The Performative Male Epidemic - Louise Perry & Mary Harrington (4K)

1. 0:00 – 14:06

   Could Taylor Swift’s Engagement Shift the Declining Birth Rate?

   1. CWChris Williamson0:00

      Americans are having a record low amount of sex, even less than they did during COVID. Just 37% of American adults have sex weekly, down from 55% in 1990. Does this counter the view that sex is becoming more casually accepted than ever before?

   2. LPLouise Perry0:19

      Who goes first?

   3. MHMary Harrington0:20

      Uh, do you wanna go first? I think I, I glanced at these statistics and I, and what I, what I thought was interesting and sort of haven't really had a chance to burrow into is how does it split between the long-term partnered and-

   4. CWChris Williamson0:33

      Unpartnered.

   5. MHMary Harrington0:33

      ... the casually-

   6. LPLouise Perry0:34

      Yeah, yeah.

   7. MHMary Harrington0:34

      ... and the unpartnered?

   8. LPLouise Perry0:35

      Yeah, ex-

   9. MHMary Harrington0:36

      'Cause that's, that's been s- generally the, the, that's where the commentary gets interesting and people have often, uh, the, the, the, the conservative side will say, "No, actually, the, the, the not getting, the not getting any is, is very much the people who are not married."

   10. CWChris Williamson0:50

       Mm-hmm.

   11. MHMary Harrington0:50

       And actually the, the, the married are getting any. And if I remember rightly, the recent headlines, no, no, actually the people who are not, who are married are also, um, pan- becoming more panda-like.

   12. CWChris Williamson0:59

       Sex recession is happening across the board.

   13. MHMary Harrington1:00

       Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's happening across the board.

   14. LPLouise Perry1:02

       Yeah, yeah, yeah.

   15. CWChris Williamson1:02

       Relationship, uh, agnostic?

   16. LPLouise Perry1:05

       So I think that the paradox where people are simultaneously having less sex and apparently being at least more permissive towards casual sex, whether or not they're having lots of it, I think is solved by that marriage issue. So if people are, are less likely to be in long-term partnerships and people in long-term partnerships have more sex. So there's a g- I think there's a, there's a model that works where, say gen Z are having casual sex but they're only having casual sex.

   17. CWChris Williamson1:30

       Mm-hmm.

   18. LPLouise Perry1:30

       So like one hookup a year, for instance-

   19. CWChris Williamson1:32

       Hm.

   20. LPLouise Perry1:32

       ... works out as very little sex. But it's also not to say that casual sex culture doesn't exist.

   21. CWChris Williamson1:39

       So you're able to have both of these things happening at the same time.

   22. LPLouise Perry1:40

       I think that those things work.

   23. CWChris Williamson1:41

       And they might actually be causing each other...

   24. LPLouise Perry1:43

       Yeah. But I also think it's plausible that even married people might be having less sex, and that might be to do with things like obesity, things like, I don't know, xenoestrogens. Like there could be biological things going on. Or people just looking at their phones too much.

   25. MHMary Harrington1:55

       I think, eh, people looking at their phones is at least as plausible on, on a practical level, uh, as xenoestrogens or any other sort of exotic biological explanations. I mean, if you're, you know, it's, it's very, it's very absorbing and, you know, at the end of the day, you know, a certain amount of, of the, a certain amount of action happens just, you know, there's nothing, nothing to do, nothing on TV-

   26. CWChris Williamson2:18

       Spontaneously. Out of boredom.

   27. MHMary Harrington2:19

       You know, you're, you're here, I'm here, um...

   28. LPLouise Perry2:21

       You know, Alice Evans-

   29. MHMary Harrington2:23

       Mm.

   30. LPLouise Perry2:23

       ... who's a, uh, academic at KCL London, she blames smartphones for the birth rate crisis.
2. 14:06 – 22:44

   Are We Underestimating the Power of ‘the Auntie’?

   1. LPLouise Perry14:06

   2. NANarrator14:06

      There's a, an app called Aura, A-U-R-A-

   3. LPLouise Perry14:08

      Mm-hmm.

   4. NANarrator14:09

      ... and it's, uh, digital safety stuff, uh, and you put it on everybody's phone but you can put it on your kid's phone, and it allows parents to have sort of surveillance that's safe without encroaching too much on privacy. That, at least that's the positioning. But it does things like it looks at how hard they're pressing the screen and it correlates that with their level of sort of psychological distress.

   5. LPLouise Perry14:30

      Mm-hmm, okay.

   6. NANarrator14:30

      And it looks at the last time that they went to ... the last time they used it and the first time they used it in the morning, and then they correlate that with GPS data. It's all held securely supposedly.

   7. LPLouise Perry14:38

      Right, right.

   8. NANarrator14:38

      And it's like, um, it can deliver a report to a parent that says, "When little Timmy goes to baseball, he sleeps for 45 minutes longer on average and he's this percent less aggressive when he's pressing the screen, which suggests that it's very regulating for him." And it's-

   9. LPLouise Perry14:52

      His grandmother could've s-

   10. NANarrator14:53

       Mm-hmm.

   11. LPLouise Perry14:53

       ... told you that though.

   12. NANarrator14:54

       Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of this stuff is- Like a grunt?

   13. LPLouise Perry14:55

       (laughs)

   14. NANarrator14:55

       A l- a lot of this stuff is absolutely a b- it's a substitute for attentive, attuned interpersonal relationships by people, from people who love you. Mm-hmm. We're trying to re-engineer through- Right, and, and there's a-

   15. LPLouise Perry15:07

       Yeah.

   16. NANarrator15:07

       ... there's a sense in which the more you offer a tech alternative to that, the more you create, more, the more you open the possibility that actually you can just do without the relationship- It's a redundancy. ... yeah. Yeah. Uh, whereas and it sh- and it's going j- jumping slightly sideways from that to, you know, the, the, the power of, the power of older women for pattern recognition. I was talking to a local friend who's, who's, who has a s- son the same age as my daughter. We were talking about schools as we were walking our dogs, you know, very, very, v- very normie- Classic. ... very, very normie, very countryside, very ... Um, and he, he was telling me, um, his, his wife, who's also my friend, his mother runs a local riding school. You know, it's one of those very classic kind of, you know, English, English kind of, you know, tier three riding schools where all the school ponies are, are very hairy and very muddy and, um, uh, and those and generation after generation after generation of local girls sort of from tween probably to mid-teens have come through this riding stables. So, so my, my friend's mother-in-law has observed patterns of behavior in possibly, you know, I think 25 years worth of local girls. And he was, and he is ba- he, he and, he and his wife are basing their school selection on what she's, has observed over 25 years about the, about the, the change in disposition as those girls go off to different schools.

   17. LPLouise Perry16:21

       Mm-hmm.

   18. NANarrator16:22

       Um, so not OFSTED, um, not, uh, not even what other parents think, not even what other parents are planning to do-

   19. LPLouise Perry16:28

       Mm-hmm.

   20. NANarrator16:28

       ... but which schools instantly t- which, which schools transi- when, which secondary schools instantly overnight transformed the girls that my mother-in-law saw from nice little girls into brats and which didn't. Wow. Yeah, okay.

   21. LPLouise Perry16:42

       Mm-hmm.

   22. NANarrator16:42

       Um, and that's the kind of stuff which you can try and, you can try and replace with an app, but, but you can't basically. Mm-hmm. A quick aside, you've probably heard experts like Dr. Rhonda Patrick talk about the benefits of omega-3s. They support brain reduction. They support brain reduction. They support brain function, but they reduce inflammation. They improve heart health and are backed by hundreds of studies. It's really tough to get enough through diet. No one's eating that much salmon. Come on. And with Momentous, you know you're getting the highest quality omega-3s on the market. They're NSF certified for sport and they're tested for heavy metals and purity. Huge deal if you're getting anything that is seafood supplement related, which is why Momentous is unparalleled when it comes to rigorous third-party testing. What you read on the label is what's in the product and absolutely nothing else. Best of all, they've got a 30-day money back guarantee, so you can buy it, try it how many s- there's 60 capsules and you take two per day. You could take this entire bottle and if you don't love it, they'll just give you your money back, so it's risk free. And they ship internationally. Right now, you can get 35% off your first subscription and that 30-day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com/modernwisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com/modernwisdom, and modernwisdom at checkout.

   23. LPLouise Perry17:59

       Have you ever read that classic, um, blog, I think it's by an anonymous blogger from years ago, about, um, about WAMS versus autists?

   24. NANarrator18:09

       (laughs)

   25. LPLouise Perry18:09

       So it's, uh, so, (laughs) so WAMS is a made up term. So the argument in the piece, it's great, is, um, we spend a lot of time talking about autism-

   26. NANarrator18:18

       Mm-hmm.

   27. LPLouise Perry18:18

       ... and, like, identifying it in people and seeing it as an obviously bad thing-

   28. NANarrator18:22

       Mm-hmm.

   29. LPLouise Perry18:22

       ... you know, and we'll list-

   30. NANarrator18:23

       (laughs)
3. 22:44 – 32:37

   The Rise of the Labubu Man

   1. CWChris Williamson22:44

      right, I want to, I want to talk about, uh, kind of downstream from the Taylor Swift thing. I want to talk about Pick Mes and performative males.

   2. MHMary Harrington22:50

      Hmm.

   3. CWChris Williamson22:50

      Because these are two memes that are taking off a li- a little bit at the moment.

   4. MHMary Harrington22:53

      Performative males?

   5. LPLouise Perry22:54

      Yeah.

   6. MHMary Harrington22:54

      This is not one I've heard. Please say no.

   7. CWChris Williamson22:56

      Have you heard about performative males?

   8. LPLouise Perry22:57

      No. No.

   9. MHMary Harrington22:58

      What is a performative male?

   10. CWChris Williamson22:59

       You need to get back on Twitter.

   11. MHMary Harrington23:00

       (laughs)

   12. CWChris Williamson23:02

       You need to get back on Twitter.

   13. LPLouise Perry23:03

       I mean, I am cut out of di- discourse.

   14. CWChris Williamson23:05

       Um, I haven't-

   15. LPLouise Perry23:05

       If Mary hasn't sent me a tweet, I just don't see it.

   16. MHMary Harrington23:06

       (laughs)

   17. CWChris Williamson23:07

       Okay, so-

   18. MHMary Harrington23:08

       I've also been deliberately not very online all, all through the summer. Yeah, I ha- I took my holiday from the internet in England's-

   19. LPLouise Perry23:14

       Yeah.

   20. MHMary Harrington23:14

       ... last remaining phone blacks.

   21. CWChris Williamson23:15

       Oh, of course. I've decided to pick your fucking sabbatical from online life.

   22. LPLouise Perry23:18

       We've just reached the end of Ben's... Yeah.

   23. CWChris Williamson23:19

       And today is the day that the kids go back to school.

   24. MHMary Harrington23:21

       Yeah, that's right (laughs) .

   25. CWChris Williamson23:22

       So how do I best do this in, in four weeks time? It'd b- oh, allow me to tell you about performative male (laughs) .

   26. LPLouise Perry23:26

       (laughs) .

   27. MHMary Harrington23:26

       So y- so you're gonna have to fill us in.

   28. CWChris Williamson23:28

       Let me, let me do that. Okay, so performative males are i- it's a call-out. It's been very interesting. The trend emerged and almost immediately became kind of castigated. You know, like woke had an opportunity to be a legitimate term before it was a satirical term. Performative males have almost immediately become satirized. Performative male is a guy with floppy hair, sort of oversized flared jeans. He's got a tote bag, he's reading some sort of literary fiction. He's got a matcha. He's not quite like a cinnamon roll boyfriend husband thing.

   29. MHMary Harrington23:58

       Is this...

   30. LPLouise Perry23:58

       (laughs) .
4. 32:37 – 49:18

   Do Women Prefer Labubu Men or Himbos?

   1. CWChris Williamson32:37

   2. LPLouise Perry32:37

      Circling back to Chris's opening question, is it possible that everyone's having less sex because of the Le BooBoo mania?

   3. MHMary Harrington32:47

      (laughs)

   4. LPLouise Perry32:47

      But seriously, like maybe we do need more-

   5. MHMary Harrington32:48

      I mean, it's, it's crossed my mind sometimes too.

   6. LPLouise Perry32:49

      Yeah, we need more polarity.

   7. CWChris Williamson32:51

      Well, look, this is... The, to me, this just seems like the progeny of Me Too in many ways, that the message that a lot of men, the vast majority of well-behaved, uh, sexually disciplined, not pushy men took was, "I shouldn't be pushy." It's like, well, yeah, you already weren't that pushy and maybe you actually weren't pushy enough. So the issue with the message don "Don't be too pushy," is that the men who really need to hear it will ignore it-

   8. LPLouise Perry33:25

      Mm-hmm.

   9. CWChris Williamson33:25

      ... and the men who are already predisposed to believe it will take it to heart. So what you end up with is this weird selection effect where the bad actors still act badly and the ones who actually probably needed a little bit of a helping hand to go forward are like, "Oh, holy fuck."

   10. LPLouise Perry33:39

       Mm-hmm.

   11. CWChris Williamson33:39

       And maybe the Le BooBoo Man is just the, the final-

   12. LPLouise Perry33:42

       Mm-hmm.

   13. CWChris Williamson33:42

       ... final form of, of that.

   14. MHMary Harrington33:44

       Sorry.

   15. LPLouise Perry33:44

       He's taking it too seriously.

   16. MHMary Harrington33:45

       At the risk of, uh... At the risk of just pouring, um, petrol on this conversation and then flinging a match in-

   17. LPLouise Perry33:51

       (laughs)

   18. MHMary Harrington33:51

       ... um, it, it strikes, you know, the... It strikes me that, you know, if, if, if your thesis is right and in fact, um, somewhere buried in, in all of this is actually a, a, a low level of r- a sort of low level revulsion at Le BooBoo Man, um, and a yearning for a more direct and unmediated form of, um, masculine sexual aggression-

   19. LPLouise Perry34:12

       Mm-hmm.

   20. MHMary Harrington34:12

       ... um, it has been suggested by people on the internet, whose names I now forget, that s- that this is some... This is in fact a factor in the extremely, um, politically sensitive subject of migration into the country across the English Channel. Um, as in-

   21. LPLouise Perry34:30

       Go on.

   22. MHMary Harrington34:31

       ... there are-

   23. CWChris Williamson34:31

       Here we go.

   24. LPLouise Perry34:32

       (laughs)

   25. MHMary Harrington34:32

       ... there, there are progressive women who-

   26. LPLouise Perry34:36

       I know. (laughs)

   27. MHMary Harrington34:36

       ... kind of, kind of enjoy the appearance of young men who haven't been Le BooBoo, Le BooBoo-fied yet.

   28. CWChris Williamson34:43

       Wow.

   29. LPLouise Perry34:44

       Or, and-

   30. MHMary Harrington34:45

       This is... No, this is, this is not a like-ee fish-
5. 49:18 – 1:01:30

   Will the English Flag Start a Culture War?

   1. MHMary Harrington49:18

      that, you know.

   2. CWChris Williamson49:18

      Have you heard the theory that aliens are just the end of human evolution, that they're-

   3. MHMary Harrington49:24

      What? (laughs)

   4. CWChris Williamson49:24

      ... complete... Yeah, I'm, it's, I'm bringing it back, I promise.

   5. MHMary Harrington49:26

      (laughs)

   6. CWChris Williamson49:27

      Um, they're sort of, uh, huge heads. Human heads have got bigger over time, although they actually got smaller at one point as well.

   7. MHMary Harrington49:31

      Mm-hmm.

   8. CWChris Williamson49:31

      But human heads are big. Um, we seem to be getting lower testosterone, less muscled, less sort of, you know, uh, domineering physically, and that aliens, the classic sort of-

   9. MHMary Harrington49:40

      Hmm.

   10. CWChris Williamson49:40

       ... big head, big eyes thing is the completely atrophied in the body but, uh, uh, overdeveloped, uh, cognitively.

   11. LPLouise Perry49:48

       Well, what they are to us as we are to chimps.

   12. CWChris Williamson49:51

       Uh, and, yeah, 'cause we are weaker-

   13. LPLouise Perry49:53

       Yeah.

   14. CWChris Williamson49:53

       ... bigger brains, yeah.

   15. LPLouise Perry49:54

       Yeah.

   16. CWChris Williamson49:54

       And then you just keep running that forward. I won-

   17. LPLouise Perry49:56

       Even less hair on aliens as well.

   18. CWChris Williamson49:59

       Good point. I'd, uh, never really assessed the hair of an alien, but I-

   19. LPLouise Perry50:02

       Hairless, right?

   20. CWChris Williamson50:02

       It's just inter- it's just interesting-

   21. LPLouise Perry50:03

       Yeah.

   22. CWChris Williamson50:04

       ... to h- hear where your mind goes. Um, I wonder whether Laboobooman is kind of the same sort of, "I've adapted to my local environment. My local environment is one where if I'm quite flaccid as a human, like a very flaccid human, I can sit in an office chair for longer," basically.

   23. MHMary Harrington50:22

       Right. So, so the interesting que- you know, what, you know, uh, uh, civilizations can go down as well as up. How long do, would it take after the shit hit the fan, hypothetically speaking-

   24. CWChris Williamson50:32

       Mm-hmm.

   25. MHMary Harrington50:32

       ... in, civilizationally, before Laboobooman got his, got his act together?

   26. CWChris Williamson50:37

       I mean, I think-

   27. MHMary Harrington50:37

       And was either, was either selected aggressively out of the picture altogether or, or actually just learned to shoot?

   28. CWChris Williamson50:42

       Needed to step his game up. Yeah. Well, I mean-

   29. MHMary Harrington50:44

       (laughs)

   30. CWChris Williamson50:44

       ... th- d- how many people say, "If our country went to war, there's no way that I would fight for them. I've got asthma. Sorry. No. My, my athlete's foot precludes me from being able to go into the..." You know, there's like all manner of different excuses. And, uh, yeah, without selection pressure, people fold around whatever that situation is.
6. 1:01:30 – 1:13:20

   Is Lifestyle BDSM Just Princess Treatment in Disguise?

   1. CWChris Williamson1:01:30

      Uh, looping it back to the perennial discussion about stupid things to do with the relationships on the internet-

   2. LPLouise Perry1:01:35

      (laughs)

   3. CWChris Williamson1:01:35

      ... have you heard of princess treatment?

   4. MHMary Harrington1:01:37

      What? No.

   5. LPLouise Perry1:01:39

      No.

   6. MHMary Harrington1:01:39

      I'm a big mystery (overlapping dialogue) -

   7. CWChris Williamson1:01:39

      Oh, allow me-

   8. MHMary Harrington1:01:40

      ... listener.

   9. CWChris Williamson1:01:40

      I mean, you are spending a lot of time on TikTok, I would've expected this to come across.

   10. LPLouise Perry1:01:43

       Mm.

   11. CWChris Williamson1:01:43

       Okay. Princess treatment refers to various supposedly fairytale worthy gestures made by women's partners, including but never limited to lattes in bed, flowers every Friday, partner-funded pedicures, and doors being opened for you. Nearly th- uh, 130,000 Instagram posts congregate under it. However, this is immediately being taken to reductio ad absurdum. Courtney Palmer, self-proclaimed housewife princess, "I do not interact with the waitress. I do not open any doors and I do not order my own food. You do not need to talk unless you are spoken to. You are not going to be laughing loudly, speaking loudly or demanding the attention of the restaurant." So, princess treatment, uh-

   12. MHMary Harrington1:02:19

       Is this not sort of lifestyle BDSM with extra steps?

   13. LPLouise Perry1:02:21

       I was gonna say, it's a sex thing.

   14. MHMary Harrington1:02:22

       It's a s-

   15. LPLouise Perry1:02:23

       (laughs)

   16. MHMary Harrington1:02:23

       It's totally a sex thing.

   17. LPLouise Perry1:02:24

       Yeah.

   18. MHMary Harrington1:02:24

       It's a sex thing.

   19. CWChris Williamson1:02:25

       How have you both arrived at this?

   20. MHMary Harrington1:02:26

       Which, which I mean-

   21. CWChris Williamson1:02:26

       This is like that-

   22. MHMary Harrington1:02:27

       High five me. (laughs)

   23. CWChris Williamson1:02:27

       This is like that fucking anti-wisdom thing where I haven't seen it.

   24. MHMary Harrington1:02:31

       (laughs)

   25. CWChris Williamson1:02:31

       Like, you're looking at this optical illusion and I'm like, "What?"

   26. MHMary Harrington1:02:34

       Okay, yeah. To, to be, I mean, this is kind of a Mary, a Mary and Louise group chat-

   27. CWChris Williamson1:02:35

       Explain, explain to the muggle in the room.

   28. MHMary Harrington1:02:37

       It's a Mary and Louise group chat running joke about the, you know, tradwife, um, and there's the tradwife or autogynephile, but that's not this. Um, the- there's also-

   29. CWChris Williamson1:02:44

       What the f- tradwife, autogynephile.

   30. MHMary Harrington1:02:46

       Okay, no, there's a, or, or, but, but there's also, there's also the continuity between, um, right wing, right wing complementarian tradwife discourse and lifestyle BDSM, which it seems to me is just, uh, it's y- it's really just a question of inflection, but it's basically the same conversation.

Episode duration: 2:14:46