Modern WisdomThe Real Effects Of “No Strings Attached” - Louise Perry
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,377 words- 0:00 – 0:17
Intro
- LPLouise Perry
If it's really the case that sex work is work, then what is the problem with being asked by your boss to give him a blow job? It's work. It's just a service. It's like being asked to do overtime or make a coffee. No one actually thinks that it's just like making a coffee.
- CWChris Williamson
(wind blows) Louise Perry, welcome to the show.
- LPLouise Perry
Thank you so much
- 0:17 – 4:38
Reactions to Louise’s Book
- LPLouise Perry
for having me.
- CWChris Williamson
Given your political background, how does it feel to have Ben Shapiro quote-tweeting your work?
- LPLouise Perry
I, (laughs) I didn't know he had.
- CWChris Williamson
Did you not see this?
- LPLouise Perry
No.
- CWChris Williamson
Let me tell you.
- LPLouise Perry
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
So, there is a tweet that, uh, someone put out a couple of days ago, explaining about how don't kink-shame the naked men doing parades in front of children and twerking in front of cops.
- LPLouise Perry
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
And that was one photo, which was a news story, and the other photo was the chapter list from your book.
- LPLouise Perry
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Which said things-
- LPLouise Perry
Oh, that oh, that's-
- CWChris Williamson
... like men and women are different-
- LPLouise Perry
No.
- CWChris Williamson
... and, uh, loveless sex is not empowering. And it said-
- LPLouise Perry
Yep, yep.
- CWChris Williamson
... um, uh, "People of the West, choose your future." Something like that.
- LPLouise Perry
(laughs) Oh, wow. Okay. That, yeah, okay, that no- that, that explains things. I have a no- I have quite a h- like, a heavy notification filter on on Twitter, so I don't always see everything. Um, the Contents page though completely blew up, like, three months ago, long before the book was published. It had just ... The publisher just put up online the cover, the title, the fact that Kathleen Stock wrote the forward, 'cause she's got a kind of existing reputation among, among her haters, my haters, and the Contents page, and that was enough to have like a several-day Twitter storm-
- CWChris Williamson
Why do you think that was?
- LPLouise Perry
... by those statements. I mean, I guess because ... I mean, I did, I did write the chapters with the knowledge that they're like, they're simultaneously obvious and also incredibly provocative, which was, which was like precisely my intention. Because to some, 'cause some people read it, I mean, some people read the whole book, s- but some people read the chapter titles in particular, and they're like, "Yeah?" And other people read them as like, fascist, basically. I mean, like, e- like, s- like, so politically outrageous. I mean, I'd say that the response to the book so far, it's only been out for a couple of weeks in the UK and not yet in the States, is, um, like 80% really positive and 20% complete outrage, and not very much in the middle (laughs) .
- CWChris Williamson
I think ... Well, what do you think is gonna happen when it comes out in America?
- LPLouise Perry
(sighs) That's a good question. I mean, the, the, like, the culture war is more intense in America in every way. It's so similar, I think, to what we have here. I mean, actually I think we import it really, but, um, yeah, I don't know. I mean, I'm, I, like, I did l- That, like, British political context is different from American, right? And I write for the new Statesman Magazine, for instance, which is a, like, traditionally left-wing outlet. Um, I have come from the left, even if I wouldn't necessarily consider myself still a part of the left and so on. So like, I hope that the book doesn't just get treated as, like, yet another socially conservative take on the sex revolution.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- LPLouise Perry
Because even if I'm reaching some conservative conclusions, I'm doing it via different priors, if that makes sense.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, why d- didn't you say, "I start from feminist priors and end up with socially conservative conclusions?"
- LPLouise Perry
Yeah, some socially conservative conclusions, yeah, um, which means that there's sort of something in it for everyone to hate.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- LPLouise Perry
(laughs) Because I have-
- CWChris Williamson
Except Ben Shapiro, apparently.
- 4:38 – 11:15
What’s Wrong with the Sexual Revolution?
- LPLouise Perry
and true.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) What's wrong with the sexual revolution then?
- LPLouise Perry
So, my argument in the book is basically that there are some really important ways in which men and women are different from one another. So some of those differences are physical and should be fairly obvious, like only women can get pregnant, men are bigger and stronger than women are on average. Like, on average, but also that difference is massive between the, between the means. And also there are psychological differences, which a lot of feminism over the last half century or more has been really invested in minimizing but are, I think, definitely there, if you look at the research, um, and obviously just look at the world around you. Um, one of those differences, for instance, is that me- male sexuality is different from female sexuality on average, that men are more likely to be into things like casual sex, watching porn, buying sex, um, all things that have become much more socially acceptable post-sexual revolution. And my argument basically is that the sexual revolution was kicked off by the pill and the ... which, which did a pretty good job of severing the link between sex and reproduction, and this kind of gave the impression that sex could just be a leisure activity, that it didn't have to mean anything, it could just be sort of a bit of fun.And my argument is actually that that idea, that sex is just, uh, just a bit of fun, it doesn't really mean anything, suits male interests much more than it does female. Because casual sex, in particular, is just one, one, men want it more than women do, and two, women carry all of the risks associated with it, like physical risks like pregnancy and violence and so on. Um, so my argument basically is it's a bad deal for women.
- CWChris Williamson
But originally, it was the sort of thing that was pushed by liberals and feminists, right? This is exactly the sort of thing-
- LPLouise Perry
It still... Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the, yeah, so the, the popular narrative that I'm challenging is one that the sex revolution was like a feminist accomplishment, and I don't think that's true. I mean, which is not to say that there aren't some things about it that have been good for women. I mean, if, I mean, if you look at the story of recent decades in particular, there are all sorts of ways in which women are doing great, actually. Like women are, women are going to university more often than men are. They are, right up until they have children, are doing better in the workplace. You know, this is, it's not to say that like everything is, like the battle of the sexes, women are like losing across the board, not at all. Um, but I think in terms of sexual culture, that I'm concerned. I'm concerned for women, I'm also concerned for men. I mean, there's a lot in the book about, for instance, the really malign influence of porn on young men. Like, like, in a superficial and short-term way, it's great to be a really attractive man in this sexual culture, right? You can basically attract as many partners as you like. You know, consequence-free sex is, is freely available to you. But I think actually in the long run, that's not a very ... that's not a happy way to live your life.
- CWChris Williamson
You say that your complaint is focused more against liberals than conservatives. Why is that?
- LPLouise Perry
(inhales deeply) I mean, because I'm expecting liberals to read it. (laughs) I might be wrong about that. But I, that, that's the space that I'm coming from originally. Like I went to s- I went to such a left-wing university. Um-
- CWChris Williamson
Where did you go?
- LPLouise Perry
I went to SOAS in London.
- CWChris Williamson
I don't even know what that is.
- LPLouise Perry
It's like a really, really small, really crazy university. (laughs) so like, so I, you know, I've, I've read all of th- uh, th- all of this radical stuff as a student, and I'm coming from a feminist background and coming from, um, as I said, the new, the new statesman I work for is, is, is historically left-wing. So I'm kind of, I'm trying to speak to those people. Um, but I mean, the book's for conservatives as well, because there are bits in it that I think every- everyone will, will find, um, will find challenging, that they'll just-
- CWChris Williamson
But isn't that the fact that a lot of what you're talking about here is conserving some fairly traditional views around men's and women's roles with each other, about sort of chivalrous conduct and having constraints on the way that men and their aggression and their desire for multiple sexual partners, like that, that is a fundamentally conservative value. So it, it seems to me like the conservatives would have far less to disagree with you on. Not, again, there's something for everybody to disagree with-
- LPLouise Perry
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... but that the conservatives would probably have far less than the new wave of liberals.
- LPLouise Perry
(inhales deeply) Probably, yeah. Although I should say that the, this idea of like constraining male sexuality, which is, which is, is, is, is central to my thesis basically, um, it is conservative in the sense that it was, it was considered to be like a mainstream idea before sex revolution in the West. But if you look across time and place, like that's not necessarily considered like a trad thing to do. I mean, like if you look for instance at antiquity, the idea that some high-status man would have access to, sexual access to his underlings was like completely accepted. It's really, I don't know if you've read Tom Holland's book, Dominion?
- CWChris Williamson
No. You don't mean Tom Holland, the guy that plays Spider-Man, do you?
- LPLouise Perry
I, no, I don't. (laughs) A c- a common, a common mistake. No. Um, no, he's a British academic and historian writer, um, and he's got this fantastic book called Dominion, which is about, um, basically about history of Christianity and the ways in which Christianity influences the modern world, even if we consider ourselves to be areligious or post-Christian. Um, and he has a bit in there where he talks about MeToo. Um, and it really triggered a lot of my thinking about this actually. This was a few years ago, where he points out that in, say, the Roman world, no one would think that Harvey Weinstein was doing anything wrong. Like, the idea that this guy who's at the top of, the top of the tree of his particular hierarchy would be able to have sexual access to anyone kind of subordinate to him, was like, "Yeah, obviously." And actually, the idea that he should be, that he should be constrained is, Ho- Holland argues, a very Christian idea. Um, and, you know, I'm, I'm not Christian, I'm not coming at this from a religious perspective, um, but it's worth pointing that out, you know, like this is not necessarily a normal thing to think. (laughs) But-
- CWChris Williamson
The, the window of trad sort of shifts over time, right? Like no one's actually going that far back. So okay,
- 11:15 – 21:01
Challenging the Idea of ‘Progress’
- CWChris Williamson
so the sexual revolution happens, like surely women have benefited with, uh, no more shame and stigma around enjoying sex and stuff like that.
- LPLouise Perry
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
Like who, who benefited from the sexual revolution overall?
- LPLouise Perry
Yeah, so the shame and stigma thing. I mean, yes, that is definitely one outcome. I mean, like, I think that one of the, one of the things that I'm trying to push in this book, and, and that is, I shared with, um, like Mary Harrington and Nina Power that you've had on the show before, they, that we, yeah, we're on the s- we're on the same page about this, like challenging the idea of progress, um, particularly from a feminist perspective, this idea that, um, history has a shape and everything is always getting better and better, and that the sexual revolu- you know, everything post-sexual revolution is necessarily better than what came before, I just don't think is true. I think that's nonsense. Like we're looking at a massive historical event triggered primarily by technology. Of course there are gonna be upsides and downsides, you know? Um, the-... yeah, so I think it is absolutely the case that, that women now can be much more open about sexuality and are more able to enjoy (clears throat) sex in certain circumstances and stuff. That's true. But I also think that, to some extent, like, we're social animals and we're very responsive to norms, and what I think has happened is kind of a... the norms have just spun on a sixpence. And now, whereas previously it would have been the case that young women, for instance, w- were, like, protecting their virginity and their reputation of being chaste, and so it was considered very important socially. Now, if anything, it's the opposite. Or not quite the opposite, but that now the pressure actually is on for women to be up for it and to be just as, like, sexually adventurous as, as the guys. And you know, like, there's... it's like a slightly painful, um... there's a contradiction within that which is really hard to navigate for young women, where on the one hand, like, it's good to be sexually open, it's good to sort of, um, base your reputation on being really sexy, but also there is actually a penalty if your body count is too high, which is quite, which is quite difficult, and I think a lot of young women don't necessarily realize that as well. Like, they're actually treading a really difficult tightrope, um, which is why I think this idea of, like, "Oh, well, people can do whatever they want now," like, you know, "We're all, we're all free to behave as we want sexually," I just don't think is true, because ev- we... like, every culture has expectations in relation to sex, has norms in relation to sex. I think that what we've done though is that we had some quite deeply embedded norms which were thrown out the window as a consequence of sexual revolution, and now there's, like, a sort of halting effort to maybe rebuild them. Sometimes they're im- they're implicit, and it's kind of the Wild West out there, basically. And I do- I... Go on.
- CWChris Williamson
Who's im- who's enforcing this then? Where's this coming from?
- LPLouise Perry
I don't-
- CWChris Williamson
Are you suggesting that men are weaponizing women to believe that they should have a particular type of, uh, sexual proclivity that then plays into men's hands because they get more variety?
- LPLouise Perry
I don't think there's a conspiracy. I don't think that anyone is enforcing it. I think that it's just everyone, like, responding to incentives as individuals, um, and that knits together to create the, the culture that we see before us. So, like, yeah, it is in, it is in the interests of, of men who want to sleep around to encourage women to, to match them, you know, in that kind of behavior. So that's clearly going on at an individual level. But then in terms of, like, women's magazines encouraging their readers to do the same, I have some... I, I, I did a lot of digging through women's magazines for this book, and, um, like, there are some really grim (laughs) articles out there.
- CWChris Williamson
What were your least favorite headlines?
- LPLouise Perry
I can't remember exactly the wording of it, but there's a whole genre of, um, articles in women's ma- in women's media about encouraging women not to catch feelings, or, I mean, the way that it's phrased is, um, how anyone of any gender can not catch feelings when they're having casual sex and how to have casual sex in, like, a fun, feminist way, et cetera, et cetera. But, like, we know that women are much more likely to bond quickly with their sexual partners. We know that they're just much less likely to like casual sex. Um, something that's s- a really interesting and really marked difference between men and women on average on, uh, in, um, sexuality is women's sexual disgust threshold is a lot, lot lower. So women will get the ick much easier than, than men will. But if you're gonna participate, if you're gonna have sex like a man, you have to overcome all of those instincts, right? And so there's a wh- this whole genre of women's mags that will basically, like, instruct their young readers in how to suppress their instincts and have sex that actually they kinda know deep down they shouldn't be having, which I think is really bleak. (laughs) And, yeah, I d- and, and I think that just representing that as feminist in any way. I don't-
- CWChris Williamson
Interestingly, looking at it from a man's perspective, I, I agree that this is bad for women. I don't think that it serves their interests. I think that the biological predisposition that women have when it comes to sexual partners, trying to decouple having sex... First off, having sex and, and making babies was decoupled, but then having sex and, um, having emotions, getting attached, was decoupled. And that second one, uh, the, the pill for that is... I mean, you know, what is it? It's ten vodkas deep. Like, does that really help?
- LPLouise Perry
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
You know, you wake up in the morning and you feel... But (clears throat) you use-
- LPLouise Perry
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... this analogy about the fact that Marilyn Monroe was a, a sort of very attractive woman that was weaponized, commercialized, utilized by a society that wanted to sexualize women, and this was at the benefit of Hughs, Hugh Hefner's... just sort of-
- LPLouise Perry
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... a high-status man who was able to sleep with lots of women-
- LPLouise Perry
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... and, and continue to do this. I agree, I think that you're right, it is bad for women, but very few men are Hughs, and what you're seeing in the modern society is this. Most women are probably dissatisfied with the way that their sexual, um, uh, pursuits are going.
- LPLouise Perry
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
Most men now, the number of men reporting no sex between the ages of 18 and 30 has tripled to nearly 30% in the last 10 years.
- LPLouise Perry
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
So the Matthew Principle kicks off here. So I think on average it's bad for pretty much everybody. I think that the-
- LPLouise Perry
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... sort of amount of sexual satisfaction...... has lowered for everybody, and you have this huge underclass of sexless men, which is where incel, black pill, MGTOW, red pi- some parts of the red pill, the manosphere, men's rights.
- LPLouise Perry
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
All of these movements are, as far as I can see, they're big copes for men who are now in a sort of sexual wasteland, where they're really, really struggling to find connection. So I think that it's, I- I understand that from a, a feminist perspective, it is bad for women and that there are higher costs that they pay, but being a listless, liminal space man with no desire from any female that you give your attention to is not a good situation to be in either.
- LPLouise Perry
Yeah, I completely agree. Yeah, I'd, I'd add to that things like rates of erectile dysfunction among young men are like insanely high, um, which is probably to do with porn. Maybe also has to do with estrogens in the environment. I don't know, but-
- CWChris Williamson
Goddam estrogen. Some-
- LPLouise Perry
(laughs)
- 21:01 – 27:48
Invention of the Pill
- LPLouise Perry
as discrete categories?
- CWChris Williamson
Do you think that inventing the pill was an error then?
- LPLouise Perry
(sighs) No, because I think... I mean, socially, no. Like there, there are, um... Mary Harrington will probably talk to you about the environmental consequences of the pill. Um, and you know, we've just mentioned estrogens and that's like, that's another story. Socially, I think, no. I mean, I think it is... I'm personally grateful for the fact that my life is not entirely dominated by childbearing, which it would have been in a previous era. I'm not gonna expect to have 10 children and to just spend my whole life either pregnant or postpartum. Um, I think it's more that we haven't really negotiated with the social consequences, and that's what I'm trying, that's the sort of conversation that I'm trying to initiate. Because we, you know, we have, we have the power to. I'm not like a complete... I, I, I have a sort of materialist analysis of all of this and I think i- in the end it does come down to, um, things like the pill, things like changes in the economy, you know, I think so often you get the popular narrative of feminist history is basically sees it as being driven by particularly inspiring feminists who just kind of give really strong arguments and everyone is persuaded and this is what, you know, this is what gives us the vote, this is what gives us access to professions, whatever. I don't think that's true. I mean, clearly there have been some very impressive feminists historically, but I think the, the, the real story of the last century is things like the washing machine.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, you said the washing machine helped liberate women more than any feminist did.
- LPLouise Perry
Yeah, I think Jordan Peterson has said the same thing. He's completely right. Um, he also mentions tampons. Yeah, yeah, there's all sorts of, all sorts of technologies which make, um, make it possible for women to have lives outside of the home, or more outside of the home than previously. Um, and also changes to the economy, which means that, you know, if you're in a, in a knowledge economy or a service economy where male physical strength doesn't have anything like the economic importance that it once did, w- women and men can participate basically as equals. Uh, you know, there are, there are like obviously childbearing makes a difference, but if you're, if you're on the pill, you're delaying childbearing, um, you're working at a laptop, and you're operating in a very kind of gender neutral social sphere. Um, you might not even, you might not even like work out, you might have no recognition of the fact that men and women are physic- are profoundly physically different in terms of things like strength. Like from that perspective, it looks as if the whole world is gender neutral. (laughs) Um, and so that's kind of, y- that's, that is the sort of social context in which this idea of the, the, the differences between men and women being socially constructed or being trivial makes sense. But actually that's like very, very superficial analysis of what's going on. I actually, w- I mean, one, the physical differences are still profound, but also like those psychological differences go really deep because we're talking about hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary history feeding into us having these really distinct reproductive roles and that, and that leading to us having quite different modes of sexuality.
- CWChris Williamson
Didn't you say that the, uh, USA women's football team was beaten by the Dallas under-15s football team?
- LPLouise Perry
Yeah. Yeah. There's, I, there, there are like several examples of this, yeah, of elite women's teams being beaten by teenage boys.
- CWChris Williamson
I think that the, the fastest woman on the, in the 100 meters on the planet gets beaten by about 100 or 200 under-17s-
- LPLouise Perry
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... in America, 200 under-17 men in America. Yeah. I mean, uh-
- LPLouise Perry
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
... the whole f- s- like the discussion around, uh, male and female physical strength differences are purely due to the fact that girls get told that they need to play with b- dolls and guys go and lift, uh, lift little trucks and stuff. It feels like LARPing to me. It feels like everybody is living this sort of charade, and nobody can bear themselves to, to pull out of it. Like it's, (clears throat) that, that's wild. But when it comes to the psychological differences, there's a little bit more, um, I guess, plausible room for maneuver there, because you can't see them manifest as much. And when you've also got a discussion about people being able to transition from different genders-
- LPLouise Perry
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... uh, th- the male brain and the female brain and traits that you put them on and take them off like clothes.
- LPLouise Perry
Yeah, and there are outliers, you know? There are, there are pl- like less so physically. I mean, you do sometimes get really strong women or whatever, but even then, I mean, I do, um, my husband and I are both powerlifters and just, I don't think that you can spend five minutes in a powerlifting gym and not be aware of the fact that men and women, strength differences are massive, even if there are obviously some really strong women.
- CWChris Williamson
Do you pull conventional or sumo?
- LPLouise Perry
Conventional.
- CWChris Williamson
What about the husband?
- LPLouise Perry
Also conventional. He pulls sumo.
- CWChris Williamson
Good. It's a family-
- LPLouise Perry
(laughs) .
- CWChris Williamson
... of non-cheaters. I'm adamant that sumo's cheating.
- LPLouise Perry
(laughs) Um, yeah, I mean, and then I see, I've been, you know, training at this for years, and then I see like novice men warming up with my one-rep maximum, Ben, like-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- LPLouise Perry
It's just, it's just, (laughs) it's just like the pure reality of it. But I mean if peop- if people don't participate in those kind of sports also, things like martial arts, if you don't participate in that, you wouldn't necessarily know it. Um, but on the psychological differences, yeah, there, there are cl- there are more outliers. There are some people who are really atypical for their sex and there clearly is like a lot of space for culture to intervene. Um, but it's, so on an individual level, if you know w- if you know someone's sex, you don't necessarily know anything really about their personality. It's more that at the population level, when you're talking about millions of people, that's when you see it play out. And like something that is really interesting and really makes clear that how, how profound these differences are is you look at things like university campuses and look at their sex ratio. On campuses where there are more women than men, so men are the rarer sex, there's more hookup culture because the m- the rarer sex is able to set the terms more easily. And then on campuses where there are more men than women, you have the inverse, there's more monogamy. And that's the sort of thing where yes, there will be individual outliers, but you can't deny the differences when you, when you see it playing out in those kind of larger arenas.
- CWChris Williamson
Well,
- 27:48 – 33:55
Dynamics of Modern Dating & Marriage
- CWChris Williamson
that sex ratio hypothesis is kind of the basis as well for a ton of hypergamy that as you have, uh, an ever increasing group of high-performing women and an ever decreasing group of underperforming men that are dropping out of college, that aren't getting as educated.
- LPLouise Perry
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Women aged 21 to 29 earn 1,111 pounds more on average than the equivalent man. So during the period when women are seeking a mate, they're unable to find what d- fundamentally on average, women want to find a mate that is more statusful, wealthier, and better educated than they are. Those are the cues typically that they were attracted to. But now women are able to gain status, earn more, and become better educated than men at higher rates than men, which is what's causing this sort of upward tilt toward turbo Chad at the top sleeping-
- LPLouise Perry
Mm.
- CWChris Williamson
... with everybody-
- LPLouise Perry
Mm.
- CWChris Williamson
... lis- listless, sexless men underclassed down here, and then the wistful women and alpha widows that are in this sort of world. I, I mean-
- LPLouise Perry
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... this is, this is the most interesting dynamic that I think there is at the moment when it comes to dating. It's got downstream implications economically. It's got downstream implications when you think about, um, population growth, population decline, culture, uh, crime. You know-
- LPLouise Perry
Hmm. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... you don't want this huge underclass of sexless men roaming the streets. When you get into a relationship as a man, your testosterone goes down. When you have a child, your testosterone goes down again-
- LPLouise Perry
Mm.
- CWChris Williamson
... because it's advantageous, it's adaptive for you to not be going out doing reckless shit when you've got a, a baby and a wife at home to look after. So all of this, I mean, this is ju- I, I, it is by far the most interesting dynamic I think that's happening in the world at the moment.
- LPLouise Perry
Yeah. And this is the subject of a... So my last chapter is called Marriage Is Good. Um, and a lot of people who've just seen the contents page sort of assumed that it's a, you know, Christian argument or whatever, but actually it's, it's making exactly, it's like a s- it's like a very rational secular argument for actually, if you look at what happens to a society when you get rid of monogamous marriage and you compare our society now as it was in the past and also look at societies where polygyny is the norm, like most soci- I think it's about 80% of societies on the anthropological record have had polygyny as a socially acceptable thing. So you end up with the, the, you know, the Chads who are having multiple wives and then you've got men who never marry at all. And you do also have some monogamy in the middle, like it's normally not quite that extreme, but that it seems is basically our natural state as a species, and 'cause it just, it just recurs again and again and again. And that, that minority of cultures that have been monogamous, including Western cultures-... are unusual, but, uh, and it's not like ... It does sort of have to be imposed. Like, you know, mo- like a lot of elite men will cheat, for instance, and, you know, they'd take on extra wives if they could. Like people, monogamy is not really our natural state. It does have to be socially enforced, but it also is, like, amazingly successful. Anthropologists talk about the puzzle of monogamous marriage in that it is weird to see that a culture like ours would have developed it in the first place, because it clearly doesn't suit the interests of elite men. You'd think that the elite men would want, would want to have multiple wives, which of course they do, but the reason they think that it's become as successful as it has is because monogamous societies do well.
- CWChris Williamson
More stable.
- LPLouise Perry
And 5 ... They're more, they're more stable. They're also more productive, so they, they colonize other parts of the world, basically, because they're wealthy and, you know, striving and successful, and then they impose their marriage norms elsewhere.
- CWChris Williamson
Think about it this way. I've only just thought about this. The naturalistic fallacy gets used a lot with this, right? Look.
- LPLouise Perry
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Ancestrally we maybe don't have tons of evidence that we're a monogamous species, therefore monogamy is not the strategy that was supposed to go down.
- LPLouise Perry
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
If you accept the fact that non-monogamous societies are more unstable and they're going to exist for less of a, um, amount of time, that means that the living standards are going to be lower. That means that mortality, all, all of the things that you care about, right, are going to be out of the window.
- LPLouise Perry
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
What if monogamy for the individual sometimes can be suboptimal, but on average is optimal for the culture as a whole? In the same way as when seatbelts got introduced, people didn't want to wear them.
- LPLouise Perry
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
And a lot of the time it's not just you that you're saving, it's also other people in the car because if you don't have your seatbelt on, you bounce around and you smash up everybody else as well.
- LPLouise Perry
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
Maybe (clears throat) a different way to frame monogamy is that it's, it's kind of like following the law a little bit.
- LPLouise Perry
(laughs) Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
It's, it's a, uh, a small individual sacrifice that you make that does perhaps make for some people suboptimal living standards, but only a little bit, but the reason that you do that is to contribute to the entire s- uh, stability of society.
- LPLouise Perry
Yeah, I've heard ... I can't remember who, who came up with this, but I've heard monogamy referred to as sexual socialism.
- 33:55 – 43:08
Explaining Sexual Disenchantment
- CWChris Williamson
Okay, so-
- LPLouise Perry
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... what's, w- what's sexual disenchantment?
- LPLouise Perry
So, um, sexual disenchantment is basically ... I took it from Max Weber, the sociologist who wrote about, um, uh, disenchantment of the natural world as part of the Enlightenment, so when you, um ... People used to believe, pre-Enlightenment, that the natural world was kind of possessed by spirits and had, like, agency and specialness, like, infused within it. And then we become more rational, whatever, post-Enlightenment, and realized actually it's all just, like, scientific forces at play. I think that ... Uh, it's not, it's not my term. I, I, I, I borrowed it from Aaron Saboor. He's a American writer. Um, s- sexual disenchantment is what happens post-sexual revolution where you used to think of sex as having this kind of specialness. I mean, within Christianity of being, like, a sacrament within marriage, and then now it's stripped of all of that meaning and it just becomes basically any old so- any old social interaction. Like, it's just a means of having fun basically. It doesn't necessarily mean anything. I mean, the point that I make in the book is actually basically no one really believes in sexual disenchantment. People talk about it a lot, and particularly, like, progressives and liberal feminists will talk about it as if, as if it's an ideal, like, we should of course get rid of all these, like, stupid old-fashioned ideas about sex having some, like, innate specialness. Um, but actually people don't really behave as if that's true because people behave almost always as if actually sex does have a special status. And it's a special status you can't necessarily define very easily, but people feel it. Like people care if they're, if they get cheated on even in, even in the polyamorous community. Like if you go onto any polyamorous subreddit or whatever, you will find people really struggling with jealousy as this, like, intense instinctive thing that they're trying to override and they can't quite do it. Um, people ... I mean, sexual harassment in the workplace, like, the ... I get really frustrated with feminists who claim simultaneously that, um, sex workers work and that we should, like, get rid of all these hang-ups about, um, selling sex being any different from working at McDonald's or, you know, selling any other kind of service. But then they also are s- get so sensitive about any, like, perceived sexual impropriety in their workplace.
- CWChris Williamson
What like?
- LPLouise Perry
Like being touched by a boss, for instance. Like not even in a, like, a really aggressive, assaulting way, but just, you know, women getting touched on the arm or something like that or being asked out.... in a context that you don't really feel comfortable, you know, that kind of Me Too stuff which is quite low-level. Like if that ... if it's really the case that sex work is work, then what is the problem with being asked by your boss to give him a blow job? Right? It's a, it's, it's, it's work. It's just a service. It's like being asked to do overtime or make a-
- CWChris Williamson
Or make a coffee.
- LPLouise Perry
... or make a coffee, yeah. And no one actually thinks that, that it's just like making a coffee. So I think that the sexual disenchantment idea is really just theoretical. It's a rhetorical kind of move, um, but actually doesn't really describe reality and doesn't really-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- LPLouise Perry
... describe how people feel. I mean, it's kind of an i- just an inconvenient fact that if you're, if you're trying to be super rational and you're trying to resist anything like remotely traditional or religious or, you know, anything, um, anything old-fashioned, then the fact that people feel very differently about sex than they do about other things is kind of inconvenient. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
It's, it's felt like an aberration, right? It's like-
- LPLouise Perry
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... oh, this is just ... And it, the analogy drawn with the, um, non-monogamy community is so correct. One of my friends out here in Austin was telling me about the first time that his wife brought somebody else back.
- LPLouise Perry
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
And he was on the floor of the bathroom dry retching, um, but-
- LPLouise Perry
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... at the time, he's now married, at the time, was adamant that this was just him working through his ego and this is, uh, even part of the process, this is part of the processing thing. I'm like, "Dude, that's ... Y- you're not choosing to throw up. That's something-"
- LPLouise Perry
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
"... way, way, way behind conscious programming. That's innate."
- LPLouise Perry
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
"That's built-in." Um-
- LPLouise Perry
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
But is it you that ... Is this your quote that says, "Few liberal feminists are willing to draw the link between the culture of sexual hedonism they promote and the anxieties over campus rape that have emerged at the exact same time"?
- LPLouise Perry
Yeah. Yeah. That's, yeah. Yeah, because I thought, I think what's going, I think what's going on a lot with Me Too is that what, what Me T- what was described during Me Too, and still is, I guess, I mean, it's still, it's still going on in different forms, right? Was not always rape, right? Like some ... So with, like, going back to Weinstein, for instance, some of what he did was like straightforwardly illegal, um, and he was convicted of it therefore. But a lot of what was described is much more somewhere in the middle, you know, much more open to interpretation. Um, and often what women were talking about was just like feeling creeped out or feeling like, like exactly this dry retching on the bathroom floor feeling, like your instincts are telling you something even if you can't quite rationalize it. And often this was like expressed in terms of consent, because in the liberal feminist framework, the only thing you're really allowed to talk about is consent because you, uh, because all the old-fashioned norms are out the window. You're not allowed to talk about chivalry, you're not allowed to talk about, um, like, any kind of instinctive feeling of disgust or discomfort that you have kind of has to be suppressed, but you are allowed to talk about consent. And so everything had to be expressed in the form, in like the language of consent. So I talk about, for instance, the Aziz Ansari case, uh, you might remember. I can't remember the name of the ... Grace, I think, was her, her pseudonym. This woman who went on a date with the actor Aziz Ansari, went back to his house afterwards, and he kind of ... He didn't rape her and he didn't do anything illegal, but he just kind of subtly pressured her into doing sex things that she didn't really wanna do. And then later, she wrote a sort of firsthand account of this, um, and he got in trouble, but it was one of those ... It was, it was a bit later on in Me Too, and it was one of those ones that provoked a lot of discussion because it was, 'cause it was a borderline one. Like he hadn't, had he done anything wrong? He definitely hadn't done anything illegal. Um, the idea that he had n- that he had violated her consent just didn't really stack up just based on her own story. I think what's often going on here is it's to do with this pressure that women feel to have sex like men, and to try and have emotionless sex, and to try and just like, you know, to do the sexual disenchantment thing and just treat it like a, like a leisure activity. But they can't actually quite do it, and they feel like, they feel sexual disgust, they feel shame, they feel like these deep painful emotions. And the only person sometimes to blame is the man even though he actually might not have done anything wrong really or he ... I mean, he probably wasn't behaving like a gentleman, but he wasn't doing anything illegal and he wasn't doing anything really wrong according to like the s- the, the standards of the day. It's just that the stands of the day are not actually very good for women. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
That's it.
- LPLouise Perry
And so for-
- CWChris Williamson
You've nailed it.
- LPLouise Perry
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
You've absolutely nailed it there. And you're right. The, the outlet for, uh, pushback and, and, and for distaste, the only one that is there is the man, and the only framing-
- LPLouise Perry
Mm-hmm.
- 43:08 – 50:44
The Argument for Celibacy Before Marriage
- CWChris Williamson
problem that you have here, uh, in the, uh, asymmetric warfare of the sexes is that men who begin to get a little bit of resentment from women, let's say that they've had their heart broken in the past, but that they are, um, within the standard where they can keep having sex, right? They're not one of the underclass. They're actually someone that can keep on doing it. If they become aware of the fact that girls are trying to play this game of detached, emotionless sex, if they fully become conscious of that, they go, "Oh, okay, let's see who can win at this game the most, because it's not going to be you. It's going to be me." And they can, you know, this isn't to say, again, on average. This isn't to say that some men don't get attached after the first time they have sex where they go, "Some of my friends fall pretty hard." Uh, but they, i- if they can weaponize that, they can do a, a ton of damage as well.
- LPLouise Perry
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
And yeah, I, I don't know. Uh, there may be an argument that everybody just needs to not be able to have sex until the age of 25-
- LPLouise Perry
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... and then when they do, they're like, "Look, I'm fully emotionally balanced."
- LPLouise Perry
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
"I've been through a bunch of breakups. I didn't have sex during the, uh, the, during the relationship. I kinda know what I like and what I don't like," and blah, blah, blah. I don't know. I, it's just, so many of-
- LPLouise Perry
What you're describing there is marriage, Chris. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Ah.
- LPLouise Perry
Like, that used to be what it was.
- CWChris Williamson
I've repurposed it.
- LPLouise Perry
You weren't allowed to have sex before you got married. Which gave e- which gave, like men in particular, a massive incentive to get their shit together.
- CWChris Williamson
How so?
- LPLouise Perry
Because if you're, because if you can't, if you can't get married until you've, say, like achieved certain adult things, like you've got a job, you've got, um, a house, you know, all, like, you've got whatever the system is, like a certain amount of money that you can demonstrate your, sort of, um, eligibility as a husband. If you have to get all of your ducks in a row before you can have sex, I mean you can potentially buy sex, but you can't have it like socially licit. Then that, that's a huge incentive to behave yourself and to do prosocial stuff. Whereas if you have a scenario now where either, either you're, like, attractive enough that you can get sex, casual sex without having to, to do anything really except be like moderately charming, or you can get sex through, o- or you, or you have access to porn, which like gives you the, the f- gives some of the same, like, feedback from your environment as if you were actually having sex. Like, w- I mean this would get so, this will get so much worse with sex robots. Where all of a sudden you can like basically bypass all of the effort that you might historically have had to put in, in order to access sex. You can just buy a sex robot and you can spend your whole life playing video games, never going to the gym, never showering, never having a job, and you still get access to this thing that your ancestors like (laughs) fought tooth and nail to get access to.
- CWChris Williamson
Even without the sex robots, men are retreating, I think-
- LPLouise Perry
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... from, from the dating market at terrifying, terrifying rates. There's a, a quote that Rob Henderson came up with, which is this, a similar sort of dynamic that we're talking about here. It says, "Norms were loosened around being an absentee father, so more men took the option. But nobody wants to admit it because it upsets people. Instead, we retreat to discussions of poverty and economics b- because talking about family and parenting makes people feel weird and judgmental. But young men will only do what's expected of them, and a lot did use to be expected. There were social norms to work hard, provide, take care of loved ones, and so on. Today, these norms have largely dissolved. Young men have responded accordingly."
- LPLouise Perry
Yeah, yeah. He's very, very smart, Rob Henderson. He's completely right. Um, yeah, I mean, I think the, I think that the, the line I have in the book about deadbeat dads is that when, when motherhood became a biological choice for women, fatherhood became a social choice for men.
- CWChris Williamson
What do you mean by that?
- LPLouise Perry
In that when contraception and legalized abortion became available, I mean the sh- that basically killed the shotgun marriage pretty much immediately-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- LPLouise Perry
... because it no longer served the same social purpose that it had before. Um, but the nature of contraception is such that nothing is 100% foolproof. And actually the pill, particularly in its earliest incarnations, wasn't that great and still isn't that great, 'cause it depends a lot on the user using it properly. So if you're using it properly, it's like 99% plus effective, but in reality it's more like 91%. So you end up with a lot of unplanned pregnancies and there will always be some women who don't wanna have a termination for whatever reason. Um, but if you're in a social context where, like, there isn't necessarily considered to be a link between sex and reproduction and getting pregnant is considered to be like this unwelcome aberration, rather than literally the whole point, then it becomes much more socially acceptable for men to not stick around because they say, "Well, you chose this." You know? "You're, you're on your own." Which is, yeah, I mean obviously there have always been cases of people... I've had some critics pointing this out, you know, there have always been cases of men abandoning their wives or abandoning women that they, they've, that they've made pregnant outside of marriage. You know, there have always been scoundrels. There have always been unwanted pregnancies, whatever. Like, that's absolutely true. But rates of out of wedlock births now are h- completely historically unprecedented. Which is kind of weird because you would think that w-... giving women the technology that enables them to cr- control their fertility would reduce single motherhood, but it's done the opposite, because humans are, humans are complicated creatures. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
That's what I learned from Mary Harrington, that you introduce the pill-
- LPLouise Perry
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... single, single motherhood goes up.
- LPLouise Perry
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Like who, who the fuck could have predicted that? Right?
- LPLouise Perry
(laughs) Right.
- CWChris Williamson
You know, that's four degrees of detachment away. You know, i- i- i- it's so interesting, but also kind of tragic.
- LPLouise Perry
Mm-hmm.
- 50:44 – 1:04:56
Why is Loveless Sex Empowering?
- CWChris Williamson
why is it then that loveless sex isn't empowering?
- LPLouise Perry
Yeah, I mean, 'cause, because your animal brain, which none of us are completely in control of, for women in particular, even if there are some outliers as you mentioned, I mean, often the outliers, like often women who, who don't get attached to sex, for instance, have like a history of sexual trauma. There's often not a very healthy reason behind it, but, uh, y- like, accepting the fact that there are outliers. Your animal brain thinks that this guy is gonna knock you up and, like, you are gonna become a profoundly vulnerable mother-baby dyad. You know, like human infants are insanely vulnerable. They need so much more care than any other, as, as far as I know, any other species young. Um, and mothers are also extremely vulnerable in the later stages of pregnancy and in ... and during infancy. You have to put so much energy and sacrifice so much in order to raise this child to adulthood. And that before, like five minutes ago, you know, (laughs) evolutionary history was what happened or, or certainly what you risked happening if you had sex, had s- heterosexual sex. And so, like, our brains are still primed for that. And that's the whole, that's the whole purpose behind emotional attachment to your sexual partner. And also the whole purpose behind, like, choosing your sexual partner and the fact that women do tend to be a lot choosier than men. There's, uh, these quite funny studies that have been done several times where they, um, they get, like, quite attractive strangers to go up to men and women, I think on university campuses normally, and proposition them. And th- when the, uh, when, when the women proposition male strangers, they almost always say yes. Or if any of they say no, it's because they have a girlfriend or whatever. Whereas when the men proposition the women, they always say no, because women, like, their filter is impregnable. Um, and there's a reason for that.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- LPLouise Perry
(laughs) It's be- you don't want some, some, like, to be knocked up by some bozo. It's, this is one of the reasons why prostitution is as traumatic as it is. I mean, there are all, there are all of the physical risks involved in prostitution, like rates of murder are insanely high. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's ... if we were to compare it to another profession, it would be by far the most dangerous profession ever. Like rates of PTSD are much higher than in the military, for instance. But one of the reasons why it's so profoundly distressing is that women have this really, really strong instinct to, like, vet their sexual partners and to only have sex with men who seem like good prospects. And women also have a very har- a very low sexual disgust threshold, which means that they get the ick very readily with a man that they don't fancy. And what, what women in prostitution are basically required to do is to override that and to suppress those instincts. If you talk to women who've, who've experienced it, they often talk about like working really hard to dissociate from their physical feelings. It is that, it's that retching on the bathroom floor thing. I mean, actually, Rachel Moran, who's a prostitution survivor and has written this amazing book called Paid For, which is a memoir of her experiences, um, she talks about that, the fact that not vomiting is one of the most important skills a prostitute can have because your, your, your physical urge to run away and to cry and to vomit is that strong that you have to, like, fight it down. And I think that if, you know, of ... in a much less extreme circumstances obviously, but when women are trying to like, to, to, to, to play the masculine role and imitate male sexuality and to enjoy sex in the way that they think they're supposed to, they are basically obliged to suppress their instincts, which isn't, isn't at all psychologically healthy.
- CWChris Williamson
Has normalizing sex work like OnlyFans been a benefit for women?
- LPLouise Perry
I mean, there clearly are some women on OnlyFans who make a lot of money from it, so there are some winners. I mean, they, they are very unusual. Most women on OnlyFans probably make a loss in terms of the amount of time they have to spend, 'cause the Pareto distribution on OnlyFans is wild. And most of the women who do really well on it are already celebrities and already quite wealthy. So, this idea that you can just be, like, as long as you're sufficiently pretty, you log on and you'll make your fortune is not true, and I'm sure has been deliberately whipped up, that idea, by OnlyFans, 'cause they're the only people actually really profiting at the end of the day. Um, I mean, I think the- OnlyFans is not like street prostitution or brothel prostit- Like, it's clearly not the same. I, e- like, it's pretty gross, and the, and you will have men asking you to do things that really turn your stomach. But it's clearly not, like, physically dangerous. I think that the main risk of OnlyFans is your ability to have a long-term relationship afterwards, because you end up putting your images out in the world and you can't get them back. That's the nature of the internet. And often OnlyFans creators get their images stolen, and so they'll be shared and they don't even get any money from it. And th- the risk is, in the future, that even though m- men don't always admit it, the sexual double standard is still actually really alive and well, if you... So, the sexual double standard being when men are kind of permitted to be a bit promiscuous and that's okay socially, but women tend to be punished for promiscuity.
- CWChris Williamson
I think that OnlyFans goes beyond promiscuity. You know, the, th- the double standard didn't accoun- it's not men wanking on camera and then trying to find a wife and them saying, "Uh, my friend shared something in a WhatsApp chat earlier on and that kinda looks a little bit like you."
- LPLouise Perry
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
What about, um, normalizing, uh, like, love sex workers? Like s- sex workers are... You, you should be completely fine with your partner doing OnlyFans or, uh, perhaps even escorting?
- LPLouise Perry
You mean crazy? What kind of... Yeah. I mean, either... I think if, I think if a man is really comfortable with that, that's like a red flag to me. Honestly. Like, I, again, it's an example of men suppressing their instincts, because the, the, the instinct towards jealousy is so strong, and again, has such an obvious evolutionary origin to it, um, because if you're putting loads of resources into raising children that you've had with this woman, you wanna know they're yours. Like, that's... Mate guarding is what the, um, biologists call it, and it's, it's so common that I think it's considered to be a human universal. And yeah, like, there are, there are loads of sort of unwelcome phenomena that come from that. You know, jealousy is often, um, the motive behind d- domestic violence, for instance. 'Cause like, you know, you mentioned the naturalistic fallacy, like, the fact that it's natural doesn't mean it's necessarily good. But it does also mean that trying to completely override it is probably not (laughs) gonna work. (laughs) Like, you have to find a way of accommodating your instincts. You can't just try and suppress them and try and, like, like, rewrite the human blueprint.
- CWChris Williamson
Well, that's where-
- LPLouise Perry
Because-
- CWChris Williamson
Th- that's where I think the, um... It's not men that are encouraging women to do OnlyFans. I don't see men on the internet saying that you should go and D- you, girl, should ditch your job and go and do it. The only people online saying sex work is real work seems to be women. Yes-
- LPLouise Perry
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... men are the ones that are paying for their images once they're in the game.
- LPLouise Perry
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
But I think that's because once women cross that threshold and become a, a sex worker or whatever, they're almost kind of... Not subhuman, but th- they're in a different category, right? And it's like, "Oh, well, th- they're doing it. I didn't get them into it, so I'm just gonna continue to fund them." But if you were to say to most men, I think, "Would you advise that pretty girl to get into OnlyFans so that you can see her nudes?"
- LPLouise Perry
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
Most of them would say, "Probably not. Probably not." A- almost e- every healthy man would say no. Right?
- LPLouise Perry
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
They'd say, "No. I'd, I'd, I'll try and go out with her," or maybe, "She should just go and enjoy her life or do whatever," but once they're in the game, that's what's going to happen. But you have this, this very bizarre sort of cartel... I don't know. It's like a self... Not self-oppression, but like, (clears throat) self-capitalization from women of women encouraging other women to go and do the game, despite the fact that the chances of you making money on OnlyFans is, uh, minusculely low when it comes to actually making the tens of thousands of dollars a day that the-
- LPLouise Perry
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... the biggest creators make. And, yeah. I mean, even i- even if you were able to have an unbelievably secure OnlyFans that was never able to leak your photos online, you have two choices for the remainder of your life when you get into talking to a new partner. You can either tell them the truth-
- LPLouise Perry
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... and (stutters) regardless of how comfortable that guy is with his sexuality, finding out that his missus... Forget body count. Even if you've only slept with one other person, but that was something that you did, like, you can't, like, left brain your way out of thinking that that is... "Oh, God. Well, if she did that in the past, does this mean that she's maybe going to... She's a risk for promiscuity in the future?" Like, the cuck radar is so hyper-attuned for men, which is why we get more jealous. Or the other one is to lie to him.
- LPLouise Perry
Mm-hmm. Cuck radar is interesting phrase. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Good coinage game.
- LPLouise Perry
'Cause I have u- 'cause I have (laughs) used the... I've, I've c- I don't write it in the book, but I've, um, like, talked about it on Twitter, nonce radar, which I-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- LPLouise Perry
... think is something (laughs) I think that women have really strongly. I mean, I think men do as well, but I think women in particular have a really strong, like... It's, I think it's slightly a sexual disgust thing, is that feeling of like, "This guy is creepy."And I think that it, I think, it's like female intuition, right? And I think it's coming, it's probably partly coming from wanting to protect yourself. It's also partly wanting to protect your children. You've got that like, "This guy's bad news." Yeah, if I'm gonna sleep with him- Yeah.
- 1:04:56 – 1:16:09
Louise’s Findings on Porn
- LPLouise Perry
you know? And then, and then that like obviously brings complications to your relationship.
- CWChris Williamson
What did you learn about porn when you looked at that?
- LPLouise Perry
For the book? I mean, the thing with porn that I think a lot of people don't fully appreciate is that online porn is a completely different beast from like Playboy of the '60s. I mean, I start the book by writing about Playboy and writing about Hugh Hefner. And clearly, like there were feminists writing at the time about porn being really grim for women. There's this famous cover of a, uh, uh, an issue of Hustler, I can't remember what year it was published in, probably the '70s, where a woman is being like, um, ground up in a meat grinder and her legs are just sticking out the top. It's really like obvi- like deliberately grotesque image. And feminists got so upset about it at the time, I think rightly. But like they had no idea what would happen with the internet. And I think that the thing that's so sinister about online porn is that there's this, there's this quote I use in the book that the nature of like technocapitalism is that we are all either above the algorithm or below the algorithm. We're either writing these, we're either creating these, these, these pieces of tech or we're being influenced by them because we're using them, or we're, you know, sexually interacting with people who are, who are using them. And porn is such an amazing example of this because it's just profit-driven. That's the point of it. It's not, it's not interested in the well-being of its consumers. I mean, whatever Pornhub like... Pornhub ha- have various like advertising efforts to try and sanitize what they do. But the whole, the whole point of it is making money. And they're really good at it. And the way that they do it is by basically creating a super stimulus which addles users' brains.... and that, like, they're incredibly adept at basically arousing the human body, the human animal, like we can't really resist our animal instincts, as quickly as possible. So you log onto one of these platforms and you look at the front page and, like, everything is designed to make you as horny as possible as quickly as possible. And the, the way the platforms are designed is to, like, introduce you to the st- super stimulus, and then introduce you to something even more stimulating, and even more stimulating, and even more stimulating. And so you end up... and it, I mean... uh, so a lot of people are able to use porn casually. Quite a lot of people don't use it at all, like a surprising... including men, surprising proportion. But-
- CWChris Williamson
Do you know how much that is?
- LPLouise Perry
Is... so I read a survey that about a quarter of millennial men haven't used it in the last month, which is quite a lot. But the, the, the, there's a minority of users who are, like, helpless-
- CWChris Williamson
Power users.
- LPLouise Perry
... to this. Yeah, yeah. Like, again, it's, uh, Pareto is at play as well. Like there is a small number of men who watch... I can't remember the quote, the, the figure I quote in the book. It's something like 2% of users use it for, like, seven hours a week or more.
- CWChris Williamson
That's a lot of porn.
- LPLouise Perry
It's a lo-
- CWChris Williamson
Do you know, um, Mary Harrington's l- Law of Fapp entropy?
- LPLouise Perry
(laughs) Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
That whatever you start out wanking to will get progressively more disgusting over time-
- LPLouise Perry
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... and you'll be down in the depths of blueberry porn before you know it.
- LPLouise Perry
Well, yeah. Uh, uh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, m- uh, like, just anecdotally, there are some, uh, very strange things that compulsive porn users end up being turned on by, and, like, to the point where they, they can't even... like erectile dysfunction being a huge problem. They can't actually have sex with a real person, which is-
- CWChris Williamson
What's the name for that? It's not ground pounding. What's it called? It's called something.
- LPLouise Perry
Oh, death grip syndrome.
- CWChris Williamson
Death... ground pounding. Where the fuck did I pull that from? Yeah, death grip. (laughs)
- LPLouise Perry
(laughs) That's much more unpleasant, uh, to, yeah. Yeah. Okay.
- CWChris Williamson
I mean, death grip syndrome isn't that nice either.
- LPLouise Perry
Yeah, and I tal-... I write in the book about, um, cultural death grip syndrome, which is where we've got an incredibly pornified public life. You've got so much more, like, sex scenes on TV, advertising billboards, whatever. I mean, like, sex scenes on TV have ramped up so quickly just in my lifetime. They used to be edgy, and now it's like, you know, every drama has to have, like, super, super explicit sex scenes every five minutes, whatever. So you've got that on the one hand. Well, I don't think we've ever had this much explicit sex in public life, but then also people aren't actually having sex. You have the sex recession, the sex depression, where you've got, as you were saying, you've got loads of men who are virgins up into their 20s and so on. It's this really weird, um, what's the word? Th- it's, it's, it's this really weird contradiction, and it's one that the feminists of the '70s who were so upset about porn didn't foresee, interestingly. Like, they were concerned that porn would inspire sexual violence. And like, it's complicated because it probably does a bit, like in some circumstances. So for instance, choking porn has become so popular and is so mainstream in a way that it wasn't at all 20 years ago. It used to be considered a really niche BDSM thing, and even actually in the BDSM community was considered a bit risky. Whereas now, like, survey data is crazy for millennials and younger, the proportion of young women who report being choked by their partners. Um, sometimes asking for it, and sometimes, sometimes non-consensually. But it's, like, just become insanely mainstream really quickly. And the only mechanism that I can see for that is porn, that it's, it's inspiring a change in sexual culture. So, so sometimes, yeah, it's inspiring more aggressive behavior from its users. But equally, actually, sometimes it's, like, basically neutering users. Like they become actually incapable of having sex with a real person, and even become incapable of being aroused by just normal porn because they're so... they, like, they go, they go down the rabbit hole se- secondly-
- CWChris Williamson
Law of Fapp entropy continues to provide.
- LPLouise Perry
Yeah, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
What do, what do most modern feminists think about porn now then? Do they think that it's liberating women and allowing them to earn, and sex work is real work?
- LPLouise Perry
It's complicated because I think that the... (sighs) like most liberal feminists and sex positive feminists would definitely think that there's nothing, like, inherently bad about porn, and would absolutely defend the right of women to produce it and so on. But I think that there's increasingly a view that actually it's not, it's not great. I did a, um, debate at the Oxford Union earlier this year. And the, the, the proposition was something like, "This house welcomes a new porn." It was mostly about OnlyFans but it ended up being about porn in general. And I thought I'd be slaughtered because I thought that the, you know, the students were gonna be so sex positive and so anti everything I had to say. And actually I won, surprisingly. I had some quite aggressive questions from the floor. But actually at the end, um, our side won. So-
- CWChris Williamson
Why do you think that was?
- LPLouise Perry
Because I think actually this generation, I mean these 18 year olds, right? So they've... or a bit older, they, they're the generation who had porn, like, on their private computers, on their phones from adolescence onwards. I mean, I'm 30, so I didn't actually have my own smartphone or whatever until teens and above. But these are the kids who, who had it from, like, adolescence and would, would expect to be exposed to porn really young. And it was really formative in their sexuality. And I think that it's hard not to, not to recognize the, like, the downsides of that.
- CWChris Williamson
The thing that I see online, I, I don't know a single guy that is pro-porn.... guys are either-
- LPLouise Perry
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... neutral porn or anti-porn. Like, and the ones that are anti-porn are vehement about it.
- 1:16:09 – 1:25:37
People Are Not Products
- CWChris Williamson
What do you mean when you say that people are not products?
- LPLouise Perry
So that's, uh, yeah, that's the (laughs) when I mentioned at the beginning that I had that big Twitter storm about my, uh, about my chapter titles, and that was kind of the most, all these, like, left-wing sex-positive people absolutely outraged at me saying that people aren't products. (laughs) I mean, it comes back to the sexual disenchantment point that if you, if you really think that sex is meaningless, it's just like making coffee, blah, blah, blah, that people can just, like, sell sexual access to themselves like they'd sell any other kind of service or any-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- LPLouise Perry
... other kind of product, like, it's internally consistent and it's the sort of, the, the phrase that I use in that chapter is that it's the logic of the punter. I mean, that's what punters think that they can just... They don't really see prostituted women as being properly human. I think, I mean, based on the way that they write about them, that doesn't, that doesn't seem to be how they view them. There's, like, uh, appalling, um, review platforms online where punters will review women that they've bought sex from and there's, like, no human feeling in there. Like, there's, like, true psychopathy on display. So, so, like, that probably is the only population who actually believe in sexual disenchantment. Um, the women they're buying sex from certainly don't. And, uh, and, like, thinking away from the more extreme end of it in terms of prostitution as well, just thinking about things like dating apps which are also kind of designed, like, they're also sort of con- continuous with the logic of the punter in that they are designed to be like shopping apps. That's how they feel. You don't feel using them that different from using, like, ASOS or eBay or whatever because you swipe, swipe, swipe and select your products. Um, I mean, or not, of course, if you're, like, an incel who doesn't get any matches. But for, for, for high-status men and for women, that is how it, that's how it's experienced. And it's got a really, really consumerist kind of energy, the ca- the whole, like, casual sex phenomenon, um, which ought to be the sort of thing that the left are really opposed to. (laughs) You know, my, my, my colleagues at the New Statesman. Like, this ought, this ought to be... You know, we're talking about this multi-billion pound global empire of the porn industry. We're talking about, uh, a really consumerist attitude towards other people's bodies and minds. Like, this, this, this isn't conservative or it shouldn't be. Like, this should be 101 anti-capitalist critique coming from the left. But, uh, it isn't and I think that that's because a lot of people on the left have prioritized, like, owning the cons and are more interested in tearing down bourgeois sexual norms and basically promoting-... free love at all costs than they are in thinking about where this has actually led to a- led us to. And I think that this, the last 60, 70 years post-sexual revolution period has been- has been a big experiment in what happens if you disconnect sex from reproduction and you basically discard all of the, like, quite finely tuned norms that used to exist basically to keep young horny people away from each other. I mean, the- the way that this is interpre- this history is interpreted by feminists often is, is this, all those social norms exist to control female sexuality, and they did, but they also existed to control male sexuality, and the purpose of it wasn't to oppress women. It wasn't motivated by misogyny. It was motivated by the fact that if sex leads to reproduction, then that's everyone's concern. Like, the- the- that matters to the community because if you've got people, young couples producing illegitimate children, like that's- that matters to the family. That matters to the community. It's- it's- it's essential in a world without contraception to control young people's sexuality, and that's what those norms existed for. And we threw them out the window very rapidly, and we've basically seen this play out over the last however many decades, and I think that the- the results are in, and they're not very promising. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) That's really, really good. Uh, I learned from Mary when she came on the show about the fact that a lot of the rules and the norms that are set are by the elite-
- LPLouise Perry
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... and they're usually not the ones that suffer the impact. It's a luxury belief, right?
- LPLouise Perry
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
To hold that, um, men don't need to hold the door open for you and that having chivalry and constraints on male behavior, that's not needed by some upper middle class woman whose husband has got a postgraduate degree-
- LPLouise Perry
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... because there are maybe levels of education or- or norm enforcement that have occurred just through his upbringing and her upbringing that means that it doesn't matter. What you don't think about is the- the underclass or- or the working class guy and girl who perhaps haven't had those same sort of levels of norms enforced, and maybe they don't know that not hitting your wife is that big of a deal. And then when the culture starts to erode and evaporate that away, you go, "Well, uh, the people that made the rules or that encouraged the norms to be dissolved are not the ones that are suffering their dissolving."
- LPLouise Perry
Yeah. Rob Henderson actually, I think, uses polyamory as his, one of his examples in his- his original luxury beliefs essay, where if you're a high status person, let's say in like the Bay Area where everyone has polyamory, like polyamory is really- is just like cool and you can, if it all falls in a heap, it doesn't matter because you've got your money and your status and all of your stability to fall back on, and everyone will just sort of think that you're a bit bohemian. Whereas if you're a working class underclass woman who's basically, you know, living polyamory, like having lots of different partners and lots of different children by them, people, one, will think you're trash, but two, like your life becomes so challenging because you've got- you've got all these children to look after and you don't have the reliable support of a partner and, like you're at risk of absolutely everything falling apart. But- but this is, yeah, it's, it is a luxury belief in the sense that saying that that's a good thing and- and- and resisting the, um, resisting the traditional norms that used to- that used to exist gives status to rich people.
Episode duration: 1:32:21
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