace than another man. But this is completely unsustainable (laughs) because of going back to the whole birth rates thing. Like, any culture that just stops reproducing itself is not gonna last. It's either gonna just wither away and die or it's going to be overtaken by some other culture. And I, and I sort of think, like, the, the, the answer to the riddle of why every culture that we see on historical record that has sustained itself and flourished has been patriarchal is possibly because a culture has to be patriarchal in order to reproduce itself. Like, that's my black pill (laughs) -

Chris Williamson 26:40 (sighs)

Louise Perry 26:40 ... reading this stuff.

Chris Williamson 26:41 Dig into that.

Louise Perry 26:42 Because it's very hard to be, to have lots of kids as a woman. You can maybe have one or two, just about, and it not, like, affect your career. But there's just a straightforward clash between the labor market and reproduction for women that you can kind of get away with if you make enough money, because you can pay for nannies and all this kinda stuff. But for most women, it's just, like... That's just, that's, that, they're ir- they're almost irreconcilable. You have to, you have to trade off something. And what most women are choosing to do, it seems, is that they're having fewer children.

Chris Williamson 27:23 Mm-hmm.

Louise Perry 27:23 Which for them personally might actually, you know, the truth is, like, children are expensive and knackering. Like, they're wonderful, they are wonderful, but if you've not had them, you don't know how wonderful they are. Like, once you've had your children, you just love them more than, more than life itself.

Chris Williamson 27:37 Mm-hmm.

Louise Perry 27:37 Like, every mother I know says, "I would unhesitatingly die for my children." But if you've never experienced that kind of love and it's kind of theoretical-

Chris Williamson 27:47 Abstract.

Louise Perry 27:47 ... yeah, then why wouldn't you say, "Actually no, I'd rather make this ne- next promotion"?

Chris Williamson 27:52 Well, uh, the

Chris Williamson 27:54 modern culture prioritizes pleasure in the here and now-

Louise Perry 27:57 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 27:57 ... and short-termism over everything else.

Louise Perry 27:59 I think human beings just do that as well.

Chris Williamson 28:01 M- you know, but maybe there was... I don't know. M- m- m- maybe you're right, but it seems like there was definitely a preparedness to, uh, invest now for returns in the future more so. Our ability to... Th- the marshmallow test was more effective 100 years ago for most.

Louise Perry 28:18 I think because culture kind of... I think culture serves, good culture serves the purpose of channeling people's... Making people more long-termist.

Chris Williamson 28:26 Mm-hmm.

Louise Perry 28:27 Because our natural inclination is to be short-termist, most of us, and... Or, I mean, the thing is with having children is, like, you, you're short-termist 'cause you wanna have sex and then, oh whoops, a baby came along.

Chris Williamson 28:38 (laughs)

Louise Perry 28:38 Like, normally you don't have to think about that.

Chris Williamson 28:40 Yeah, that was evolution's big trick, wasn't it?

Louise Perry 28:42 Yeah, exactly, but now-

Chris Williamson 28:43 You thought you were just having fun.

Louise Perry 28:44 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 28:44 Guess what? The next 19 years of your life are blocked off. Yeah.

Louise Perry 28:47 And, and I mean, there's like, there's a certain elegance to that, right? But we've lost that because of contraception. And now there are still groups, there are still cultures, there are still, there are still people who just love babies and will have loads of kids because they just get so much joy from babies, which is great. Um, like, I'm one of those people. I would rather have loads of kids and earn less money.

Chris Williamson 29:08 Mm-hmm.

Louise Perry 29:08 I've, like, made that rational decision. But a lot of people, for a lot of people, that's not an obvious choice. Some cultures are still channeling people into being more traditionalists, being more long-termist. But the mainstream culture absolutely isn't doing that. And the, the very likely consequence of that is that... I mean, like, I can't remember the numbers exactly, but South Korea, you'll know, has the lowest fertility rate in the world.

Chris Williamson 29:33 For every 100 South Koreans, there will be four great-grandchildren.

Louise Perry 29:37 Right. Like, there's never been a plague that has knocked out that many people.

Chris Williamson 29:43 There's a 96% extinction rate over the next 100 years-

Louise Perry 29:46 Incredible.

Chris Williamson 29:46 ... of Koreans.

Louise Perry 29:47 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 29:47 Remembering that we shut down the entire world for something that kills 1 to 2% of people.

Louise Perry 29:51 Yeah.It's crazy.

Chris Williamson 29:52 Yeah.

Louise Perry 29:52 It's the most incredible evolutionary bottleneck that we're going through.

Chris Williamson 29:55 In other news, this episode is brought to you by Cozy Earth. We sleep one-third of our lives. Do not spend 33% of your life in anything other than unbeatably comfortable sheets. Getting a good night's sleep is the ultimate game-changer, and the sheets that you have are a massive determinant of just how comfortable you feel. Cozy Earth has the most premium bedding and loungewear that I've ever found. They're made from super soft viscose from highly sustainable bamboo, temperature regulating so you will sleep comfortably all year round, and an enhanced weave quality that won't pill. So it's higher quality, will last longer, and you will have a more comfortable night's sleep and wake up feeling more rested and revitalized. Plus, there is a 10-year warranty on all of their products. That's how confident they are that they're gonna last. But don't just take my word for it. Oprah has chosen Cozy Earth as one of her favorite things for five years in a row now. You can get an exclusive 35% discount sitewide on everything by going to cozyearth.com/modernwisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM35 at checkout, cozyearth.com/modernwisdom and MODERNWISDOM at checkout. The interesting thing about declining birth rates is that it's a... It's not an existential risk in the traditional sense of permanent, unrecoverable collapse. It's not a classic version of it.

Louise Perry 31:07 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 31:07 But it, it's, it's a, uh, population risk that's very unique in that there's no smoke in the sky, there's no asteroid heading toward Earth. There's no, there's no lead measure if you're looking until it's way too late.

Louise Perry 31:22 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 31:22 Right? You don't feel it getting warmer. You don't even feel it getting, uh, quieter because we've got an aging population whilst a reducing, uh, birth rate, which means that you can have more people on the planet while fewer are being made. So you can almost predict out that was it a-

Louise Perry 31:40 So it feels really counterintuitive, yeah.

Chris Williamson 31:41 Yeah. Was it, uh-

Louise Perry 31:42 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 31:42 Demography is destiny.

Louise Perry 31:43 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 31:44 Right? Yeah. I, uh, I definitely think that a big chunk of it is this prioritization of the here and now, of pleasure, of meaning. Did you see, uh, the girl with the list on TikTok?

Louise Perry 31:55 No.

Chris Williamson 31:56 In, this, this needs to be, uh, for the PeriPill out there, this needs to be a part of it.

Louise Perry 32:00 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 32:00 This girl wrote a 350 point eight-page-long list and printed them out on TikTok of all of the reasons why she didn't wanna have kids.

Louise Perry 32:10 Mm.

Chris Williamson 32:10 Uh, and these ranged from things like literally a parasite living inside of my body, to can't wear cute heels anymore, to, uh, unable to do brunch with the girls.

Louise Perry 32:20 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 32:21 Uh, and then she printed off like a t- one-page list of reasons to have kids.

Louise Perry 32:24 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 32:24 And now, like, #girlwiththelist on TikTok's got millions and billions of plays.

Louise Perry 32:29 Ah, amazing.

Chris Williamson 32:30 (laughs)

Louise Perry 32:30 Yeah. I mean, I guess she's kind of right. But the problem is that the thing you have to have on that, that reasons to have kids, is like, like, inexpressible joy, which to me-

Chris Williamson 32:46 The most meaningful experience of my life.

Louise Perry 32:47 Yeah, which to me does cancel out g- like, brunch with the girls. Also, you can bring your baby to brunch with the girls. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 32:52 You know, and when it comes to heels, look at the shoes that you've got on today are-

Louise Perry 32:56 Indeed.

Chris Williamson 32:56 Yeah.

Louise Perry 32:56 I never wore heels anyway. Overrated.

Chris Williamson 32:59 Just sparkly things.

Louise Perry 33:00 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 33:00 So, uh, you know, uh, o- one of the promises, I had, uh, Mary Eberstadt on the show a couple of weeks ago, who's just phenomenal.

Louise Perry 33:06 Mm.

Chris Williamson 33:06 Um, uh, I feel like she's your spirit animal. Um, and she was talking to me about very similar sorts of things, that the promises that women were given previously, uh, you know, the freedom, the liberation. Ultimately, do you think that most women on average are more happy with modern sexual culture than they were previously, let's say, 60 or 70 years ago?

Louise Perry 33:35 Um, I think no, but the outliers are quite, um, striking. So there are some... (laughs) The thing is that having the kind of, uh, let's say, like mildly patriarchal kind of structure where the assumption is that the men do participate most in public life and do the bulk of... Well, I mean, it depends on what era you're talking about materially, right? So in subsistence cultures, women do actually do loads of economic work. They just do economic work that is compatible with also looking after little children. So like, the man goes out in the field and collects raw materials, and the woman processes the raw materials at home while minding the toddlers and, like, sharing the, the burden of, of childcare with her sisters and cousins or whatever. Um, the more recent model of the breadwinner, where the man goes out and earns all the money and the woman stays at home and does all of the housework is, is, is kind of historically unusual. It's not that, it's not that bad. Like actually, it's, it's, it's fine if and only if your husband isn't a tyrant.

Chris Williamson 34:41 Mm.

Louise Perry 34:41 But if your husband is a tyrant, it's completely disastrous. So it's like for most people, it's fine. For most women, it's fine, and probably is actually better than like the current, the sta- the status quo where women have to still do disproportionate amounts of childcare-

Chris Williamson 34:56 (coughs)

Louise Perry 34:56 ... and housework and do all of the, you know, all the pregnancy, obviously, all the breastfeeding, obviously, plus going out to work, right? This is what feminists call the second shift, that you end up doing two jobs. That's, I think, worse, actually, for most women.

Chris Williamson 35:09 What was it that you... Didn't you say you'd worked it out that you were doing a full-time job breastfeeding?

Louise Perry 35:15 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 35:15 You were doing 40 hours a week of breastfeeding?

Louise Perry 35:17 Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 35:18 That's the third shift.

Louise Perry 35:19 Yeah, exactly, like crazy levels-

Chris Williamson 35:21 The breastpace shift.

Louise Perry 35:22 ... of (laughs) of crazy levels of work that you have to do, which is obviously, you know, joyful, meaningful-

Chris Williamson 35:27 Yeah, yeah.

Louise Perry 35:28 ... et cetera. But it, uh, like, there are only so many hours in the day. You n- like, you n- (laughs) It isn't feasible unless you have loads of money available to you or whatever. It isn't feasible to not have a husband, father who goes out and does all of that-

Chris Williamson 35:47 Mm.

Louise Perry 35:48 ... and still be as good a mother as you want to be.

Chris Williamson 35:51 (laughs) It's... I'm so interested in paradoxes. You know, Mary taught me about a ton of them. Uh, b- w- you have the pill.... gets introduced, increase in single motherhood, increase in abortions. Like, paradox, interesting. Another one that I found from Candice Blake, who's over in, uh, Australia, is that (laughs) gender inequality in the pay gap between men and women positively predicts both male and female satisfaction in relationships.

Louise Perry 36:20 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 36:20 That the more unequal the earning opportunities are for men and women, skewed in the direction of men, not women, the happier both men and women are in their outcomes in relationships.

Louise Perry 36:32 And stay-at-home dads is a very strong predictor of divorce.

Chris Williamson 36:35 Yeah. If the-

Louise Perry 36:36 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 36:36 ... uh, woman is the primary breadwinner, men are 50% more likely to use erectile dysfunction medication. (laughs) Uh, you know, increases in domestic violence.

Louise Perry 36:46 Mm.

Chris Williamson 36:47 The women are more likely to be, uh, on the receiving end of domestic violence if they're the primary breadwinner because the male partner switches from a benefit-affording to a cost-inflicting mate retention strategy. You know, i- i- if you begin to feel a disparity in mate value, you have two choices, right? You can either start to raise yourself up or try to drag the other person down.

Louise Perry 37:12 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 37:12 And, you know, making them fearful of you is a pretty good way to drag them down. But that be- you know, that's kinda dark. That being said, the patriarchy is so powerful that we've somehow convinced women that they both need to earn the money and that we can stay at home while they bear the burden of children. So, maybe this is just a psy-op from all of us to not have to do anything except for Xbox now.

Louise Perry 37:34 (clears throat) What we've worked, what, what, what we've discovered... All right, so I don't really believe in... Okay. Patriarchy clearly has, like, a strict anthropological meaning, in that societies where only men are allowed to, to be in positions of power and authority, a- have traditionally been described as patriarchal by anthropologists. We don't live in one of those anymore. We haven't lived in one of those for half a century now. In that, I mean, in this country, we've had, like, three female prime ministers and so forth, right? But I think that there's also a different way in which people use the word patriarchal, which still to some extent applies to contemporary culture, which is that there's this quite deep-seated feeling shared by both men and women, and I think cross-culturally, that masculine things are higher status than feminine things.

Chris Williamson 38:27 Mm-hmm.

Louise Perry 38:30 And that's why you see this great eagerness, actually, of women, now that they can, to participate in, like, masculine-coded things, to be-

Chris Williamson 38:39 What like?

Louise Perry 38:40 Well, professional work, right? That there's been this rush of women into, into, into the pub- into public life, into traditionally masculine roles. There has not been a rush of men into trad- traditional feminine roles. Not at all.

Chris Williamson 38:53 Because there's no status associated with them.

Louise Perry 38:55 Because there's no status associated with it. And I think often that's what feminists are describing when they talk about things being patriarchal. Like, they, they recognize the fact that there's that kind of status gap.

Chris Williamson 39:04 Remember who's ascribing that. At least 50% of society is ascribing that, like, on their own behalf, right?

Louise Perry 39:09 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 39:10 You know?

Louise Perry 39:11 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 39:11 Like, uh, I s- this is why Richard Reeves' book was so interesting, where he talks about HEAL, right? What was it? Like, health, education, maybe like administration of something else.

Louise Perry 39:20 Yeah, feminine jobs.

Chris Williamson 39:21 Yeah, yeah. Well, feminine jobs.

Louise Perry 39:23 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 39:23 That there are four times more female fighter pilots in the US Air Force by percentage than there are male kindergarten teachers in America.

Louise Perry 39:30 Yeah, makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, 'cause there, there just hasn't been this rush for men to try and attain feminine status, right? And I think that... I don't think that our culture is misogynist, right? Like, misog- misogynists exist. There are, there are th- like, there are some of them out there. But that's not typical. I think though that this sort of deep-seated assumption that women are... Are you familiar with the women are wonderful bias?

Chris Williamson 40:04 Uh, yes.

Louise Perry 40:06 So this is the, the cognitive bias where people will tend to actually prefer to sort of show kindness and generosity to women over men in various scenarios. So like, uh, you know, you see a stranger drowning, you're more likely to jump into the water and save them if they're female than if they're male.

Chris Williamson 40:21 But both men and women are more positively predisposed to news stories that compliment women's outcomes, let's say that a woman achieved something than, say, that a man achieved something.

Louise Perry 40:30 Exactly, so-

Chris Williamson 40:30 And vice versa is true too.

Louise Perry 40:32 Right. Which doesn't fit at all with the idea that we live in, like, a misogynist culture. I don't think that we hate women. I think though the way that women are sort of regarded, all else being equal, is as, um, like your mum. Like, you love your mum...

Chris Williamson 40:47 You don't wanna be her, necessarily.

Louise Perry 40:50 Y- y- y- you don't necessarily respect her.

Chris Williamson 40:51 Hmm.

Louise Perry 40:52 I think that's the, I think that's the common way in which... Like, the, I think that the, the, the puzzle basically as to why women are so consistently regarded in a particular way cross-culturally as being, like, lovable but also a bit, like, lower status, is that women are considered to be kind of adjacent to children.

Chris Williamson 41:08 Mm.

Louise Perry 41:08 So in the same way that we love children, but we're not gonna let them vote.

Chris Williamson 41:12 (laughs)

Louise Perry 41:13 Right? I think that what the human brain does is it has this like, it's like there's men, there's women, there's children. So women are in a kind of intermediary position. And very often, uh, basically have kind of childlike legal status.

Chris Williamson 41:29 Hmm.

Louise Perry 41:29 So-

Chris Williamson 41:29 Which is why, I suppose, it ties into something that I've been saying for a while. Uh, modern women have been taught that true freedom is having sex like their brother and working like their father. That's the pinnacle of their-

Louise Perry 41:43 'Cause it's this, like, clambering up, trying to attain that masculine status.

Chris Williamson 41:47 Right. Yeah.

Louise Perry 41:47 Which for some women, particularly women who have a more masculine temperament, you know, like some women are more disagreeable and competitive and not maternal.

Chris Williamson 41:55 Mm.

Louise Perry 41:55 And those women have done well out of the changes we've seen since the sexual revolution, in that they can basically live, they can basically, you know, live like their brothers now pretty much. Most women aren't like that though.And aren't made happier by trying to be more male.

Chris Williamson 42:13 Well, Chelsea Conaboy in the New York Times last year wrote that article, Maternal Instinct is a Myth That Men Created.

Louise Perry 42:19 No, that's not true. (laughs) Yeah, right, like, yeah. You can go around sort of pretending that's true-

Chris Williamson 42:28 But deep-

Louise Perry 42:28 ... till you're blue in the face, but I just don't think it's true.

Chris Williamson 42:31 It's such a, a hydra-headed problem that we're talking about, because it's the convergence of the denial of sex differences, uh, this sort of tyranny of the minority, uh, a selection for the most outspoken gregarious amongst a group-

Louise Perry 42:44 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 42:44 ... to focus on the outliers. It's not even tyranny of the minority as in, uh, some under-spoken class that's, uh, speaking up for themselves, but also tyranny of the minority that appears to have, have outsized achievements, like the male CEOs, that, oh, well, th- that's exactly what we've got going on here, that we'll skew data, that people will focus on and use.

Louise Perry 43:04 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 43:04 Uh, January, January or February of this year is the highest percentage number of new female CEOs ever in America. It was 34% of new, of CEOs in America were female, new CEOs.

Louise Perry 43:17 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 43:17 You go, like, "That's insane."

Louise Perry 43:20 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 43:20 That's so... That... I would guess, if you were to actually pull from a, uh, nature predisposition perspective, that that's over-indexing for it. Like, how many women actually want that life, that job? CEO sounds like a fantastic title, but what's the reality of CEO, right?

Louise Perry 43:38 Appalling. I would hate to... I would hate that lifestyle.

Chris Williamson 43:40 80-hour weeks, stress.

Louise Perry 43:41 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 43:42 You know, i- i- it's horses for courses, and aga- like, this is Peterson fucking tw- 2018 stuff.

Louise Perry 43:48 (laughs) Yes.

Chris Williamson 43:48 You know what I mean? Right?

Louise Perry 43:50 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 43:50 Like, how many times do we need to bang this drum?

Louise Perry 43:52 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson 43:53 Evidently more, because it's not happening.

Louise Perry 43:54 Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 43:55 One, one other thing I wanted to really dig into, what do you think the fallout of Me Too has been, now approaching 10 years hence?

Louise Perry 44:05 I often hear from men that they are now more reluctant to go up to a woman in a bar or whatever, that there's this problem of fear of being falsely accused of something. And so, I think... I mean, I believe them, you know, if that, if some men are experiencing that. I'm sure, though, what's gone on is that the men who were already sexually aggressive and likely to actually be, you know, Me Too perpetrators haven't changed their behavior at all. And the men who started being really careful were probably fine to begin with.

Chris Williamson 44:38 If you were a raper, the-

Louise Perry 44:40 People weren't listening.

Chris Williamson 44:40 ... recent social media campaign probably... Uh, uh, well, they've got a hashtag on Twitter, #IdBetterStopGoingAroundRaping.

Louise Perry 44:46 (laughs) Yeah, which is, uh... I mean, there's a... I always... I wrote about it in my first book, and it applies to this as, as to loads of things, the problem of normal distribution, where you have some trait which is arranged on a bell curve. And the problem is that if you apply some intervention, so whatever that is, like a, a social movement like Me Too or some policy change or whatever, probably what you wanna do is you wanna actually target one of the tails. You wanna... You're like, "Oh, so we've got the... you know, we've got a bell curve of sexual aggression, and there's this, this, like, most aggressive end who are causing no end of harm. What we wanna do is make them stop." But it's ve- y- you can't just apply an intervention to that, to that point on the normal distribution. Like, it's gonna shift in one way or another, and everyone is gonna be affected.

Chris Williamson 45:32 Yeah, you're smearing the entire group with the same solution.

Louise Perry 45:34 So what you end up with is moving the threshold for being, like, reluctant to go up to a woman in a bar or whatever, slightly, just to mean that, like, some of the nice guys are not doing it. I... But that doesn't actually improve... It doesn't affect the rapists.

Chris Williamson 45:46 Mm-hmm.

Louise Perry 45:47 And it doesn't improve women's experience of it.

Chris Williamson 45:49 David Buss's book Bad Men talks about, uh, it's one man doing a thousand sexual assaults, not a thousand men doing one sexual assault.

Louise Perry 45:56 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson 45:57 You know, it's repeat-

Louise Perry 45:57 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 45:58 ... offenders over and over and over and over again.

Louise Perry 46:00 Yeah, absolutely.

Chris Williamson 46:00 Uh, a- and unfortunately, as well, repeat victims. Th- there is something about the way that... A- again, this isn't victim blaming, but it is, like, something about the way that women hold themselves-

Louise Perry 46:11 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 46:11 ... where they showed this to, I think, maybe criminals in prison or assaulters or assault- y- m- men that had assaulted people and showed them a number of women walking-

Louise Perry 46:22 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 46:22 ... and they asked them to pick which one they would attack if they were going to.

Louise Perry 46:26 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 46:27 And they converged on the same women. Uh, so, you know, for all that we can say, you know, th- it's not about wearing the skirt, it shouldn't be about being in the dark alley at the wrong time, all the rest of it, like, correct. But there is something about particular women that, uh, causes predators to see them as viable prey.

Louise Perry 46:48 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 46:49 Does that excuse it? No. Does that, you know... Is that, uh, them choosing it? Also no.

Louise Perry 46:53 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 46:54 But, like, this is just the way that the world appears to be.

Louise Perry 46:57 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 46:57 It's ruthless.

Louise Perry 46:58 Yeah, and it drives me mad that we tell lies to girls all the time about this.

Chris Williamson 47:02 Why?

Louise Perry 47:02 Because we're so desperate not to appear to be victim blaming that we'll say, "Oh, no, you can, you know, you can behave like a man. You can do whatever you want. Go back to some random guy's house. It'll be fine." And then when it inevitably isn't fine, we're like, "Oh, well, you know, he shouldn't have, he shouldn't have been so aggressive." I'm like, yes, obviously, but we don't... You know, I would love to just, like, delete every rapist from the world all at once. I can't do that.

Chris Williamson 47:27 Mm-hmm.

Louise Perry 47:28 Like, if the advice that I'm gonna be giving my daughters is, is going to be, unfortunately, different from the advice I give my sons.

Chris Williamson 47:35 What would be the advice that you give them?

Louise Perry 47:36 Like, for instance, "Don't go back to a random man's house that you've just met." Like, basic, okay? Like, complete- c- c- considered to be completely commonsensical up until, up until even, like, the 1980s, you know. This is, like, recent stuff, but basically unsayable now, in feminist circles at least. Except everyone quietly says it, you know.

Chris Williamson 47:58 Well, again, it's the stated and revealed preferences thing.

Louise Perry 48:01 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 48:01 Like, how many parents that will proselytize about this on CNN and say that, you know, "We shouldn't be telling women... Oh, so you're saying that we should just accept the fact that men are going to do this? It should be, it shouldn't be that women should change their actions, men should change their behavior." Okay, what did you tell your 17-year-old daughter to do last weekend?

Louise Perry 48:21 Right.

Chris Williamson 48:21 Did you, did you say, "Make sure that you text me when you get home. Make sure that you're home before 11," et cetera?

Louise Perry 48:25 "Don't get an unlicensed taxi," whatever, yeah. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 48:27 Yeah. Stated and revealed preferences.

Louise Perry 48:28 Yeah. And what drives me bananas is that we, there are some girls who don't actually have parents or friends or whoever who are privately telling them the truth. You know, all they get, all they hear is, is, is the, is the public misdirection.

Chris Williamson 48:42 Oh, this is like the luxury beliefs of Me Too in a way.

Louise Perry 48:44 Yeah. And so I-I feel as if actually we have a duty, people who, who are speaking publicly, to tell those girls the truth-

Chris Williamson 48:52 Hmm.

Louise Perry 48:52 ... on the assumption that they're not gonna hear it from anyone else.

Chris Williamson 48:54 So like cultural surrogate mothers in a way?

Louise Perry 48:59 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 49:00 You've got this line between consensual and good, which I think relates to Me Too as well. What's that?

Louise Perry 49:07 I think that a lot of what... So, I mean, there's a lot of things that came under the Me Too banner. Um, some of it was, uh, just unambiguously criminal, and, you know, Harvey Weinstein or whatever got sent to prison for, for criminal acts. A lot of what came up though, a lot of the stories that got shared were things that weren't actually strictly criminal. They were just, it was just, like, bad behavior. It was behavior that actually in another era you probably would've been, probably would've been called ungentlemanly or something like that. But, but that vocabulary isn't available to a sort of contemporary feminist who's really bought into the, to, to the sex-positive message. And so they'll tend to just talk about things being consensual or not consensual. And actually, the consensual/not consensual bar is, is like a low one. It's a legal bar. It's not actually a moral bar, really. Like, there's a lot of, there are a lot of things that a man can do on a first date or whatever that are legal but are bad, plenty, but we don't really have the vocabulary to describe them. Which is why I try and make, you know, like, the feminist case for chivalry. We shouldn't have got rid of that as a concept. Like, when you have th- as stark a physical difference and psychological differences between the sexes. You know, 99% of men can kill 99% of women with their bare hands, and not vice versa. We have to operate with that, with that recognition. Chivalry in those circumstances is obviously in women's interests, even if occasionally it will mean being, feeling slightly patronized. Like, who cares? I'm so happy to have my, the door held open for me and my bags carried, it's completely fine, you know?

Chris Williamson 50:43 If it means that someone's not gonna assault me.

Louise Perry 50:45 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 50:46 Yeah, I mean, th- this is, I, I quote you and Mary about this all the time, that it is a straight line from, "You should hold the door open for a woman," to, "You shouldn't beat your wife." It is one just continuous, women are worthy of protection and there is an asymmetry between what men and women can do.

Louise Perry 51:04 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 51:04 And again, Rob Henderson's, uh, coming a couple of days later, the new... It's like luxury beliefs all over again.

Louise Perry 51:10 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 51:10 Like, the women who come from societies where their husbands already knew that beating your wife would be a bad idea, or they had the support networks where that wouldn't be accepted, were trying to deconstruct a, a support structure that was needed for the underclass women whose husbands had grown up without a father and whose stepdad had beaten them, who just presumed that the way that you were supposed to be in a relationship was to hit your wife.

Louise Perry 51:35 Yeah. I mean, I just, uh, like Chesterton's Fence, like, the wisdom of it. You know, this, this idea from GK Chesterton, you know, you, you come across a fence in a field, you don't know what it's there for. The, the progressive, the reformer, whatever vocabulary he uses, says, "We don't need this fence, let's tear it down." Whereas the conservative says, "No, let's find out what it's for, and then maybe we might tear it down if it turns out that it really isn't necessary." I mean, just the whole last 100 years has been-

Chris Williamson 52:01 Fences being blown over.

Louise Perry 52:01 ... like nonstop indication of Chesterton's Fence Principle. Yeah. And, and I, and I honestly think that most of it actually is to do with technology. Like, much as I love to, to complain about my political enemies, like, e- actually the main thing that's changed for people has not been the intellectuals of the 1960s. It's been, um, the, like the dissolution of the family has as much to do with the Pill as it does with anything any feminist has ever said. You know? Like, the real, I, like, I'm, I'm, I'm very sort of materialist in the sense I think the real engine of history is, is technology.

Chris Williamson 52:44 Wo-

Louise Perry 52:44 Or as, as Mary Harrington, our friend, likes to say, it's, um, material reality plus memes.

Chris Williamson 52:51 Meme first, explain later. Me and Mary are on board with that.

Louise Perry 52:53 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 52:54 What was it that you told me the last time we spoke? The washing machine has done more to liberate women than any feminist ever did?

Louise Perry 53:00 That was Phyllis Schlafly's observation.

Chris Williamson 53:03 (laughs)

Louise Perry 53:04 Like, Phyllis Schlafly is such an interesting figure because she-

Chris Williamson 53:06 Who is this person?

Louise Perry 53:07 So she was a '60s, uh, when would she have been born? She, she was, she was at her height in, like, the '70s, um, and she was a, I mean, she was one of these really interesting women. American. Well, so she'd billed herself as, like, an American housewife, and she was, she had, I think she had five kids. Um, but she also was, like, a foreign policy expert who'd worked in, in, um, um, not Westminster, Washington, um, and had, like, incredible degree actually of professional expertise. But she always billed herself as, like, you know, a lowly housewife, whatever. And she led the campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment, which was a second-wave feminist effort to basically enshrine in the US Constitution that men and women are equal and ought to have equal rights. And Schlafly said, in retrospect not unreasonably, "Men and women aren't the same." And so actually if you were to enshrine this in the Constitution, you would...... frequently end up with things, with, with, you know, having to do things that are actually ba- not in women's interests. So the example she liked to give, because this was during the Vietnam War, was, "Do you wanna get, you wanna see women drafted?" 'Cause that's, that's where that ends up if you say that men and women are the same.

Chris Williamson 54:15 Mm-hmm.

Louise Perry 54:15 Then why wouldn't you draft women? Why wouldn't you be sending pregnant women into combat? Men and women are, you know, men and women are the same, whatever.

Chris Williamson 54:23 Mm-hmm.

Louise Perry 54:23 And so quite a few feminists used to say, because they were all anti-war, they said, "Well, we don't think anyone should be drafted." It was like, okay, (laughs) okay. But if you're trying to, like, future-proof your Constitution, which is, I think, very much the point of the Constitution, that does seem to be an obvious... I mean, I don't completely agree with Schlafly. One of the things she used to do, which I find so cringe, is whenever she showed up at a public event, she used to thank her husband for allowing her to be there.

Chris Williamson 54:45 Ah.

Louise Perry 54:47 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 54:47 (laughs)

Louise Perry 54:47 I don't, I don't do that-

Chris Williamson 54:48 (laughs)

Louise Perry 54:48 ... when I go to public events. So like she was, she was of a different time in that sense, okay? So I'm not, I'm not gonna hold Phyllis Schlafly up as, like, feminist poster girl.

Chris Williamson 54:57 Yeah.

Louise Perry 54:58 But she did, like, she had insights-

Chris Williamson 55:00 Yeah.

Louise Perry 55:01 ... at the time which, on which she has been proven right. Um, and the Equal Rights Amendment was never passed because of her efforts.

Chris Williamson 55:08 What do you think about this lack of approach at the moment? Uh, Alexander, one of my friends, Alex Stateslike, uh, put a study up recently. Uh, 50% of men aged 18 to 24

Chris Williamson 55:20 have never approached a woman in person in their life, and uh, like even a higher percentage, 18 to 30, haven't approached a woman in the last year.

Louise Perry 55:28 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 55:29 Is this downstream from Me Too?

Louise Perry 55:33 I have a slightly weird take on this, which is that actually the thing you hear about as sort of... The thing that Gen X people talk about of going up to someone in a bar and this being a way of striking up relationships, I think that was a very brief period history, sort of post-sexual revolution but pre-internet, where that was considered normal. Um, and I'm slightly too young to have ever actually experienced that. The normal way, actually, that people start relationships in the vast majority of cultures is to be like, it, it is like semi-arranged marriage, right? Like not the full, you've-never-met-this-person-before, you know, 13-year-olds, whatever, getting betrothed, like not like that. But the sort of you're introduced by family members, mutual friends, you're known in the community, you go to the same church, whatever it is. And then your, both of your families, like, consent to the marriage, and it works out okay. But the o- but the expectation isn't like... The expectation of marriage up until relatively recently was that you would have an economic relationship, a, you know, and then a reproductive relationship, but you weren't best friends.

Chris Williamson 56:47 Mm-hmm.

Louise Perry 56:48 And actually, I don't think, I don't think m- husbands and wives used to talk to each other (laughs) as much-

Chris Williamson 56:53 (laughs)

Louise Perry 56:53 ... as they do now. I think, and people used to have much more homosocial kind of lives.

Chris Williamson 56:57 Mm-hmm.

Louise Perry 56:57 You'd hang out with other men, you'd hang out with other women. You wouldn't necessarily hang out a lot with the opposite sex, including your spouse. Um, th- so this idea that, like, the going up to a person in the bar is like the normal and natural way of starting relationships I don't think is historically accurate.

Chris Williamson 57:14 That's interesting. So the male aversion, felt fear of approach anxiety, which every guy-

Louise Perry 57:23 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 57:23 ... listening is aware of, apart from the psychopaths, right?

Louise Perry 57:26 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 57:26 There is a girl that I find attractive that I either know or don't know or partly know or whatever.

Louise Perry 57:30 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 57:31 "Hi, how are you? Nice to meet you," is kind of like a miniature war that you have to go through, and the felt sense of palpable fear-

Louise Perry 57:40 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 57:40 ... is just ripping you apart inside. That isn't, uh, o- or the modern aversion to that isn't some novel new problem. It was a, uh, in your opinion here, a bar that kind of never really needed to be gotten over in the first place in some regards because you had seen each other at church for ages, or her father owned the farm next to your father's land and you guys had known bla bla bla, like...

Louise Perry 58:07 Yeah, yeah. People have much more kind of static social lives.

Chris Williamson 58:09 Mm-hmm.

Louise Perry 58:10 So yeah, just approaching some stranger and ending up getting married to her is not...

Chris Williamson 58:17 I had this, uh, I had this conversation with a guy called Mads Laursen, who is a mating ideology researcher. I'll send it to you. It's phenomenal. And he talks about this, uh, all of the different, uh, arrangements that people went through and the, uh, romantic to the confluent, which is what we've moved through most recently, has left us with a really interesting vestige, which is previously it was they owned the, the farm next door. It was almost like a tactical, uh, marriage between the two of you.

Louise Perry 58:47 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 58:47 And then it's no, no, no, no. You're supposed to, uh, uh, you guys are supposed to be together forever. You know, there is supposed to be deeper meaning instantiated in this. But then as soon as you have the sexual revolution, you have confluence, so for as long as you can benefit me and I can benefit you. I think even Mia Khalifa, who obviously paragon of sexual virtue, uh, said on a recent interview that, um, uh, people think that marriage is some sacred thing. It's not. It's just a piece of paper, and if this person isn't helping you grow, it's time to move on. Um, so they just-

Louise Perry 59:18 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 59:18 ... confluent, like, uh, ideology there, you know.

Louise Perry 59:21 Helping you grow. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 59:22 Front and center. You need to be helping them grow.

Louise Perry 59:24 What does that mean?

Chris Williamson 59:24 Yeah, I'm not sure.

Louise Perry 59:25 Yeah. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 59:26 Uh, helping you prepare for your next porn scene. I don't know, whatever she meant.

Louise Perry 59:29 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 59:29 Um, so you have this really interesting thing which is that both, uh, uh, the two most recent cultures have kind of got, like, conceptual inertia inside of our heads that we have this sense and we were kind of told and maybe some people think that it's true that you're supposed to find a person who fulfills you, who is your confidant, your best friend, your, uh, the sexual paramour, your, uh, the co-owner of your children and the household and all the rest of the things.

Louise Perry 59:55 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 59:56 And yet modern culture is this more confluent thing which is they're supposed to benefit you and help you grow and-... uh, these two things kind of bounce off against each other, and then, you know, if we look back ancestrally at what we're predisposed for, it's fucking neither of those two. Right? Like, you can say what you want about the truthfulness or utility of both of those. It wasn't that.

Louise Perry 1:00:15 Mm.

Chris Williamson 1:00:15 And it seems, seems like serial monogamy is what we're built for, some combination of poly- polygyny and serial monogamy. Uh, and all of these, the existing base rate of what we are plus the two most recent cultures are just like-

Louise Perry 1:00:29 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:00:29 ... like the Bemu- Bermuda Triangle of mating ideologies inside of our mind.

Louise Perry 1:00:33 Yeah. There's this book called, uh, um, The All or Nothing Marriage, which is about sort of, yes, this modern conception of marriage, where, where exactly this, you put so much expectation on your spouse that they will be, you know, you will be perfectly sexually compatible, perfectly, like, conversationally compatible, per- you know, everything, everything is perfect. And obviously, for loads of people that isn't gonna be true and that's not gonna be true for 60 years or whatever that you might be together. Um, and so you end up with this all or nothing thing, that like some people have absolutely fabulous marriages, and some people just, it, they can't possibly take the strain and so they collapse.

Chris Williamson 1:01:11 Hm.

Louise Perry 1:01:12 And the authors compare it to, um, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, where like if you're in a position, if you're in a sis- situation of economic subsistence, y- you basically just see your spouse as like your economic partner with whom you have children, but your expectations are not that high. And then you reach the point where you're so affluent, (laughs) right-

Chris Williamson 1:01:31 (laughs)

Louise Perry 1:01:31 ... in contemporary culture where you kind of regard marriage as, yes, as, as fulfilling all of these like esoteric psychological needs-

Chris Williamson 1:01:41 Hm.

Louise Perry 1:01:41 ... which is just not reasonable. So that, I, I honestly, this again, Mary Harrington, uh, endlessly quotable, she has this, uh, this, this, this saying that we should abolish big romance.

Chris Williamson 1:01:52 Yeah.

Louise Perry 1:01:52 That the idea of having these incredible, like, romantic expectations of your spouse is just pretty much setting yourself up-

Chris Williamson 1:01:59 She's just a-

Louise Perry 1:01:59 ... up to fail.

Chris Williamson 1:02:00 ... one-woman meme machine, isn't she?

Louise Perry 1:02:01 Yeah, she really is.

Chris Williamson 1:02:02 Um, what was your thing? It was you that reminded me of a story that I'd forgotten from my childhood about, uh, ladies dropping handkerchiefs.

Louise Perry 1:02:12 Oh, right, as a way of s- like demonstrating ...

Chris Williamson 1:02:15 Interest.

Louise Perry 1:02:15 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:02:16 So, I had this thing with, uh, me and David Buss came up with this solution, uh, around women cultivating receptiveness if they want to improve their dating prospects.

Louise Perry 1:02:26 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:02:26 Now, in a post-Me Too world where we're worried about, uh, women's safety, especially sexually, this is something that is kind of difficult to say, but again, if you want to work within the confines of how reality is and how you want it to be, I think that women cultivating receptiveness accounts for the male approach anxiety problem.

Louise Perry 1:02:45 Mm.

Chris Williamson 1:02:46 Right? That, you know, a, a slightly lingering, a longer lingering eye than you think or, like, you know, smiling at somebody as opposed to doing the, uh, why men love bitches, treat him mean, keep him keen kind of approach.

Louise Perry 1:02:59 Men are gonna be so bad at receiving those signals though, don't you think? Have you ever heard that a, uh, the average man of 130 IQ has the like emotional, social receptivity of a woman with 70 IQ?

Chris Williamson 1:03:11 (laughs)

Louise Perry 1:03:13 Like, the, the, the difference, this is why my husband and I-

Chris Williamson 1:03:15 So, you're saying that we're actually socially retarded?

Louise Perry 1:03:18 Y- y- yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:03:19 Yeah.

Louise Perry 1:03:19 My, (laughs) my husband and I, like my husband calls me a witch because I can like, I'll, I'll be able to like-

Chris Williamson 1:03:25 Oh, you've got clairvoyance.

Louise Perry 1:03:25 ... sense there's something off with this person.

Chris Williamson 1:03:27 You are particularly witchy today-

Louise Perry 1:03:28 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:03:28 ... with the, with the olive as well. Yeah, yeah.

Louise Perry 1:03:30 I think it's just women. I think we are just-

Chris Williamson 1:03:31 Witchy.

Louise Perry 1:03:32 ... witchy.

Chris Williamson 1:03:32 That's why you were burned at the stake. Bring it back.

Louise Perry 1:03:34 You can just like sense that something, I don't know, facial expressions, whatever, something-

Chris Williamson 1:03:39 Mm.

Louise Perry 1:03:39 ... which most men are just oblivious to.

Chris Williamson 1:03:41 Blinkers on.

Louise Perry 1:03:41 With s- with some exceptions clearly, but-

Chris Williamson 1:03:43 Well, okay, so yeah. Uh, w- well, l- let's take that as the, again, the thermodynamics of the situation, that-

Louise Perry 1:03:48 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:03:48 ... men are, uh, their EQ is 50% of what a woman's is essentially.

Louise Perry 1:03:53 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:03:54 Um, if that is the case, leaning in even further to not being receptive is going to make said blinkered man even less capable of understanding that maybe you're interested.

Louise Perry 1:04:05 Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:04:06 Right? So, I just think that, uh, again, another confluence of, uh, of the hydra's head of lots of stuff that's going on, the multifactorial problem, uh, women are maybe being a little bit more masculine, working in more masculine environments, thinking they need to be more disagreeable to be m- more effective at work, concerned about their own safety, uh, generally skeptical of, of men that come up to them, strange men that come up to them in, in a bar-

Louise Perry 1:04:28 Mm.

Chris Williamson 1:04:28 ... which has led to absolutely less res- receptivity from, uh, women. And it's like, look, if you are complaining like, "Where are all of the good men at?" Look around a little bit, if you can, when you're at your CrossFit class or you're doing yoga or you're doing whatever, and if someone, if some guy comes up to you and asks some awkward, clunky question, but he's kind of cute, like don't just presume that he's asking the question. Like, use the witch p- clairvoyance, right, tap into the astral realm or whatever it is that you do-

Louise Perry 1:04:55 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:04:55 ... and think, "Oh."

Louise Perry 1:04:57 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:04:57 Have you heard of the, the male over-perception and the female under-perception bias?

Louise Perry 1:05:02 W- is this with sexual interest?

Chris Williamson 1:05:03 Correct. Yeah.

Louise Perry 1:05:05 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:05:05 Yeah, so that's in David, David Buss's book that men, uh, overestimate the degree of interest that women have to them and women underestimate, which is largely why you have awkward passes by, uh, male coworkers and stuff. "Well, what do you mean? Like, her eyes, I, I, and you saw the way that she looked at me every time we went to the copy machine," or whatever, and it's like-

Louise Perry 1:05:23 And you know alcohol exaggerates that.

Chris Williamson 1:05:25 Does it really?

Louise Perry 1:05:26 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:05:26 Wow.

Louise Perry 1:05:27 So, men are more likely to falsely perceive sexual interest when they're drunk.

Chris Williamson 1:05:30 Fantastic.

Louise Perry 1:05:30 Which a- again, just makes so much sense of all the, you know ... Like, were you, um, you know that there was like Me Too but for schools in the UK a few years ago?

Chris Williamson 1:05:41 No. (laughs)

Louise Perry 1:05:42 It was called Everyone's Invited. It was like a website that some, some girl set up to, to describe like bad sexual experiences that they'd had with, um, what they-

Chris Williamson 1:05:53 In school?

Louise Perry 1:05:54 Well, not, also not normally in school. This was a thing. So, it ended up being a big, um, headache for teachers and head teachers because parents were obviously really upset, understandably, um, and they said, "You know, you should be teaching consent workshops in schools. You should doing all these things," and the teachers were like, "This isn't happening in school."

Chris Williamson 1:06:09 Mm.

Louise Perry 1:06:09 "Very rarely is this happening in school. This is normally happing, happening Friday night-"... at some house party.

Chris Williamson 1:06:16 Mm.

Louise Perry 1:06:16 The parents aren't there, everyone's drunk. And like, it's kinda the parent's responsibility, honestly, to stop that from-

Chris Williamson 1:06:23 Oh, you wanna step in.

Louise Perry 1:06:24 Yeah. And it's like, look, you've got horny young men raised on porn, plus alcohol. Young women often giving confusing signals. I mean, one of the things that, like, teenage girls just don't understand, bless them, is like, if you, if you say dress in revealing clothes because you want to attract a particular man, that, the blast radius of that signal (laughs) -

Chris Williamson 1:06:46 It's a dirty bomb.

Louise Perry 1:06:47 You know what I mean? Yeah. Like, I was, I was getting the train recently in London, and there was a schoolgirl who was probably, like, 16, who was walking ahead of me and she was going up the stairs. And she was wearing such a short skirt going to school that I could see absolutely everything. And I, like, I almost jogged after her just to say, like, "You're lucky it was me who was walking behind you." And I know that you're doing this because you wanna f- like, there is a kind of thrill of feeling sexy-

Chris Williamson 1:07:13 Mm-hmm.

Louise Perry 1:07:14 ... that young women experience for the first time.

Chris Williamson 1:07:15 Mm-hmm.

Louise Perry 1:07:16 And they have no idea how potent and dangerous that, that tool is. So, you know, you do it because there's a, like a particular guy who gets the same train as you, who you wanna catch his eye or whatever, fine. But like, I could've been a creepy bloke. And this is why I think parents have to be banning their daughters from leaving the house looking like that, basically.

Chris Williamson 1:07:37 Mm, mm.

Louise Perry 1:07:38 Because they have no idea. Like, teenage girls are just... I mean, teenag- you know, teenagers are dumb.

Chris Williamson 1:07:43 The, the, the, the sort of Me Too conversation around victim blaming and, uh, and, and stuff is such a deep hole when you get into it, to talk about should things be this way? No.

Louise Perry 1:07:54 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:07:55 Are things this way? Yes.

Louise Perry 1:07:56 Mm.

Chris Williamson 1:07:56 Do you want to play within the confines of the thermodynamics of this particular system? Well, you probably should, right? And to thread that needle, especially because... I, I often think about this, um, Douglas Murray once taught me that it doesn't really matter who makes the best logical argument in a debate. If you manage to get two or three big laughs, you win.

Louise Perry 1:08:18 Yes, that's true.

Chris Williamson 1:08:19 And it's almost this-

Louise Perry 1:08:20 It's all vibes.

Chris Williamson 1:08:21 Yep. It's just vibe, you're a vibe architect.

Louise Perry 1:08:23 (laughs) Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:08:23 Right? And the problem with this discussion, if you have somebody who is very anti this, and is saying, "That's victim blaming, you absol- are you saying that, you're giving men a pass? You're saying that women should be fearful of what they should wear?" And it's like, that particular talking point is so empathetically robust in its signaling that it almost always wins.

Louise Perry 1:08:48 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:08:49 Because the most obviously caring argument up front that sounds like the one that sounds right, that sounds like the one that you will get the most support for on Twitter-

Louise Perry 1:09:00 Mm.

Chris Williamson 1:09:01 ... it's so tough to pa- It's like, right, yeah, yeah, no, I don't disagree. But look at the outcomes that we get from this.

Louise Perry 1:09:09 One of the things that, um, progressives really have on their side, rhetorically, is that if you're, if you're a conservative who's saying, "Look, actually, you know..." There was a line that one of my readers sent me from a, from all places, it was a book about, um, uh, making wine. And the line was, um, "Traditions are experiments that worked." You can say that when you're talking about wine making, and it's not too, like, politically explosive, but you can obviously apply that to, to, to, to-

Chris Williamson 1:09:40 That's so perfect.

Louise Perry 1:09:40 ... social issues as well. I know, isn't that a great line?

Chris Williamson 1:09:42 "Traditions are experiments that worked."

Louise Perry 1:09:43 Exactly. But, what you end up, if you're trying to make that argument, and if you're, and if you're, you know, proposing anything remotely conservative, is that you have to, you end up having to defend other cultures or cultures of the past. So you'll say, "Look, actually, you know, there was a lot to be said for the sort of slightly arranged marriage. There's a lot to be said for teenage girls being encouraged to dress more modestly," whatever. And people say, "Oh, what, so you're saying that you support domestic violence? You're saying that you support, you know, cholera and imperialism and like-"

Chris Williamson 1:10:12 (laughs)

Louise Perry 1:10:12 "... everything that might've happened during the era that you're talking about?" And you have to say, "No, no, no, I don't, you know," I mean, it, you just end up at the back foot.

Chris Williamson 1:10:19 Yeah.

Louise Perry 1:10:19 Whereas if you're a progressive, you can say, "I can see this vision, you know."

Chris Williamson 1:10:23 Yeah.

Louise Perry 1:10:23 "Like, in the future, we'll have this amazing society where everything's great." And the fact that this is, this has never happened and is never likely to happen means that you never, you're never in the position of having to defend anything unfortunate.

Chris Williamson 1:10:34 Yeah.

Louise Perry 1:10:34 You never have to talk about trade-offs. I think that, like, acknowledging the existence of trade-offs is a fundamentally conservative trait.

Chris Williamson 1:10:41 Yeah. Thomas Sowell, "There are no solutions, only trade-offs."

Louise Perry 1:10:45 Yeah. It's really painful, but it's true, unfortunately.

Chris Williamson 1:10:48 You'll have seen

Chris Williamson 1:10:49 a lot of the stats coming out about the happiness, or lack of, amongst young girls.

Louise Perry 1:10:53 Mm.

Chris Williamson 1:10:54 You know, 60% of girls aged 12 to 16 have regular or persistent feelings of hopelessness and stuff like that. What's your assessment of the current mental health of young women?

Louise Perry 1:11:07 I mean, it seems to be really bad. The, the, I mean, there's all the obvious stuff, um, about why, you know, young people, they don't go outside enough, they don't do enough exercise, all that. But that's, that's true for boys as well. I think, um, and Jonathan Haidt's done lots of work on this, that the main thing that's going on for girls is social media. Because girls use social media differently from boys. One of the ways that girls use social media is to talk to each other, right? Girls are so... Like, you know that all, basically all contagious mental illnesses start among and predominate among teenage girls. Things like, like something like anorexia, for instance, is like a classic example. Or, or like now, apparently all these teenage girls have got Tourette's that they've a- acquired from TikTok.

Chris Williamson 1:11:55 There was a period where, uh, multiple personality disorder and the-

Louise Perry 1:11:59 Precisely.

Chris Williamson 1:11:59 ... the, the others were coming out on TikTok too.

Louise Perry 1:12:02 Precisely. And I think it's because, it's kind of like that witchy thing we were talking about earlier, like women being very, very socially sensitive-

Chris Williamson 1:12:08 Mm-hmm.

Louise Perry 1:12:09 ... for obvious evolutionary reasons, you know, that women being smaller, not having the kind of physical capacities that men do, the main advantage you have in terms of your own survival and the survival of your children, is making alliances.

Chris Williamson 1:12:25 Mm.

Louise Perry 1:12:25 ... particularly among oth- other women. You know, re- recruiting other women to assist you in your endeavors and whatever requires this social sensitivity. And I think that that can misfire in terms of, say, being so receptive to whatever, getting Tourette's from TikTok-

Chris Williamson 1:12:46 (laughs)

Louise Perry 1:12:46 ... that you, that, you know, you do, you do yourself harm basically. I mean, it's not terrible harm, but like anorexia is terrible harm, right, that you might acquire sort of memetically. Um, and I think also it means that girls... I mean, one of the things I always think about Inst- Instagram, it's like the i- it's the image-based social media which seems to be particularly bad for girls. Um, Twitter is bad for journalists, it sends them completely insane. TikTok and Instagram sends teenage girls insane. I think it's because, um, one of the things that, uh, looking at these, these, these platforms, one of the things it does to girls is it gives them a completely false impression of their intersexual competition pool. That normally they would look around at the young women they actually know who are as like-

Chris Williamson 1:13:30 Plain and normal as them.

Louise Perry 1:13:31 ... skinny and acne-ridden as they are, yeah. And think, "Oh, okay, right, yeah, this is like, this is basically my, my like competition pool for acquiring whichever like equally mediocre-looking man," right? Whereas now you look at Instagram and you see the most beautiful women in the world airbrushed and having had plastic surgery, and you think that's your intersexual competition. So I think it just kind of, I think it just plays complete havoc with their minds. And-

Chris Williamson 1:14:00 This also explains the, uh, social contagion theory for F-to-M transitions.

Louise Perry 1:14:07 Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:14:07 Because if the... You've heard of the, uh, left-handedness argument for trans people, right? That i- i- as soon as you remove the societal impositions and judgment, people can truly be their real selves.

Louise Perry 1:14:20 Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:14:21 It's like, well, okay, if that's the case, and that very well may contribute-

Louise Perry 1:14:24 Hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:14:25 ... if that was entirely the case, why is it four girls that all sit together at the same lunch table in school?

Louise Perry 1:14:31 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:14:31 Like, why is it not evenly smeared-

Louise Perry 1:14:33 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:14:33 ... across the entire populous? It's not, it clumps together.

Louise Perry 1:14:36 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:14:36 Right? Um-

Louise Perry 1:14:37 It's also gone from being, like diagnoses of gender dysphoria have gone from being pri- primarily a male thing to being primarily a female thing, like by a big margin. Like the huge explosion as being among teenage girls specifically.

Chris Williamson 1:14:51 There was a, a study in Finland that I found that I put on my newsletter last week, uh, that said they could attribute 15% of the negative mental health outcomes of teenage girls to their use of birth control.

Louise Perry 1:15:04 (inhales deeply) Right.

Chris Williamson 1:15:05 Uh, and I s- I realized this when I spoke to, uh, Dr. Sarah Hill last year, uh, as, as she's talking to me about how, uh, young forming brains can have particular types of negative mental health outcomes locked in for life if you're on hormonal birth control during this particular period. And I remember thinking about The Coddling of the American Mind at the time and going, "I 100% bet that no one's factored in the base rate of the increase of hormonal birth control-

Louise Perry 1:15:33 Hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:15:33 ... and the, uh, predisposition that it's caused amongst young girls."

Louise Perry 1:15:37 Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm sure that that's true. This sounds random but, uh, I... There's this debate you might be familiar with about whether or not it's ethical to use chemical castration for pedophiles. In some countries they do, so like Germany I think is an example of a country that will, that will offer chemical castration as an alternative to prison time. And actually look-

Chris Williamson 1:15:57 Oh, it's an alternative?

Louise Perry 1:15:59 Yes.

Chris Williamson 1:15:59 Okay.

Louise Perry 1:15:59 Or maybe you have it when you're on parole or something like that.

Chris Williamson 1:16:01 Pretty sure Alan Turing got something similar like that as well.

Louise Perry 1:16:03 Which is one of the reasons why I think it's not popular in the UK, right, because Turing is a famous example of it being used, um, against gay men.

Chris Williamson 1:16:10 Yeah.

Louise Perry 1:16:10 Um, but a lot of pedophiles will say that they would prefer that, and that actually they're really tortured by that.

Chris Williamson 1:16:18 Mm-hmm.

Louise Perry 1:16:18 I mean, I- I- I am generally of the opinion, I think that this is scientifically sound, that it, it is an innate sexual orientation that is found in a small number of men-

Chris Williamson 1:16:26 Yeah.

Louise Perry 1:16:26 ... and a lot of them report being absolutely tortured-

Chris Williamson 1:16:29 Yep.

Louise Perry 1:16:29 ... by it. It's awful, it's like the most stigmatized, like you wouldn't wi- wish it on your worst enemy, what ha- what a horrible curse, right? They would actually choose chemical castration to relieve them of that. And, and yet there's a, there's a general feeling, at least maybe in the Anglosphere, that there's something really dodgy about using sort of pharmacological punishments, right? And you can imagine, of course, using it in other contexts as well. You might sedate-

Chris Williamson 1:16:55 Yeah.

Louise Perry 1:16:55 ... aggressive, you know, whatever.

Chris Williamson 1:16:58 (laughs)

Louise Perry 1:16:58 Um, I was talking to a friend about this who works in politics and who's, uh, a gay man, and, and I was saying, "Well, you know, you could use like, you know, like the arm, the implants you get in your arm, you could, you- you could use that to sort of release small doses of this every day." And he said, "The implants you get in your what?" And I said, "Well, you know, you can get hormonal contraception, either you get it in your arm or you get the, like the, the, the, um, intrauterine devices or whatever which secretes more..." He had no idea because he's like innocent to these (laughs) -

Chris Williamson 1:17:23 Yeah.

Louise Perry 1:17:23 ... to these matters.

Chris Williamson 1:17:23 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Louise Perry 1:17:24 Um, but it occurred to me, like isn't it crazy that we're so, it seems so outside the Overton window to, um, use pharmacology to like alter the minds of criminal offenders? And we've had teenage girls on these drugs-

Chris Williamson 1:17:37 (laughs)

Louise Perry 1:17:38 ... for decades. Like-

Chris Williamson 1:17:39 Wow.

Louise Perry 1:17:39 ... we know them to be mind-altering to some extent.

Chris Williamson 1:17:42 Wow.

Louise Perry 1:17:43 And we put, with like no hesitation, about putting an arm implant in like a 15-year-old girl, um, when it's basically quite an experimental drug. I mean, the argument against is to say, yeah, but pregnancy is also a pretty like-

Chris Williamson 1:17:57 Poor outcome for a 15-year-old.

Louise Perry 1:17:58 Uh, r- that, but also quite an extreme thing to go through full stop, physically, mentally, et cetera. So if the choice is pregnancy or hormonal birth control-

Chris Williamson 1:18:07 Mm-hmm.

Louise Perry 1:18:08 ... hormonal birth control has fewer side effects.

Chris Williamson 1:18:11 It's, you know, there are no solutions, only trade-offs-

Louise Perry 1:18:14 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:18:14 ... right? And, uh, it's rough, man. I, I think about some of my friends who've got young girls that are, you know, maybe 12 or 13 and are gonna be, starting to be around boys that can get them pregnant, and they're gonna become sexually active at, at some point in future, but also know about the risks of hormonal birth control and don't want to condemn their-... a beautiful daughter to a life of potential, you know, 10% more anxiety and depression risk, plus the weight gain and the, the, all the rest of the stuff, but also really don't want them to get pregnant at-

Louise Perry 1:18:48 Mm.

Chris Williamson 1:18:48 ... at 15.

Louise Perry 1:18:49 Mm.

Chris Williamson 1:18:50 And you go, "Okay, are you, again, playing within the confines of the world as it is, not as we want it to be?" But saying, "Oh, make sure that you use protection and make sure that, bl- like, you don't get too drunk and bl-" It's like they're 15 or 16-

Louise Perry 1:19:04 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:19:04 ... or 17 or something. You know? Yeah. The, the, you said there about the, um,

Chris Williamson 1:19:09 uh, uh, sexual predisposition or the, the, the, pedophilia being a sexual, uh, orientation. Peter Thiel's got a famous question, which is, "What do you believe that most people would disagree with?" And for a long time, that was mine, that, uh, non-offending pedophiles need, need way more sympathy than we give them-

Louise Perry 1:19:28 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:19:28 ... uh, because I've had a bunch of neuroscientists on the show, and they've put people in FMRIs with arousal responses, uh, and they can show, uh, non-offending pedophiles everything. They can throw every sexual kink under the sun at them. Nothing.

Louise Perry 1:19:47 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:19:48 And then they are able to show them something that tickles their fancy and it-

Louise Perry 1:19:53 It's really disturbing, isn't it? It would be so much, it would actually be so much more, like, psychologically reassuring, which is why I think most people prefer this explanation, to think that it's just some manifestation of evil or something, or it's under people's control, 'cause it's just, it's awful to think-

Chris Williamson 1:20:08 It's so uncomfi- uh, uncomfortable.

Louise Perry 1:20:09 ... imagine being cursed with that.

Chris Williamson 1:20:11 Yeah.

Louise Perry 1:20:12 Awful.

Chris Williamson 1:20:13 I remember learning about it. I was at uni, and there