The Real Effects Of “No Strings Attached” - Louise Perry

Louise Perry is a writer, Press Officer for the campaign group We Can’t Consent To This and an author. 50 years ago there was a dream of women being released from the patriarchal shackles of stringent sexual norms. They should be able to sleep around like men, talk about sex like men and decouple their emotions from their bodies like men. Except it didn't quite work out, and now Louise thinks that both men and women are in a bad spot. Expect to learn why trying to not catch feelings when sleeping with someone is very dangerous, how TikTok is encouraging young girls into rough sex, whether sex work is real work, why men's porn addictions are ruining their sex lives, how the washing machine is more useful than most feminists, whether inventing the pill was an error and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://bit.ly/cdwisdom (use code MW15) Extra Stuff: Buy The Case Against The Sexual Revolution - https://amzn.to/3tWS9bf Follow Louise on Twitter - https://twitter.com/Louise_m_perry Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #feminism #sexualrevolution #redpill - 00:00 Intro 00:17 Reactions to Louise’s Book 04:38 What’s Wrong with the Sexual Revolution? 11:15 Challenging the Idea of ‘Progress’ 21:01 Invention of the Pill 27:48 Dynamics of Modern Dating & Marriage 33:55 Explaining Sexual Disenchantment 43:08 The Argument for Celibacy Before Marriage 50:44 Why is Loveless Sex Empowering? 1:04:56 Louise’s Findings on Porn 1:16:09 People Are Not Products 1:25:37 How to Act Against the Sexual Revolution 1:30:58 Where to Find Louise - Join the Modern Wisdom Community on Locals - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Louise 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 blowjob? 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.

• 0:14Chris Williamson?

  Louise Perry, welcome to the show.

• 0:16Louise Perry?

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 0:18Chris Williamson?

  Given your political background, how does it feel to have Ben Shapiro quote tweeting your work?

• 0:25Louise Perry?

  I didn't know he had.

• 0:28Chris Williamson?

  Did you not see this?

• 0:29Louise Perry?

  No.

• 0:29Chris Williamson?

  Let me tell you. So there is a tweet that 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. And that was one photo, which was a news story. And the other photo was the chapter list from your book,

• 0:53Chris Williamson?

  which said things like men and women are different and loveless sex is not empowering. And it said, people of the West, choose your future, something like that.

• 1:07Louise Perry?

  Wow, okay. Yeah, okay, that explains things. I have quite like a heavy notification filter on Twitter, so I don't always see everything. The contents page, though, completely blew up like three months ago, long before the book was published. They just, the publishers just put up online the cover, the title, the fact that Kathleen Stock wrote the foreword, because she's got a kind of existing reputation among her haters, my haters, and the contents page. And that was enough to have like a several day Twitter storm.

• 1:41Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think that was?

• 1:42Louise Perry?

  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, because some people read it, I mean, some people read the whole book, 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, 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 like 80% really positive and 20% complete outrage.

• 2:27Louise Perry?

  And not very much in the middle.

• 2:29Chris Williamson?

  I think, well, what do you think's gonna happen when it comes out in America?

• 2:34Louise Perry?

  That's a good question. I mean, the, the, like,

• 2:39Louise Perry?

  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.

• 2:50Louise Perry?

  Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I'm, I like, I did.

• 2:55Louise Perry?

  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.

• 3:21Louise Perry?

  Because even if I'm reaching some conservative conclusions, I'm doing it via different priors. If that makes sense.

• 3:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, I didn't, you say, I start from feminist priors and end up with socially conservative conclusions?

• 3:35Louise Perry?

  Yeah, some socially conservative conclusions, yeah. Um, which means that there's sort of something in it for everyone to hate.

• 3:45Chris Williamson?

  Except Ben Shapiro, apparently.

• 3:47Louise Perry?

  He's not read the whole thing. I'm not sure how he might think about some of the early chapters.

• 3:51Chris Williamson?

  You've been co-opted by the right wing of America now, and this is your future. So I, I was at, um, the heterodox academy Jonathan Haidt's organisation. I was at that, the conference for that this weekend. One of the speakers said something that kind of, I think, sort of, is a good synopsis of, of the thesis of your book that says, there are many ways to change the world. Few will make it better, many will make it worse.

• 4:18Louise Perry?

  Yeah, it's true. There's a Roger Scutcheon quote like that. I can't remember exactly how it's phrased, but, um, something like, it's really easy to break things and it's really hard to make things.

• 4:32Louise Perry?

  Which I think is like a really fundamentally conservative observation and true.

• 4:39Chris Williamson?

  What's wrong with the sexual revolution then?

• 4:42Louise 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 the difference is massive between the between the means. And also there are psychological differences, which a lot of feminism of the last half century or more has been really invested in minimizing, but are, I think, definitely there if you look at the research and if you just look at the world around you.

• 5:24Louise Perry?

  One of those differences, for instance, is that 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, 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 which which did a pretty good job of severing the link between sex and reproduction and 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 just a bit of fun, it doesn't really mean anything, suits male

• 6:06Louise Perry?

  interests much more than it does female, because casual sex in particular is just, 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. So my argument basically is it's a bad deal.

• 6:26Chris Williamson?

  But originally, it was the sort of thing that was pushed by liberals and feminists, right? This is exactly the sort of thing.

• 6:33Louise Perry?

  Still, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the, yeah, so the the popular narrative that I'm challenging is one that the sexual 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. 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.

• 7:11Louise Perry?

  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 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.

• 7:44Chris Williamson?

  You say that your complaint is focused more against liberals than conservatives. Why is that?

• 7:50Louise Perry?

  I mean, because I'm expecting liberals to read it. I might be wrong about that. But I, that that's the space that I'm coming from originally. Like, I went to, I went to such a left wing university.

• 8:02Chris Williamson?

  Where did you go?

• 8:03Louise Perry?

  I went to Soas in London.

• 8:05Chris Williamson?

  I don't even know what that is.

• 8:06Louise Perry?

  It's like a really, really small, really crazy university. So I, you know, I've. I've read all of, 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 everyone will, will find.

• 8:39Louise Perry?

  We'll find challenging.

• 8:40Chris Williamson?

  Is it not 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 seems to me like the conservatives would have far less to disagree with you. Not again, there's something for everybody to disagree with, but that the conservatives would probably have far less than the new wave of liberals.

• 9:15Louise Perry?

  Probably, yeah. Although I should say that the, this idea of like constraining male sexuality, which is, which is, is, is central to my thesis, basically. It is conservative in the sense that it was, it was considered to be like a mainstream idea before sexual 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?

• 9:55Chris Williamson?

  No, you don't mean Tom Holland, the guy that plays Spider-Man, do you?

• 9:59Louise Perry?

  No, I don't. A common, a common mistake. No. No, he's a British academic and historian writer. And he's got this fantastic book called Dominion, which is about, basically about history of Christianity and the ways in which Christianity influences the modern world, even if we consider ourselves to be a religious or post-Christian. And he has a bit in there where he talks about Me Too. And it really triggered a lot of my thinking about this, actually, 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

• 10:40Louise Perry?

  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.

• 10:52Louise Perry?

  That he should be constrained is, 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.

• 11:08Chris Williamson?

  The window of trad sort of shifts over time, right? Like, no one's actually going that far back. So, okay, so the sexual revolution happens, like surely women have benefited with uh, no more shame and stigma around enjoying sex and stuff like that. Like, who, who benefited from the sexual revolution overall?

• 11:29Louise 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 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 this, 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 revol-, you know, everything post-sexual revolution is necessarily better than what came before. I just don't think it's true. I think that's nonsense. Like, we're looking at a massive historical event triggered primarily by technology.

• 12:12Louise Perry?

  Of course, there are going to 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 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, uh, the norms have just spun on a sixpence. And now, whereas previously it would have been the case that young women, for instance, were like, protecting their virginity and their reputation had been chased and so it was considered very important socially.

• 12:54Louise Perry?

  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.

• 13:04Louise Perry?

  And to be just as like sexually adventurous 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. We're 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 realise 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,

• 13:47Louise Perry?

  you know, we're all, we're all free to behave as we want sexually. I just don't think is true. Because every, 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 windows as a consequence of sexual revolution. And now there's like a sort of halting effort to maybe rebuild them. Sometimes they're, they're implicit. And it's kind of the Wild West out there, basically. And I don't.

• 14:23Chris Williamson?

  Who's, who's enforcing this then? Where's this coming from? Are you suggesting that men are weaponising 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?

• 14:39Louise 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.

• 14:55Louise Perry?

  Like, yeah, it is in, it is in the interests of, of men who wanna sleep around to encourage women to, to match them, you know, in that kind of behaviour. 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

• 15:23Louise Perry?

  like, there are some really grim articles out there.

• 15:26Chris Williamson?

  What were your least favourite headlines?

• 15:29Louise 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 cannot 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 really interesting and really marked difference to men and women on average on, in um sexuality is women's sexual disgust threshold is a lot, lot lower.

• 16:12Louise Perry?

  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 whole, 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. And, yeah, and, and I think that just representing that as feminist in any way.

• 16:46Chris Williamson?

  Interestingly, looking at it from a man's perspective, 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 making babies was decoupled, but then having sex and having emotions, getting attached was decoupled. And that second one, the pill for that is, I mean, you know, what is it? Is it 10 vodkas deep? Like, does that really help? You know, you wake up in the morning and you feel, but you use this analogy about the fact that Marilyn Monroe was a sort of very attractive woman that was weaponized, commercialized, utilized by a society that wanted

• 17:29Chris Williamson?

  to sexualize women. And this was at the benefit of Hughes, Hugh Hefner's, the sort of high status man who was able to sleep with lots of women and continue to do this. I agree. I think that you're right. It is bad for women, but very few men are Hughes. And what you're seeing in the modern society is this, most women are probably dissatisfied with the way that their sexual

• 17:57Chris Williamson?

  pursuits are going. 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. So the Matthew principle kicks off here. So I think on average, it's bad for pretty much everybody. I think that the 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, some parts of the red pill, the manosphere, men's rights, all of these movements are, as far as I can see, they're big copes from men who are now in a sort of sexual wasteland, where they're really, really struggling to find connection.

• 18:38Chris Williamson?

  So I think that it's, I understand that from 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.

• 18:55Louise Perry?

  Yeah, I completely agree. Yeah, I'd add to that things like rates of erectile dysfunction among young men are insanely high, which is probably to do with porn, maybe also to do with estrogen in the environment. I don't know.

• 19:06Chris Williamson?

  Goddamn estrogen. I was eating some edamame beans the other day and everyone at the table who's big into health and fitness looked disgusted. Apparently edamame beans have got tons of estrogen in. Who knew?

• 19:16Louise Perry?

  You can have a bit of soy, can't you?

• 19:18Chris Williamson?

  Don't get into the soy argument. But yeah, few men, a few men are Hughes, right? So they're the ones that are losing.

• 19:24Louise Perry?

  Yeah, no, this is completely true. And I think as well that there's this antagonism between feminists and, let's say, incels broadly, which does, I think, very much come down to these innate differences between male and female sexuality and the fact that we don't really talk about them enough, which means I think that you end up with the sexes really misunderstanding each other, right? So feminists will look at incels and like completely not understand why it would be so frustrating to be a young man who can't get laid. Like, I think a lot of women are surprisingly clueless about male sexuality

• 20:07Louise Perry?

  in all sorts of ways. Like, definitely the dark side of male sexuality, but also just like its intensity. I think most women cannot, can't, just can't directly empathize at all. And similarly, incels, I think, would look at women and be like, you can walk out into the street and pick up half a dozen guys, you know, within five minutes, you must be living heaven on earth. And women are like, but I don't want that. And so you end up with this, everyone thinks that the other, the other side has it easy, which has a lot to do with the fact of just this, like, these quite fundamental biological differences making it hard for us to empathize with one another. And this is added to a culture in which, like, not only are those sexuality differences routinely denied, but like, the

• 20:52Louise Perry?

  existence of sexual dimorphism is routinely denied. It's like, how can you possibly successfully navigate the sexual landscape if you don't even think men and women exist as discrete categories?

• 21:04Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that inventing the pill was an error, then?

• 21:08Louise Perry?

  No, because I think...

• 21:12Louise Perry?

  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 yeah, we've just mentioned estrogen, so 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 going to expect to have ten children and to 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 I'm trying to initiate. Because we, you know, we have, we have the power to, I'm not like a complete, I I.

• 21:55Louise Perry?

  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.

• 22:22Louise Perry?

  Give really strong arguments and everyone's 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.

• 22:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you said the washing machine helped liberate women more than any feminist did.

• 22:40Louise 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 their home, or more outside of their 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.

• 23:19Louise Perry?

  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 physically profoundly physically different in terms of things like strength. Like, from that perspective, it looks as if the whole world is gender neutral. Um. And so that's kind of, that's, that is the sort of social context in which this idea of the, the differences between men and women being socially constructed or being trivial makes sense. But actually, that's like a very, very superficial analysis of what's going on. Like, actually, I mean, one, the physical differences are still profound,

• 24:04Louise Perry?

  but also like those psychological differences go really deep. Because we're talking about

• 24:11Louise Perry?

  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.

• 24:22Chris Williamson?

  Didn't you say that the uh USA women's football team was beaten by the Dallas under fifteens football team?

• 24:31Louise 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.

• 24:40Chris Williamson?

  I think that the, the fastest woman on the, in the hundred metres on the planet gets beaten by about a hundred or two hundred under seventeens.

• 24:49Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 24:50Chris Williamson?

  In America, two hundred under seventeen men in America. I mean, eh, the whole, 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 dolls and guys go and lift, lift little trucks and stuff. It feels like lapping 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, that, that's wild. But when it comes to the psychological differences, there's a little bit more, um, I guess, plausible room for manoeuvre 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,

• 25:34Chris Williamson?

  the male brain and the female brain and traits that you put them on and take them off like clothes.

• 25:41Louise Perry?

  Yeah, and there are outliers, you know, there are, there are like, less so physically. I mean, you do sometimes get really strong women or whatever, but even then, I mean, I do. 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.

• 26:07Chris Williamson?

  Do you pull conventional or sumo?

• 26:09Louise Perry?

  Conventional.

• 26:10Chris Williamson?

  What about the husband?

• 26:11Louise Perry?

  Also conventional.

• 26:12Chris Williamson?

  Good, it's a family of non-cheaters. I'm adamant that sumo's cheating.

• 26:19Louise Perry?

  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 max and then like, it's just, it's just like the pure reality of it. But I mean, if people, 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, 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.

• 26:55Louise Perry?

  But it's so on an individual level, if you know what, 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, 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.

• 27:38Louise Perry?

  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.

• 27:47Chris Williamson?

  Well, that sex ratio hypothesis is kind of the basis as well for a ton of hypergamy, that as you have an ever increasing group of high performing women and ever decreasing group of underperforming men that are dropping out of college, that aren't getting as educated. Women aged twenty one to twenty nine earn one thousand one hundred and eleven pounds more on average than the equivalent man. So during the period when women are seeking a mate, they're unable to find what 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

• 28:31Chris Williamson?

  of upward tilt toward turbo chad at the top, sleeping with everybody, listless, sexless men, underclass down here, and then the wistful women and alpha widows that are in this sort of world. I mean, 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 population growth, population decline, culture, crime. You know, 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 because it's advantageous, it's adaptive for you to not be going out doing reckless shit when you've got a baby

• 29:15Chris Williamson?

  and a wife at home to look after. So all of this, I mean, this is just, I it is by far the most interesting dynamic, I think, that's happening in the world at the moment.

• 29:25Louise Perry?

  Yeah, and this is the subject of, so my last chapter is called Marriage is Good. 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 making exactly, it's like a, 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 societies, I think it's about eighty percent of societies on the anthropological record have had polygyny as a.

• 30:03Louise Perry?

  Socially acceptable thing. So you end up with 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 because it's 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 and it's not like, it does sort of have to be imposed, like, you know, like a lot of elite men will cheat, for instance, and, you know, they take on extra wives if they could, like people.

• 30:46Louise Perry?

  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

• 31:01Louise Perry?

  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.

• 31:15Chris Williamson?

  More stable.

• 31:16Louise Perry?

  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.

• 31:29Chris Williamson?

  Think about it this way, I've only just thought about this.

• 31:33Chris Williamson?

  The naturalistic fallacy gets used a lot with this, right? Look, ancestrally, we maybe don't have tons of evidence that we're a monogamous species. Therefore, monogamy is not the strategy that we're supposed to go down.

• 31:44Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 31:44Chris Williamson?

  If you accept the fact that non-monogamous societies are more unstable and are going to exist for less of an 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.

• 31:57Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 31:58Chris Williamson?

  What if?

• 32:00Chris Williamson?

  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. 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. Maybe a different way to frame monogamy is that it's kind of like following the law, a little bit. It's 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 stability of society.

• 32:44Louise 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. Basically that reason.

• 32:52Chris Williamson?

  It's a redistribution strategy, for sure.

• 32:54Louise Perry?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I mean, mentioned Jordan Rees again, he got in trouble for saying something along these lines, I can't remember exactly.

• 33:01Chris Williamson?

  Enforced monogamy. I brought it, I brought it up in them at the start of the year.

• 33:05Louise Perry?

  Yeah, because it sounds really authoritarian. But I think what he was describing there is basically what we're describing, where it's like socially prescribed. It's not even necessarily legally required. It's just considered to be the norm. You know, cheating is considered to be bad. You can't have a second wife. And yeah, there are also, I mean, there are other, there are good outcomes also in terms of things like child abuse and domestic violence, which obviously is something feminists are very interested in. Like polygynous societies have much higher rates of both, because the households with multiple wives and their children are like, full of conflict.

• 33:41Chris Williamson?

  A hundred times more likely that a child is going to be killed if they're in the household with one parent that isn't their biological parent.

• 33:49Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 33:49Chris Williamson?

  A hundred times more likely.

• 33:51Louise Perry?

  Yeah, yeah, it's, yeah, it's insane.

• 33:54Chris Williamson?

  It's wild. Okay, so what's, what's sexual disenchantment?

• 33:59Louise 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 realise that actually it's all just like scientific forces at play. I think that, it's not, it's not my turn, I, I, I borrowed it from Aaron Sbarro, he's an American writer. Um, sexual disenchantment is what happens post-sex revolution.

• 34:43Louise Perry?

  We 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.

• 35:28Louise Perry?

  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 work is work.

• 36:10Louise Perry?

  And that we should like get rid of all these hangups about, um, selling sex being any different from working in McDonald's or, you know, selling any other kind of service. But then they also get so sensitive about any like perceived sexual propriety in their workplace.

• 36:26Chris Williamson?

  What like?

• 36:28Louise Perry?

  Like being touched by a boss, for instance, like not even in a like a really aggressive assaulting way, but just, you know, when we're 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, all that kind of me too stuff, which is quite low level.

• 36:45Louise Perry?

  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 them a blowjob?

• 36:54Louise Perry?

  Right? It's it's it's it's work. It's just a service. It's like being asked to do overtime.

• 36:59Chris Williamson?

  Or make a coffee.

• 37:00Louise 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 describe how people feel. I mean, it's kind of 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,

• 37:33Louise Perry?

  anything old fashioned, then the fact that people feel very differently about sex than they do about other things is kind of inconvenient.

• 37:41Chris Williamson?

  It's felt like an aberration, right? It's like, 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. And he was on the floor of the bathroom, dry retching. Um, but at the time, he's not married, at the time was adamant that this was just him working through his ego and this is in part of the process, this is part of the processing thing. I'm like, dude, that's, you're not choosing to throw up. That's something way, way, way behind conscious programming. That's innate. That's built in.

• 38:19Chris Williamson?

  Um, 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?

• 38:32Louise Perry?

  Yeah, yeah, that's, yeah, yeah, because I so I think what's going, I think what's going on a lot with me too is that what? What me, what was describing me to, 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 is described is much more.

• 39:06Louise Perry?

  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, 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.

• 39:48Louise Perry?

  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, 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 first hand account of this. Um, and he got in trouble, but it was one of those.

• 40:27Louise Perry?

  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, because 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 hadn't, 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.

• 40:53Louise Perry?

  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, the standards of the day. It's just that the standards of the day are not actually very good for women.

• 41:32Chris Williamson?

  That's it, you've nailed it, 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 through which you can talk about this is consent. Which is where false allegations, I think, sometimes come in that perhaps you repurpose it as uh guilt as.

• 41:56Louise Perry?

  Must have done something criminal, yeah.

• 41:58Chris Williamson?

  Now it's rape, yeah.

• 41:59Louise Perry?

  Um, um, and of course, the nature of it is that there are only two people there, there weren't any witnesses. And so it's everyone's like analysis of something that's gone in the past is just really difficult. Um, and you know, to be fair to a lot of men, they're being

• 42:17Louise Perry?

  they're being raised in the same culture where you're told that this is, that women love it, you know, they, I mean, they haven't necessarily watched like Sex and the City. But it's the same, it's the same milieu where you, where like having sex like a man is aspirational. And the idea is, you, I, I, I write a lot in the book about pop culture examples of women who are clearly aspirational fictional characters. Who have loads of casual sex, love it, like don't have any emotional connection to the men that they use for sex. And this is, this is like, this is, this is aspirational, you know, and so, and, and young men are seeing this as well. And they're also watching porn, which gives a completely unrealistic perspective on what women like.

• 42:59Louise Perry?

  And so, you know, they're clueless, basically.

• 43:01Chris Williamson?

  They're playing by the rules of the game as well, or at least by the the cultural influences of the game that they think are going on. Another another problem that you have here in the asymmetric warfare of the sexes is that men who begin to get a little bit of resentment for women, let's say that they've had their heart broken in the past, but that they are 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.

• 43:39Chris Williamson?

  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, or they go, some of my friends fall pretty hard. But if they can weaponize that, they can do a ton of damage as well. And yeah, I don't know. There's maybe an argument that everybody just needs to not be able to have sex until the age of 25. And then when they do, they're like, look, I'm fully emotionally balanced. I've been through a bunch of breakups. I didn't have sex during the during the relationship. I kind of know what I like and what I don't like, blah, blah, blah. I don't know. It's just so many of

• 44:16Louise Perry?

  What you're describing there is marriage, Chris.

• 44:20Louise Perry?

  That used to be what it was. You weren't allowed to have sex before you got married. Which gave which gave like men in particular a massive incentive to get their shit together. Because if you can't, if you can't get married until you say, like achieve certain adult things, like you've got a job, you've got a house, you know, or like you've got whatever the system is, like a certain amount of money that you can demonstrate your sort of 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 illicit, then that that's a huge incentive to behave yourself

• 45:04Louise Perry?

  and to do pro-social 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, or you or you have access to porn, which like gives you the

• 45:29Louise Perry?

  gives some of the same like feedback from your environment as if you were actually having sex, like 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 gym, never showering, never having a job. And you still get access to this thing that your ancestors like fought teeth and nails to get access to.

• 46:01Chris Williamson?

  Even without the sex robots, men are retreating, I think, from from the dating market. 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. 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 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 used 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.

• 46:45Louise Perry?

  Yeah, yeah, he's very, very smart, Rob Henderson. He's completely right. Um, yeah, I mean, I think that I think that the the line I have in the book about Debbie Daz is that when

• 46:59Louise Perry?

  When motherhood became a biological choice for women, fatherhood became a social choice for men.

• 47:04Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean by that?

• 47:05Louise Perry?

  In that when contraception and legalized abortion became available. I mean, that basically killed the shotgun marriage pretty much immediately because it no longer served the same social purpose that it had before. Um. But the nature of contraception is such that nothing is a hundred percent foolproof. And actually, the pill, particularly in its earliest incarnations, wasn't that great and still isn't that great because it depends a lot on the user using it. Properly. So if you're using it properly, it's like ninety nine percent plus effective, but in reality, it's more like ninety one percent. So you end up with a lot of unplanned pregnancies and there will always be some women who don't want to have a termination for whatever reason.

• 47:49Louise Perry?

  Um, but if you're in a social context where like.

• 47:55Louise Perry?

  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've always been cases of men abandoning. Their wives or abandoning women that they they they made pregnant outside of marriage, you know, there have always been scandals, there have always been unwanted.

• 48:34Louise Perry?

  Pregnancies, whatever, like, that's absolutely true, but rates of out of wedlock births now are completely historically unprecedented. Which is kind of weird because you would think that giving women the technology that enables them to control their fertility would reduce single motherhood, but it's done the opposite. Because humans are humans are complicated creatures.

• 48:55Chris Williamson?

  That's what I learned from Mary Harrington, that you introduce the pill. Single, single motherhood goes up, like, who the fuck could have predicted that, right? You know, that's four degrees of detachment away. You know, it's so interesting, but also kind of tragic, but.

• 49:14Chris Williamson?

  It's it seems like women.

• 49:18Chris Williamson?

  It was it was a perfect storm, right? You had the the decoupling socially, then you had the decoupling biologically, but you haven't had the decoupling emotionally. It's still that fundamentally, there will be some women that are able to have sex like a man. And there will be some able, there's a man, the men that are able to have sex like a man. But on average, it it used to be something that you worked toward for a long time. It used to be the sort of thing. And think about now, I was sent another article by Rob the other day, where he was talking about, why is it that parents tend to select when when their daughter or son brings home a new potential partner? They look at things like job title, earnings, family.

• 50:03Chris Williamson?

  And he asked, why is that the case? Why is it that you look at these when, you know, they're not looking at how hot they are, not looking at at attraction and and stuff like that. Even kindness kind of takes a little bit of a backseat. And it's less falsifiable, basically. The fact is, look, these are the things that are going to be the most likely to become

• 50:24Chris Williamson?

  grandchild optimizing algorithms. Do you have status? Do you have money? Do you have the right family behind you? If you've got those, I'm probably going to have grandchildren. All of the other ones are wishy washy and and kind of easy to to fake in a way.

• 50:43Chris Williamson?

  Why? Why is it then that loveless sex isn't empowering?

• 50:51Louise Perry?

  Yeah, I mean, because

• 50:54Louise Perry?

  because

• 50:56Louise Perry?

  your animal brain, which none of us are completely in control of.

• 51:02Louise Perry?

  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 like, accepting the fact that there are outliers. Your animal brain thinks that this guy is going to knock you up. And like, you are going to become a profoundly vulnerable mother baby dyad.

• 51:28Louise Perry?

  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, in evolutionary history, was what happened. Well, was certainly what you risked happening if you had sex, heterosexual sex. And so, like, our brains are still primed for that.

• 52:10Louise Perry?

  And that's the whole, that's the whole purpose behind emotional attachment to a 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 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 when the, 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.

• 52:53Louise Perry?

  Um, and there's a reason for that, is we don't want some, some, like, to be knocked up by some bozo. 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.

• 53:33Louise Perry?

  And women also have a very high, 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 Rachel 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.

• 54:19Louise Perry?

  Fight it down. And I think that if.

• 54:23Louise Perry?

  You know, of in much less extreme circumstances, obviously, but when women are trying to like. To, to.

• 54:31Louise Perry?

  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.

• 54:45Chris Williamson?

  Has normalizing sex work like OnlyFans been a benefit for women?

• 54:50Louise 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.

• 54:58Louise Perry?

  They, they are very unusual. Most women on OnlyFans. Probably make a loss in terms of the amount of time they have to spend because the burrito 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're making a fortune is not true. And I'm sure has been deliberately whipped up that idea by OnlyFans because 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 prostitution, like it's clearly not the same. I.

• 55:37Louise Perry?

  It like, it's pretty gross and the, and you will have men asking you to do things that really turn your stomach.

• 55:46Louise Perry?

  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.

• 55:57Louise Perry?

  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 the risk is in the future that even though men don't always admit it.

• 56:18Louise Perry?

  The sexual double standard is still actually really alive and well. If you, so such a 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.

• 56:32Chris Williamson?

  I think that OnlyFans goes beyond promiscuity. You know, the the double standard didn't account, it's not men wanking on camera and then trying to find a wife and them saying, uh. My friends shared something in a WhatsApp chat earlier on and that kind of looks a little bit like you.

• 56:48Chris Williamson?

  What about um

• 56:51Chris Williamson?

  normalizing uh like love sex workers, like sex workers are, you should be completely fine with your partner doing OnlyFans or uh perhaps even escorting.

• 57:03Louise Perry?

  I 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 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 want to 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.

• 57:45Louise Perry?

  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 domestic violence, for instance. It's 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 gonna work. 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.

• 58:15Chris Williamson?

  Well, that's where that's where I think the um.

• 58:20Chris Williamson?

  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 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, men are the ones that are paying for their images once they're in the game. But I think that's because once women cross that threshold and become a sex worker or whatever, they're almost kind of not subhuman, but they're in a different category, right? And it's like, oh, well, they're doing it. I didn't get them into it, so I'm just going to 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?

• 59:02Chris Williamson?

  Most of them would say probably not, probably not. But almost every healthy man would say no, right? They'd say, no, 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 uh self not self oppression, but like 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 minisculely low when it comes to actually making the tens of thousands of dollars a day that the biggest creators make.

• 59:41Chris Williamson?

  And yeah, I mean, even 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 and regardless of how comfortable that guy is with his sexuality, finding out that his misses, forget body count, even if you've only slept with one other person, but that was something that you did.

• 1:00:11Chris Williamson?

  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 tuned for men, which is why we get more jealous. Or the other one is to lie to him.

• 1:00:29Louise Perry?

  Cuck radar is interesting phrase.

• 1:00:33Chris Williamson?

  Good coinage game.

• 1:00:34Louise Perry?

  Because I have, because I have used the, I've, I've, I have to write it in the book, but I, like, talked about on Twitter, nonce radar, which I

• 1:00:46Louise Perry?

  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 partly a sexual disgust thing. It's that feeling of like, this guy's 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.

• 1:01:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. If I'm going to sleep with him, what's he going to do to the kids perhaps down the line? I saw, I got to tell you about this meme that I saw. So Carl Benjamin, Sargon of Akkad, a guy who has incredibly conservative views about this stuff, but aligns completely with what we're saying here. He posted a meme the other day, and it had a girl from OnlyFans in like a bikini or lingerie or whatever, sort of dancing away on one side, and it had Michael Scott from The Office on the other side of looking strangely. And the text said, "We call it female empowerment, and they will dance naked for the price of a cheeseburger."

• 1:01:40Louise Perry?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this question you raise about why women encouraging each other to do it, you're right. I mean, one exception I would give is, I do have a friend who went on a date with a guy who said, "You're so hot, you should be on OnlyFans." And she did not go on a date with him again, because it was just so obviously, I know.

• 1:01:57Chris Williamson?

  Failing strategy, I think.

• 1:01:59Louise Perry?

  Yeah. Because the way that she interpreted it, and I think correctly, was that he was, he was clearly not regarding her as like wife material, right? And this is, this is, I think, an error that women do make sometimes, where they don't have a good understanding of male sexuality, and they don't.

• 1:02:15Louise Perry?

  It's really interesting. I don't know if you've read David Buss's book Bad Men.

• 1:02:18Chris Williamson?

  I absolutely love it. Yeah, I brought him on for this.

• 1:02:21Louise Perry?

  Fantastic book, yeah. And he talks about the fact that women tend to assess like short term partners and long term partners based on the same uh qualities. They want the same things in all the men they have sex with. Men don't do that. They have a much lower standard for their short term partners than they do for long term partners. And so they will be willing to have sex with a woman that they absolutely would not marry. They would not even introduce to their friends. And I think a lot of women don't necessarily know that. And so they will interpret sexual advances from men as flattering. When actually they are potentially like cheap, you know.

• 1:02:58Chris Williamson?

  This is the genesis of the alpha widow, right? Like this is what m- m- many girls that are liberated sexually and using Tinder and stuff like that don't get. And I I think that this is another. I'm I'm actually not so convinced about quite how big of an of an effect this is. I'd need to see Rob go and do some research about it. But certainly, women are able to sleep with men that they wouldn't be able to get into a relationship with, but the reverse isn't true. And there is an argument that the the aftershock of this means that those women are going to constantly pine after the nine out of ten guy that's worth half a million and so all that. I I'm not sure about how long that would last for and the echoes of that and stuff like that.

• 1:03:42Chris Williamson?

  But I certainly think that um what porn has done to men, which is to teach them that women are to be objectified, is similar in part to what OnlyFans has done to women, which is to teach some women that men are commercial vehicles to be exploited and that their sex is just a it's a commodity. You can trade it like anything else.

• 1:04:04Louise Perry?

  Yeah, and it's not, I think as well, some women who are already like posting a lot of.

• 1:04:12Louise Perry?

  Raunchy photos on Instagram don't necessarily feel like OnlyFans is that biggest step. It's just a bit more explicit and you get paid for it. So you can sort of see the reasoning. And what some women say, and I, I get it, is that, you know, yes, maybe that it means that some men in the future wouldn't want to be in a relationship with me because I've got these photos out in the world. But I wouldn't want to be in a relationship with a man like that anyway, if he's going to judge me, sort of thing. And the problem with that is that if you actually look at research on men, it's like, that's basically all men. They might not say it because it's not really socially acceptable to admit to, but actually is basically all men. Like to the point that if a man isn't bothered, I'd wonder if he had a cuckold fetish.

• 1:04:56Louise Perry?

  You know, and then, and then that obviously brings complications to your relationship.

• 1:05:00Chris Williamson?

  What did you learn about porn when you looked at that?

• 1:05:04Louise Perry?

  For the book. I mean, the thing with porn that I think a lot of people don't

• 1:05:13Louise Perry?

  fully appreciate is that online porn is a completely different beast from like Playboy of the sixties. I mean, I start the book by writing about Playboy, writing about Hugh Hefner. And clearly, like, there were feminist writing at the time about porn being really grim for women. There's this famous cover of a, an issue of Hustler. I can't remember what year it was published in, probably the seventies, 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, 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.

• 1:05:55Louise Perry?

  And I think that the thing that's so sinister about online porn is that.

• 1:06:04Louise Perry?

  There's this, there's this quote I use in the book, that the nature of like techno-capitalism 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 wellbeing of its consumers. I mean, whatever Pornhub like, Pornhub have various like advertising efforts to try and sanitize what they do.

• 1:06:45Louise Perry?

  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 adults use as brains. And the, 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 on to 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,

• 1:07:28Louise Perry?

  like, introduce you to the sto- super stimulus and then introduce you to something even more stimulating and even more stimulating, even more stimulating. And so you end up, and I mean, 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.

• 1:07:43Chris Williamson?

  Do you know how much that is?

• 1:07:45Louise Perry?

  So I read a survey that about a quarter of millennial men haven't used it in the last month.

• 1:07:51Louise Perry?

  Which is quite a lot, but the, the.

• 1:07:55Louise Perry?

  There's a minority of users who are like helpless.

• 1:07:58Chris Williamson?

  Power users.

• 1:07:59Louise Perry?

  This, yeah, yeah, like, again, it's, it, Prito is at play as well, like, there is a small number of men who watch, I can't remember the, the, the figure I quote in the book, it's something like two percent of users use it for like seven hours a week or more.

• 1:08:13Chris Williamson?

  It's a lot of porn. Do you know, um, Mary Harrington's Law of Fap Entropy?

• 1:08:18Louise Perry?

  Yes.

• 1:08:20Chris Williamson?

  That whatever you start out wanking to will get progressively more disgusting over time and you'll be down in the depths of blueberry porn before you know it.

• 1:08:26Louise Perry?

  Well, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, like, just anecdotally, there are some 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.

• 1:08:46Chris Williamson?

  What's the name for that? It's not ground pounding, what's it called? It's called something.

• 1:08:52Louise Perry?

  Oh, death grip syndrome.

• 1:08:53Chris Williamson?

  Death, ground pounding, where the fuck did I pull that from? Yeah.

• 1:08:57Louise Perry?

  More unpleasant.

• 1:08:59Chris Williamson?

  I mean, death grip syndrome isn't that nice either.

• 1:09:01Louise Perry?

  Yeah. And I, 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 wrapped up so quickly, just in my lifetime, that 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

• 1:09:43Louise Perry?

  virgins up into their twenties and so on. It's this really weird, um, what's the word?

• 1:09:51Louise Perry?

  It is this really weird contradiction, and it's one that the feminists in the seventies 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 twenty years ago. It used to be considered a really niche, biddy-ass thing, and even actually in the biddy-ass community, it 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.

• 1:10:32Louise Perry?

  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 inspiring a change in sexual culture. So, so sometimes, yeah, it's inspiring more aggressive behaviour from its users. But equally, actually, sometimes it's like basically nurturing users. Like, they become actually incapable of having sex with a real person and even becoming capable of being aroused by just normal porn. Because they're so, they like, they go, they go down the rabbit hole.

• 1:11:15Chris Williamson?

  Laura Flap entry continues to.

• 1:11:17Louise Perry?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:18Chris 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?

• 1:11:28Louise Perry?

  It's complicated because I think that the, like, most liberal feminists and sex-positive feminists would definitely think that there's nothing 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 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 going to be so sex positive and so anti everything I had to say. And actually, I won, surprisingly.

• 1:12:09Louise Perry?

  I had some quite aggressive questions from the floor, but actually at the end, um, our side won.

• 1:12:15Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think that was?

• 1:12:16Louise Perry?

  Because I think actually this generation, I mean, these eighteen 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 thirty, 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 recognise the, like, the downsides of that.

• 1:12:56Chris Williamson?

  The thing that I see online, I, I don't know a single guy that is pro porn. Guys are either neutral porn or anti porn, like, and the ones that are anti porn are vehement about it.

• 1:13:08Louise Perry?

  Do they tend to be anti porn from like the ethical women's stuff or because of the effect on them? I can.

• 1:13:19Chris Williamson?

  Not from the effect on women's stuff, no. Um, I think that, I, I, I actually think that the guys that are behaviourally addicted to porn or ha- ha- have got friends that do or are scared that they're going to become it. I actually think in part that they see the women that are, um, a part of the porn machine as part of the oppressor. I think that they think that they are creating the content which is causing me to, yeah, I have to fap three or four times a day and, and feel disgusted with myself or waste time or have this sort of supernormal stimuli problem of not being able to get it up and. Yeah, I mean, it's another one of those things where everybody's losing, you know.

• 1:13:59Louise Perry?

  Except for the owners of MindGeek, they're fine.

• 1:14:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, didn't one of those, one of those went on a podcast a few years ago, I remember hearing about how huge that MindGeek empire is. It's like more than 50% of all porn streaming on the internet goes through them, remembering that porn is still the biggest traffic source on the internet and they've got, it's wild. Yeah, aren't they British?

• 1:14:24Louise Perry?

  Basically unknown.

• 1:14:25Chris Williamson?

  One of the guys is British as well, I'm sure.

• 1:14:27Louise Perry?

  Canadian, the guy who OnlyFans is British.

• 1:14:30Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yeah, he's a, I was trying to get him on, I was trying to bring him on because he seems like a very interesting guy and I was really fascinated by their attempted move away from explicit content. It was obvious that they had, I don't think that that came from altruistic means, I think that that came from probably investor problems and shit to do with banks. So Chelsea Ferguson, if you know her, she owns admireme.vip, which is another version of OnlyFans. She was on OnlyFans, she found out that it was a problem, she's a friend, I've been friends with her for a very long time. She's got a huge private Snapchat, she's been a stripper for a long time in Newcastle. And she was telling me that she had to go to Germany, Germany was the only place that she could get a bank that would process payments

• 1:15:11Chris Williamson?

  when they found out what she was doing. So the backend of stuff, I think that that was the, the story about OnlyFans wasn't that they were trying to clean up the image, it's that they were probably having investor problems and operational shit on the backend.

• 1:15:25Louise Perry?

  Yeah, interesting, because that was one of the, my memory of the timeline is that that big New York Times piece about Pornhub and MindGeek came out. And Visa in particular, possibly some other companies, I can't remember, got a cold feet and thinking that they were inadvertently funding child rape images. And so I guess that that, I mean, I mean, OnlyFans has loads of kids on it, realistically. And I know that they try, they say that they try to make sure that it's only adults, but they can't realistically do that. There are loads of stories anecdotally of girls, you know, 14, 15 year old girls, whatever, putting their images up there. It is inevitable on any of these platforms, you can't really protect against it.

• 1:16:09Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean when you say that people are not products?

• 1:16:12Louise Perry?

  So that's the, yeah, that's the. 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. I mean, it comes back to the sexual disenchantment point. But if you.

• 1:16:36Louise Perry?

  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 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. Appalling um review platforms online where punters will review women that they've bought sex from.

• 1:17:21Louise Perry?

  And there's like no human feeling in there, like there's like true psychopathy on display. So, so. But that probably is the only population who actually believe in sexual disenchantment. Um. The women that buy sex from certainly don't.

• 1:17:37Louise Perry?

  And. And like, thinking.

• 1:17:43Louise Perry?

  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 whole casual sex phenomenon, which ought to be the sort of thing that the left are really opposed to.

• 1:18:28Louise Perry?

  My colleagues at the New Statesman, like this ought to be, you know, we're talking about this multi-billion pound global empire of the porn industry, we're talking about a really consumerist attitude towards other people's bodies and minds, like this, this isn't conservative, or it shouldn't be, like this should be 101 anti-capitalist critique coming from the left. But it isn't, and I think that that's because a lot of people on the left have prioritised, like, owning the comms 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 us to.

• 1:19:13Louise Perry?

  And I think that this, the last sixty, seventy years post-sexual revolution period has been has been in 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 way that this is, this history is interpreted by feminists often is, is 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

• 1:19:53Louise Perry?

  by the fact that if sex leads to reproduction, then that's everyone's concern, like, 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 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.

• 1:20:34Chris Williamson?

  That's really, really good. 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 and they're usually not the ones that suffer the impact. It's a luxury belief, right? To hold that men don't need to hold the door open for you and that having chivalry and constraints on male behaviour, that's not needed by some upper-middle-class woman whose husband has got a postgraduate degree because there are maybe levels of education 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 underclass or the working-class guy and girl who perhaps haven't

• 1:21:19Chris Williamson?

  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, the people that made the rules or that encouraged the norms to be dissolved are not the ones that are suffering their dissolving.

• 1:21:39Louise Perry?

  Yeah. Rob Henderson, actually, I think uses polyamory as his, one of his examples as in his original luxury beliefs essay, where if you're a high-status person, let's say in like the Bay Area where everyone loves 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

• 1:22:20Louise Perry?

  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, is 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.

• 1:22:52Chris Williamson?

  Well, think about I I I really like the idea that um beating the other side was more important than raising up the people of your political party. And I think that that's very true. There was a study that I saw around about two thousand and twelve, surveys of Democrats and Republicans, the proportions twisted and they they flipped from I vote for my party because I like my party to I vote for my party because I dislike the other party. Pretty much more more people were doing protest votes because of a hatred of the other rather than a love of the similar.

• 1:23:26Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:26Chris Williamson?

  You go, how easily is that to be weaponized, you know, and how how many perverse incentives are you going to create there?

• 1:23:34Louise Perry?

  You mentioned at the beginning about um how my book could be received in America and um not all, but a lot of the a lot of my friends who are also writing on similar things like Mary and Nina and so on are British. And British feminism is much more it's much more permissible to say this stuff than it is in the States in general. And I think the reason for that is that we don't really have a Christian right in the UK. So there isn't really any like fearsome enemy that we all need to be focused against. And things like abortion rights are rock solid, pretty much, like not in Ireland, but in

• 1:24:13Louise Perry?

  the mainland UK. Um, like that doesn't feel under threat. And I think that's what it is, because I think American feminists are just so focused all the time on like often shadow boxing against the Christian right, in the sense that I think they overstate their influence and their power and they're and they're kind of stuck in the past a little bit. And there's this like underdog mentality that we, things like constantly having to reassert, like, oh, you shouldn't be ashamed of sex, you should be, you know, it's like, we've won that fight. Come on. Like, look at any any newspaper, magazine, TV channel, whatever, like, the idea that women are not allowed to say they enjoy sex is like fifty years out of date. Come on. So they're so focused on us like somewhat imaginary enemy.

• 1:25:00Louise Perry?

  That they can't actually interrogate the coherence of their own views, whereas I think in the UK, that isn't. That isn't so much the case at all. And actually, there's a lot more. Things like trans politics or whatever, which we haven't gone into in in this discussion, but is. Is much more cross party, is not, there isn't this like really fierce dichotomy. Politically, which I think gives more space for thinking critically. I I feel like I can write this book and I'm not going to get pegged as. A crazy conservative. I might be wrong about that.

• 1:25:37Chris Williamson?

  We'll wait and see. How how should people act then, given all of this, everything that we've gone through? How should people act?

• 1:25:45Louise Perry?

  So I mean, I I do basically make the case in the book for for for for being a bit more old fashioned on some stuff like I. A lot of the, a lot of that section of it is directed more at women than at men. So like, I think, for instance, it's a good idea for women not to have sex on a first date. Or not even to have sex in the first three months. Because that that gives you the opportunity to assess whether or not he considers you to be good time only. Or if your wife material, stuff like that, which like you could basically read in most. Agony aunt from like the nineteen fifties, which is obviously what I get accused of in my reviews.

• 1:26:26Louise Perry?

  Um. But also they like, there was, there was a reason for it. It wasn't, it wasn't managed by misogyny, you know, there was a, there was like a proper principle behind it. Um. I mean, similarly for men, I I mean, I don't know what, I don't know what advice I have to offer in cells, to be honest. I think I'm probably not the right person to offer any kind of advice because.

• 1:26:44Chris Williamson?

  Typically, they don't like advice in any case.

• 1:26:47Louise Perry?

  No.

• 1:26:47Chris Williamson?

  Uh. From like a fish, teaching a fisherman how to fish type thing.

• 1:26:52Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:53Chris Williamson?

  It just, it goes down badly. I had a Nama Kate's on um a couple of months, maybe six months ago, and she's done tons of work, tons of research, like first hand research into it. A lot of people were unhappy about the fact that she wasn't someone that could understand their plight. So, okay, so for women, don't have sex on the first day, not having sex for three months. So there's an interesting insight I learned from Jeffrey Miller, evolutionary psychologist. So his book Mate that he wrote with Tucker Max, which should have been so much bigger than it was. It's such a shame that it didn't do like mental numbers because it's great. He explained about how slut shaming is a sort of game theoretic enforcement mechanism to ensure that the price of sex doesn't descend lower than women want it to, which is why most women are the enforcers of slut shaming,

• 1:27:36Chris Williamson?

  not men. Men actually have an incentive for slut shaming to go away. But one of the problems that you have here is you can kind of see ease of sex or speed towards being, accepting of having sex with a potential new partner as kind of being a price, right? And as you start to extend that out, the price that the man has to pay continues to go up and up and up. So you really do need a bit of a god's eye view because if every woman tomorrow said, right, no sex until three months, that's fine, that's the playing field. Maybe you would have more men that would sort of duck out of the dating game. But over time, they would acclimatize, right? Because we acclimatize to no sex before marriage, that was there. So, yeah, I think, okay, so what else? What else can people do?

• 1:28:22Louise Perry?

  I mean, yes, on that point about, yeah, I mean, strike breakers, for everyone else, the, I think that one of the things I hope comes from the book is that a lot of young women in particular, because they've not yet learnt through life experience, are phenomenally ignorant about the reality of male sexuality and the reality of sexual difference. And so don't realise, for instance, some of what we've spoken about, the fact that like the sexual double standard is alive and well, and a lot of like men can have emotional sex in a way that women can't, and all of this. And so we'll interpret, for instance,

• 1:29:04Louise Perry?

  they will misinterpret a lot of male behaviour and end up making decisions that are actually not in their best interest because they think that, you know, the guy who wants to sleep with them must want something more from them afterwards. And then, and then I like, you know, learn the hard way that that's not true. And I think that actually if

• 1:29:24Louise Perry?

  If there was more knowledge, widespread knowledge about the existence of these facts, I think actually that young women's behaviour could change quite quickly. Because at the moment, for instance, the, like, you go on TikTok or whatever and you get young women will do things like show off their bruises that they've got from having rough sex with men who like obviously hate them. But there is, I mean, it's a status symbol because it's a sign of being, oh, look, I'm so attractive. I mean, particularly things like choking. A lot of women interpret choking as being a sign of like passionate love, like in like a Fifty Shades of Grey way. Like, I want you so much, I'll do anything to have you. It's the way that this is like interpreted in the romantic imagination. That's not generally how the men who are

• 1:30:09Louise Perry?

  doing it interpret it at all. So there's this like mutual miscomprehension where each sex is doing something and they actually don't like realise how the other side is interpreting it. I think if more women realise that, it would, it would no longer be high status to be showing off your bruises on TikTok. Because actually, the, like, the truth of it is that basically any moderately good-looking young woman can get as many partners as she wants and can get them to do, you know, if, if she, if, if she asks them to choke her, they will. It's not a sign of being super attractive, but it's misinterpreted as being as such. So I think that if there were more, I think there was

• 1:30:50Louise Perry?

  a better understanding, then some of the incentives would change. Which is a bigger thing for young women.

• 1:30:57Chris Williamson?

  Louise Perry, ladies and gentlemen. I really, really enjoyed the book. I think that the group of women that we've got in the UK, you, Mary, Nina, we need to come up with a new, this can be a public service announcement to the people that are still listening. Before we started, we came up with the name of Based British Women, but then realised that the acronym of BBW can

• 1:31:20Louise Perry?

  Unfortunately, yeah.

• 1:31:21Chris Williamson?

  is problematic. So if you've got an alternative that the girls can use, that would be great. But yeah, I, I think that it's really great. I really, really like all of the work that you guys have put out. Where should people go? They want to read more of your stuff online? Where should they go?

• 1:31:36Louise Perry?

  So it's a book, obviously, which is out already in the UK, The Case Against Septu-Revolution, and it's out at the end of August in America. And I write a weekly column for The New Statesman.

• 1:31:48Chris Williamson?

  You got Substack as well, right?

• 1:31:50Louise Perry?

  No, I don't actually. I started one very briefly, but then I got off with a New Statesman job and I can't do two columns in one week, so.

• 1:31:58Chris Williamson?

  Take the money. Louise, I appreciate you. Thank you.

• 1:32:01Louise Perry?

  Thank you so much.