The Dating Problem Nobody Knows How to Solve - Louise Perry (4K)

Louise Perry is a writer, Press Officer for the campaign group We Can’t Consent To This and an author. Young women have been through turmoil over the last 50 years. With their entry into the workforce, emancipation from the kitchen and greater freedom and independence, you might think they have got everything they want out of life. But unfortunately, the reality may be less rosy. Expect to learn why 40% of young adults say that marriage has outlived its usefulness, why younger generations see relationships in TV shows as an unnecessary addition, whether women are actually happy with the modern culture around sex, what the fallout of the MeToo movement has been, why young women are unhappier on average compared to previous generations and much more... Sponsors: Get a 35% discount on all Cozy Earth products at http://www.cozyearth.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ Buy my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom #women #dating #metoo - 00:00 Is Marriage Still Useful? 02:38 Society is Becoming More Prudish 11:52 Young People’s Views on Sex in Movies 15:05 Birth Control is Making Weak Men 20:19 The Gen-Z Pushback Against Romance 25:23 Is Patriarchy the Best System? 27:54 How Culture Impacts Our Views of Sex 33:00 Are Women Happier Now Than 70 Years Ago? 43:55 10 Years On From #MeToo 55:20 Why Men Aren’t Approaching Women 1:10:49 The Mental Health Crisis of Girls 1:19:09 Do Pedophiles Need Sympathy? 1:23:08 Why Women Support Body Positivity 1:27:50 The Normalisation of Cosmetic Surgery 1:38:14 Where to Find Louise - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - 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.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  There's a Wall Street Journal column about marriage as a mirror of human nature that says forty percent of young adults say marriage has outlived its usefulness.

• 0:10Louise Perry?

  Hmm.

• 0:10Chris Williamson?

  What do you think's going on?

• 0:12Louise Perry?

  I mean, I'm not surprised because these are young adults who've like, I think, so I think in London now, and this would be true in lots of parts of the West. About half of kids will reach the age of fifteen not living with their biological father. Half. So I guess these young people just look around and they're like, well, it's like evident to me that marriage isn't working.

• 0:37Chris Williamson?

  Mary Eberstadt's got this idea about motherhood and family life as a mimetic desire.

• 0:44Louise Perry?

  Hmm.

• 0:45Chris Williamson?

  That the death of mothers and families causes fewer people to see them, which causes fewer people to want them, which causes fewer people to.

• 0:54Louise Perry?

  I think that's definitely true. And you can see that in data actually with, like, if your sister or your close friend has a baby, you're more likely to have a baby in the year or two following. And vice versa. So if if the people around you are not having children, you're less likely to have children yourself. I think, and that's, I think that's so interesting because

• 1:16Louise Perry?

  there's always been this assumption by demographers up until birth rates started really crashing in recent decades, that people would just spontaneously decide, once they had access to contraception or whatever, to have two point one kids, that that was like the natural settling point for the human species, that we'd all, we'd all reach there and we'd just stay there. And that's clearly not true because so many countries now are falling way below replacement. And I think it's because actually there's no law of nature that says that people should want two point one kids. People look around them and they're like, oh, okay, everyone here has one or zero or six. And then that becomes, as you say, a mimetic desire. I think that becomes what's considered normal. And humans are completely obsessed with what's normal.

• 2:00Louise Perry?

  Which is why I'm just genuinely quite, generally quite skeptical of the idea of.

• 2:05Louise Perry?

  Of people having like absolute agency or I mean, we do clearly have. We do clearly have free will. But I think that what we consider to be desirable, normal, the life template is so incredibly dependent on what other people around us think.

• 2:25Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 2:26Louise Perry?

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

• 2:32Chris Williamson?

  There's a, I love your analogy or your conception of prudishness and licentiousness that we kind of flip flop between the two.

• 2:41Louise Perry?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:42Chris Williamson?

  Which one do you think we're in now?

• 2:45Louise Perry?

  Uh, licentiousness transitioning to prudishness.

• 2:49Chris Williamson?

  Okay, is this like the Perry Pilled equivalent of the hard men create strong times, weak men, weak times, blah, blah, blah.

• 2:57Louise Perry?

  Loose women. Yeah, right, okay, okay. Yeah, maybe, I mean, I think it's kind of natural to have. I think there's always a bit of a roller coaster within culture because you reach a point where, um, you know, whatever particular excess becomes obvious. And then people start quietly thinking, hang on, I don't really like this. And then some people start saying loudly, I don't like this. And then, you know, everyone kind of joins in.

• 3:25Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 3:26Louise Perry?

  You know, so on forever through history. Um, what's different about this one, of course, is that we invented the pill.

• 3:33Louise Perry?

  So previous periods of licentiousness, they didn't have the technological means to sort of go all the way with it.

• 3:41Chris Williamson?

  There was a glass ceiling on how licentious you could be without incurring a ton of costs.

• 3:46Louise Perry?

  Yeah, like you always had some people, some, I mean, because it's women who like carry the, literally carry the consequences of, um, of sex outside marriage, right? There were always some women who, either because they had to, because they were in prostitution, because they were poor, or because they were like crazy aristocrats who just could be eccentric and get away with it, who would, who would behave unusually. But most women in the middle, you know, having sex is probably the most consequential thing a woman can do without contraception. So most women would take that decision very, very seriously for obvious reasons up until.

• 4:27Louise Perry?

  The sixties and then it's all out the window and we can't un-invent that like the pill is not going to get un-invented. Even if all these, I mean, there is a little bit of a reaction of the kind of. What I think of as the goop class, right?

• 4:42Louise Perry?

  Women who are really into, women who are really into wellness.

• 4:45Chris Williamson?

  The goop class.

• 4:46Louise Perry?

  Yeah, like really into, into.

• 4:48Chris Williamson?

  Goop.

• 4:49Louise Perry?

  Gwyneth Paltrow, yeah, yeah.

• 4:51Chris Williamson?

  What's, what's, why is goop, what's she got to do with goop? What's that?

• 4:55Louise Perry?

  Because there's this recognition, which I think is true, that hormonal birth control is bad for you, basically. And so there's a, it's, it's not coming from traditional Catholics or anything like that. It's coming from. Women who are, I think justifiably concerned about the health effects, who are doing things like fertility tracking. Rather than hormonal birth control, like that's happening, but I don't think that, I don't think that heralds a mass sort of rejection of the pill.

• 5:22Chris Williamson?

  Okay, there's, dig into the goop class for me then. What are they doing?

• 5:26Louise Perry?

  So like natural cycles, for instance, have you heard of this?

• 5:28Chris Williamson?

  I have, yeah, yeah. Sarah Hill did a great, talked about a great study that was done to do with. Attraction to the partner when you were, got together on the pill versus off the pill, et cetera, et cetera.

• 5:39Louise Perry?

  Yeah, I know, okay, so two things. I know, I know quite a lot of women who have, who have, who have abandoned hormonal birth control and have ended up. Doing whatever kind of well, more like wellness maximizing means of fertility. You can also do things like tracking your, like making your exercise regime. Gel with your, your menstrual cycle and things like that. Yeah. So there's a whole, there's a whole wealth of like technology enabled. Reproductive wellness available, which is, which is good. I have nothing against it. I also know so many women who've got pregnant from doing that accidentally.

• 6:12Chris Williamson?

  What, from their exercise routine?

• 6:14Louise Perry?

  No, got pregnant.

• 6:20Louise Perry?

  It doesn't work that well. It doesn't work that well, like realistically.

• 6:23Chris Williamson?

  Natural cycles is a thermometer under the tongue, right?

• 6:26Louise Perry?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's it's like a more sophisticated version of just tracking that Catholics have done forever.

• 6:36Louise Perry?

  But like, there's quite a good chance.

• 6:37Chris Williamson?

  Who knew it was just Catholic technology all over again? Okay, so prudishness, prudishness to licentiousness, and you think that we're what, sort of tumbling just over the top of that super sex positive into what's coming next?

• 6:51Louise Perry?

  I think that, I think that we, I, I think the reason my book did unexpectedly well is because, yes, we're at that tipping point where everyone's been privately, well, not everyone, but a lot of people have been privately thinking, this is weird. And then they, and then someone starts saying it and you're like, yeah, this is weird. I think that that, I think that's probably the point that we're at. I, the only thing is though, I don't know if it's going to be as radical a period of prudishness as we've seen historically, because we've got the pill, one, right? So that's like a completely different material situation. And two, because we've got the internet, we've got porn, like, is that really going to be?

• 7:31Louise Perry?

  My suspicion is probably what we'll see is we'll see elites reacting against the licentious period. We'll see, you know, the the goop class, like the, but also the male equivalent, you know, that, I mean, you know this, that impulse control is such an important element of living in our kind of technological landscape. Like, if you can't put down your phone, you're never going to do well professionally. Do anything, yeah. So the people who are best able to resist all of the various temptations, including sexual temptations of our new material conditions.

• 8:14Louise Perry?

  Other people who are most likely to find themselves in the elites.

• 8:17Chris Williamson?

  See, what's interesting, conscientiousness is moderately heritable, like all psychological dispositions. And yet, what you're saying here is that the people who are going to best be able to control their reproduction are the people who are high in conscientiousness, which means that you're going to select for people low in conscientiousness, who are going to be having more kids on average.

• 8:38Louise Perry?

  Yes.

• 8:39Chris Williamson?

  This is the future.

• 8:40Louise Perry?

  Yes.

• 8:41Chris Williamson?

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

• 9:15Louise Perry?

  I agree with you and people have been worrying about this for like 150 years. It's just that that, like you're familiar with Francis Galton.

• 9:22Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 9:22Louise Perry?

  He's the, you know, the father, the father of eugenics. He, he was like, as far as I am aware, I mean, this was before they even knew what a gene was. He was the first person to sit down and draw up family trees and realise that what he called genius was heritable.

• 9:43Chris Williamson?

  Wasn't it hereditary genius? Was that not his first thing?

• 9:46Louise Perry?

  That sounds right.

• 9:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 9:47Louise Perry?

  And so particular families were particularly likely to generate these, you know, prominent figures. And obviously the sort of methodology he was using now is seems really archaic. And how do you measure genius or whatever, whatever. But he was basically right. He was basically recognised that all of these things were just, basically every psychological trait is heritable to some extent. And I mean, that's where, the thing that people forget about the eugenics movement is that it was, it was progressive. It was like self-consciously progressive. That's how people understood themselves. And it was often anti-religious. It was anti-conservative. It was seen as like this brave new scientific frontier

• 10:28Louise Perry?

  that so many people were into. Like it's, I've been, I've been reading about this at the moment for a piece I'm writing and the popularity of eugenics in the early 20th century is like mind-boggling and is mostly the memory hold.

• 10:42Chris Williamson?

  Branding problem. Just needs, needs a new branding problem.

• 10:45Louise Perry?

  Well, I mean, we, well, what they were talking about mostly, the se genesis of the period, was using the state to either encourage some people to reproduce or discourage other people from reproducing. And there were some really. Particularly in the States, the use of forced sterilisation.

• 11:02Chris Williamson?

  Did you come across that, um, that particular lady who had had, I think it was, uh, the statement was, uh, three generations of idiots are enough.

• 11:10Louise Perry?

  Exactly.

• 11:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 11:11Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 11:11Chris Williamson?

  You saw that one.

• 11:11Louise Perry?

  Exactly. I can't remember her name, but yeah, that was like in important case law in the States. Um, and yeah, like, uh, really a lot of people were sterilised during that quite brief period in America. Not so much in the UK, but of course it was the Nazis that just completely uh, made that line of thinking completely unthinkable.

• 11:29Chris Williamson?

  Branding problem, I'm telling you. So looking at this sort of licentiousness, prudishness paradigm, which I think is really important. I think it's not, anything that kind of has a flip flop, uh, seems to be accurate to me because it always swings back and forth.

• 11:41Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 11:42Chris Williamson?

  I found this article that said, "Looking for no man's, study finds teens want less sex in their TV and movies." Have you come across this?

• 11:50Louise Perry?

  No, that's interesting.

• 11:51Chris Williamson?

  So, "Younger generations don't think sex is necessary to the plots of most movies and TV shows." That's according to a recent study from UCLA. Researchers interviewed fifteen hundred individuals between the ages of ten and twenty four about the way that they're interacting with media. Those between the ages of thirteen and twenty four were asked if they thought sex was needed for the plot in entertainment and forty seven point five percent of respondents said it was not. They also said they wanted to see less romance on screen, forty four percent, and more content centred around platonic friendships, fifty one point five percent. In a video UCLA released in conjunction with the survey, sixteen year old respondent Anna said, "When there's media with too much sex in, me and my friends often feel uncomfortable." She later added, "I feel that it is way too graphic."

• 12:34Chris Williamson?

  The survey also quoted pop star Olivia Rodrigo's answer to the question of whether or not she watched the HBO series The Idol. "I don't have the desire to. I remember walking out of Barbie and being like, wow, it's so long since I've seen a movie that is female centred in a way that isn't sexual or about her pain or her being traumatised." What do you make of that?

• 12:54Louise Perry?

  Um, so is it just the girls who are, who are reacting against it?

• 12:57Chris Williamson?

  I'm not sure. Uh, researchers say fifteen hundred individuals.

• 13:01Louise Perry?

  Okay.

• 13:01Chris Williamson?

  Uh, no, it seems like it was, it seems like it was both, uh, males and females that were saying that.

• 13:06Louise Perry?

  I have got three possible explanations come to mind. The first is it's the girls not liking porn culture, fair enough.

• 13:12Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 13:13Louise Perry?

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

• 13:26Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 13:26Louise Perry?

  It might be that. It might be um differential fertility rates already having an impact in terms of the conservatism and religiosity of young people, because you know um

• 13:42Louise Perry?

  like in America, for the first time in sixty, seventy years, you've actually seen a decline in pro LGBT attitudes among young people.

• 13:52Chris Williamson?

  Wow, where's that coming from?

• 13:54Louise Perry?

  Well, my guess is that it's coming from the fact that basically since the pill, more conservative, more religious people having kids, yeah. And that that's already starting to play out in terms of the younger generations being more religious and conservative.

• 14:07Chris Williamson?

  We're seeing that male, female, liberal, conservative divide amongst kids as well, though, right?

• 14:14Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 14:14Chris Williamson?

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

• 14:20Louise Perry?

  That's plausible.

• 14:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 14:21Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 14:21Chris Williamson?

  All right. What was the third one?

• 14:23Louise Perry?

  Uh, like xenoestrogens.

• 14:28Louise Perry?

  It's possible, isn't it?

• 14:29Chris Williamson?

  Everything, all roads lead back to Alex Jones, ultimately.

• 14:33Louise Perry?

  I mean, he was sort of onto something, wasn't he? I mean, it is possible that the sex recession, so called, is partly hormonal. It's partly caused by, I mean, it might partly be caused by women being on hormonal birth control, which is changing their sexuality. It might also be caused by men being low T.

• 14:53Chris Williamson?

  So the low testosterone for men, do you want to hear my real horseshoe theory for this? Right. So I learned this whilst talking to Dr. Sarah Hill, who wrote This is Your Brain on Birth Control, right? And um she taught me that male testosterone levels are mediated by the fertility of the women in their local ecology. So if you were a uh male in their twenties, but you happen to be around a bunch of other men or a bunch of other grandmothers, perhaps, or a bunch of children. Your testosterone levels drop.

• 15:28Louise Perry?

  Interesting.

• 15:28Chris Williamson?

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

• 15:53Chris Williamson?

  And the women who are currently during the seven day, you can get me pregnant period, they're the ones that they're most attracted to. The fucking silhouette of the way they walk displays.

• 16:03Louise Perry?

  And high heels replicate that. That's the idea. The high heels make you walk.

• 16:08Chris Williamson?

  Move, jiggle in that way.

• 16:09Louise Perry?

  That make you look.

• 16:10Chris Williamson?

  So you have this recursive feedback loop of hormonal birth control causes women to select for men who are more providers rather than protectors. They want provisioners, right? They want the academic and the resources more agreeable. They then either come off or don't come off birth control, but find that they've come out this fucking hormonal fugue state. Oh my God, who am I in a relationship with? But you also have this effect on men too. Not only socially, in, I noticed that lots of women seem to be attracted to Timothy Chalamet, who's painting his nails and kind of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 16:43Louise Perry?

  Yep.

• 16:44Chris Williamson?

  But the genuine physiological hormonal response to men just being around lots of women who are on hormonal birth control. Now, processed foods, not enough time outside, not enough time with vitamin D, not enough time with friends, da, da, da, da, da. But there's a big X factor apparently amongst testosterone researchers who don't know why men's T levels have dropped the amount that they have, right? It's about one percent a year, every year since, I think, nineteen fifty. So it's like, and then that goes to a hundred and then it's that again and it goes to a hundred. So it's not how we're in minus fucking testosterone soon. But yeah, so hormonal birth control has a lot to answer for, I think.

• 17:28Louise Perry?

  It's a really tricky trade off, isn't it? Because like. There are clear downsides to having a bunch of low T men, you know, in terms of, in terms of fertility, in terms of men and women just fancying each other and like having functional relationships. But also, like, high stress strain is also associated with crime and violence.

• 17:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 17:49Louise Perry?

  So which, you know, do we choose to have a society of kind of

• 17:57Louise Perry?

  sexless, incredibly like online?

• 18:02Chris Williamson?

  Placid soy people.

• 18:04Louise Perry?

  Yeah, who also are quite chill. They don't cause like enormous problems. I don't know. That's like, that's like a genuinely hard thing to choose.

• 18:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you could almost look at it kind of like disposition sterilization.

• 18:19Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 18:19Chris Williamson?

  In a way.

• 18:20Louise Perry?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 18:23Chris Williamson?

  Fuck. Yeah, but.

• 18:24Louise Perry?

  Then we have problems with like, like this is a real problem with the military. I'm sure you know, like massive recruitment problems.

• 18:31Chris Williamson?

  I thought that was because everyone's fat and got diabetes.

• 18:33Louise Perry?

  Well, that too.

• 18:34Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 18:35Louise Perry?

  But also not being interested in it.

• 18:37Chris Williamson?

  But men just don't want to wage war.

• 18:38Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 18:39Chris Williamson?

  We can do it from modern warfare or I'm on Reddit.

• 18:42Louise Perry?

  It's probably also partly to do with lack of like faith in the nation, like being less patriotic in general. Like the the pool of potentially great soldiers just gets smaller every year. And it's sort of fine, I guess, to get away with it because if we're not actually in a hot war and if we have loads of technology. But you can imagine a scenario where that becomes an enormous problem. Like a mass mobilization. I don't know how we actually fare.

• 19:06Chris Williamson?

  The Chinese government banned K-pop. Do you see this? Because they didn't want, what was it they called them? It was like sissy men. We don't want any more sissy men. So it was all of the Chinese male role models were like super high T jacked dudes and they didn't want this BTS like soy.

• 19:32Chris Williamson?

  Like culture infecting them. That's how they, that's what they saw it as.

• 19:37Louise Perry?

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

• 20:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 20:03Louise Perry?

  That's associated with pre-communist China.

• 20:06Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 20:07Louise Perry?

  And so some of the reaction against feminization through K-pop or whatever. Is associated with, um, anti-communist feeling.

• 20:17Chris Williamson?

  So this sort of Gen Z pushback against romance, this is what I thought was super interesting, right? So we've got, uh, your spectrum of prudishness and licentiousness, but it's not just the, uh, short-termism of uh, physical desires being satisfied. There's also another level to this, which is to do with romance and how central your connection to another person, a significant other is. Right? Cause that kind of fits on the prudishness, licentiousness scale, but it's also not exactly the same. Like that would be something that's slightly different. Like, how important is it that you find a significant other?

• 20:55Chris Williamson?

  And I think that at least a little bit of that UCLA study probably is Rachel Zeigler, Ziegler as the new Snow White saying, we don't need a prince to come and save her. She didn't have a prince. She had a stalker. Like a sleeping beauty can't consent. Uh, like I, I wonder if it's not just a pushback against the sex side of stuff, but the romance, right? Just against romance culture in general. HSBC got Emily Radikowski, the tennis player, to come and do, uh, fairer tales, uh, princesses doing it for themselves,

• 21:34Chris Williamson?

  which was a rewriting of Cinderella, Rapunzel and Snow White, where instead of waiting for a prince, the prince. Cessars went and started their own businesses on their own and invested their money wisely. So I think because HSBC is really where we go for like modern fucking dating culture. So, yeah, I just think that this Gen Z pushback against what may on the surface appear to be about sex may actually run deeper.

• 22:03Louise Perry?

  The thing is that they're sort of right. The sort of a man, a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, old line. Or the line from Gloria Steinem I always thought was really clever, which is we became the men we once wanted to marry. I E. Second wave feminists were able to do that. And I mean, I always, I always think this about the sort of the disposability of men in modern culture, which is totally real, you know, the like that that basic Red Bull position is true. There is this problem of men basically not feeling, having purpose, not feeling needed, whatever. Women not feeling as if they need husbands because like they kind of don't, you know, if they don't have to, if they're not having children.

• 22:48Louise Perry?

  Or even if they do have children, you know, they can participate. Like it turns out that actually women being slightly more conscientious than men are, for instance, and slightly more agreeable than men are. Is actually really great in a sort of laptop job.

• 23:02Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 23:03Louise Perry?

  Economy.

• 23:03Chris Williamson?

  Brain based instead of braun based.

• 23:04Louise Perry?

  Yeah, like women are actually slightly better, not, not at the, not at the tech, you know, you've still got overwhelmingly male CEOs and things like that. But in the kind of the, the, the median range, women are actually kind of better employees in service economies.

• 23:20Louise Perry?

  You know, the problem that men are facing is not actually feminism as such. Although feminism has kind of accelerated some of these phenomena, it's just, it's basically technology and affluence.

• 23:35Louise Perry?

  In highly technologically sophisticated and affluent societies, men who are not in this incredibly, you know, far right tail, super successful, intelligent, whatever, just normal men have less to do. We don't need brawn. Like, when we invented the internal combustion engine, the importance of male muscle power dropped like a stone.

• 23:59Chris Williamson?

  Diminished.

• 23:59Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 24:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. And then as soon as you had equality in terms of access to education and employment, and you pivoted already from that brawn-based to brain-based economy, it turns out that women have a kind of a genetic unfair advantage with the current working environment, which meant that the, you know, like, this is something that the manosphere, the red pill, never really gets right. Like, when they talk about how women in the past and the culture that they applied to their dating made them happier, they forget the fact that women were largely financial prisoners of their partner because they had nowhere else to go. So, yeah, maybe they were able to remain loyal and make better sandwiches, but how much of that was by choice?

• 24:44Chris Williamson?

  And how much of that was Stockholm syndrome?

• 24:47Louise Perry?

  It's probably better, I think, well, so the big problem with the status quo right now, where we have, you know, women are actually earning more than men are at most points along the income distribution, just not at the very top. Like, the gender pay gap is basically a result of the fact that you've got a handful of male CEOs who make enormous sums and they get stay-at-home wives.

• 25:07Chris Williamson?

  You see that the PM of Iceland, the country, not the fucking company, is on strike, along with all other Icelandic women at the moment, over the gender pay gap?

• 25:16Louise Perry?

  Right.

• 25:18Chris Williamson?

  Anyway, you were saying, yeah, along, pretty much, pretty much everywhere outside of Iceland and CEOs.

• 25:22Louise Perry?

  The gender pay gap is an artifact. One, of the fact that there are a small number of very, very high-earning men. And two of, it's basically, it's basically a maternity gap. It's actually just the fact that having children, yeah, having children means that you can't operate in the workplace in the way that a man can. Like, at the very least, when you're very pregnant and you've just given birth, you know. But women are choosing not to do that, right? So, if you...

• 25:49Louise Perry?

  If you if you don't have children and you are a sort of typical woman in terms of being slightly more conscientious, slightly more agreeable, having all of these, you know, being more probably more punctual, being a better employee, you do basically have more of an advantage in the workplace than another man. But this is completely unsustainable because of going back to the whole birth rates thing. Like, any culture that just stops reproducing itself is not going to last. It's either going to just wither away and die, or it's going to be overtaken by some other culture.

• 26:23Louise Perry?

  And I and I sort of think like that the answer to the riddle of why every culture that we see on historical record that has sustained itself and flourished has been patriarchal is possibly because a culture has to be patriarchal in order to reproduce itself. Like, that's my black pearl, reading this stuff.

• 26:41Chris Williamson?

  Dig into that.

• 26:42Louise Perry?

  Because it's very hard to be to have lots of kids as a woman. You can maybe have one or two, just about, and it not let affect your career. But there's just a straightforward clash between the labour market and reproduction for women that you can kind of get away with if you make enough money, because you can pay for nannies and all this kind of stuff. But for most women, it's just like, that's just, that's that they're almost irreconcilable. You have to you have to trade off something. And what most women are choosing to do, it seems, is that they're having fewer children. Which for them personally might actually, you know, the truth is, like, children are

• 27:27Louise Perry?

  expensive and knackered. Like, they're wonderful, they are wonderful, but if you've not had them, you don't know how wonderful they are. Like, once you've had your children, you just love them more than more than life itself. Like, every mother I know says, I would unhesitatingly die for my children. But if you've never experienced that kind of love and it's kind of

• 27:46Chris Williamson?

  Abstract.

• 27:47Louise Perry?

  Yeah. Then why wouldn't you say, actually, no, I'd rather make this next promotion?

• 27:52Chris Williamson?

  Well, the modern culture prioritizes pleasure in the here and now and short-termism over everything else.

• 27:59Louise Perry?

  I think human beings just do that as well.

• 28:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, but maybe there was, I don't know. Maybe you're right, but it seems like there was definitely a preparedness to invest now for returns in the future, more so. Our ability, the marshmallow test was more effective a hundred years ago for most.

• 28:18Louise Perry?

  I think because culture kind of, I think culture serves, good culture serves the purpose of channeling people's, making people more long-termist, because our natural inclination is to be short-termist, most of us. And, or, I mean, the thing is with having children is like, you're short-termist because you want to have sex and then oh whoops, a baby came along. Like normally you don't have to think about that.

• 28:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that was evolution's big trick, wasn't it?

• 28:41Louise Perry?

  Yeah, exactly. But now.

• 28:43Chris Williamson?

  Thought you were just having fun. Guess what? The next nineteen years of your life are locked off.

• 28:47Louise Perry?

  And I know there's like, there's a certain elegance to that, right? But we've lost that because of contraception. And now there are still groups, there are still cultures, there are still, there are still people who just love babies. And will have loads of kids because they just get so much joy from babies, which is great. Like, I'm one of those people. I would rather have loads of kids and earn less money. I've like made that rational decision. But a lot of people, for a lot of people, that's not an obvious choice. Some cultures are still channeling people into being more traditionist, being more long-termist. But the mainstream culture absolutely isn't doing that. And the very likely consequence of that is that,

• 29:27Louise Perry?

  I mean, like, I can't remember the numbers exactly, but South Korea, you'll know, has the lowest fertility rate in the world.

• 29:33Chris Williamson?

  For every one hundred South Koreans, there will be four great-grandchildren.

• 29:37Louise Perry?

  Right.

• 29:40Louise Perry?

  Like, there's never been a plague that has knocked out that many people.

• 29:43Chris Williamson?

  The ninety-six percent extinction rate over the next hundred years.

• 29:45Louise Perry?

  Incredible.

• 29:46Chris Williamson?

  Of Koreans, remembering that we shut down the entire world for something that kills one to two percent of people.

• 29:51Louise Perry?

  Yeah, it's crazy. It's the most incredible evolutionary bottleneck that we're going through.

• 29:55Chris Williamson?

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• 30:35Chris Williamson?

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• 30:57Chris Williamson?

  The interesting thing about declining birth rates is that it's a, it's not an existential risk in the traditional sense of permanent unrecoverable collapse. It's not a classic version of it. But it's a population risk that's very unique in that there's no smoke in the sky, there's no asteroid heading toward Earth. There's no, there's no lead measure if you're looking until it's way too late.

• 31:22Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 31:22Chris Williamson?

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

• 31:40Louise Perry?

  So it feels really counterintuitive, yeah.

• 31:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, demography is destiny.

• 31:43Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 31:44Chris Williamson?

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

• 31:55Louise Perry?

  No.

• 31:56Chris Williamson?

  In this, this needs to be, for the peri-pilled out there, this needs to be a part of it. This girl wrote 350 point.

• 32:04Chris Williamson?

  Eight page long list and printed them out on TikTok of all of the reasons why she didn't want to have kids. And these ranged from things like literally a parasite living inside of my body to can't wear cute heels anymore, to unable to do brunch with the girls. And then she printed off like a one page list of reasons to have kids. And now like hashtag girl with the list on TikTok's got millions and billions of plays.

• 32:29Louise Perry?

  Amazing. Yeah. I mean, I guess she's kind of right, but the problem is that the thing you have to have on that, that reasons to have kids is like, like inexpressible joy.

• 32:45Chris Williamson?

  Most meaningful experience of my life.

• 32:47Louise Perry?

  Yeah. Which to me does cancel out like brunch with the girls, or so you can bring your baby to brunch with the girls.

• 32:52Chris Williamson?

  And when it comes to heels, look at the shoes that you've got on today.

• 32:55Louise Perry?

  Indeed. I never wore heels anyway. I've rated.

• 32:59Chris Williamson?

  Sparkly things. So, you know, one of the promises, I had Mary Eberstadt on the show a couple of weeks ago, who's just phenomenal. I feel like she's your spirit animal. And she was talking to me about very similar sorts of things, that the promises that women were given previously, you know, the freedom, deliberation. Ultimately, do you think that most women on average are more happy with modern sexual culture than they were previously, let's say 60 or 70 years ago?

• 33:35Louise Perry?

  I think no, but the outliers are quite striking. So there are some, the thing is that having the kind of, let's say like mildly patriarchal kind of structure, where the assumption is that the men do.

• 33:55Louise Perry?

  Participate most in public life and do the bulk of, well, I mean, it depends on what era you're talking about materially, right? So in subsistence cultures, women do actually do loads of economic work. They just do economic work that is compatible with also looking after little children. So like the man goes out in the field and collects raw materials and the woman processes the raw materials at home while minding the toddlers and like sharing the the burden of childcare with her sisters and cousins or whatever. The more recent model of the breadwinner, where the man goes out and earns all the money and the woman stays at home and does all of the housework is is kind of historically unusual. It's not that, it's not that bad. Like, actually, it's, it's, it's fine if and only if your husband isn't a tyrant.

• 34:40Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 34:41Louise Perry?

  But if your husband is a tyrant, it's completely disastrous. So it's like for most people, it's fine. For most women, it's fine. And probably is actually better than like the current, the state, the status quo where women have to still do disproportionate amounts of childcare and housework and do all of the, you know, all the pregnancy, obviously, all the breastfeeding, obviously, plus going out to work, right? This is what feminists call the second shift, that you end up doing two jobs. That's, I think, worse, actually.

• 35:09Chris Williamson?

  What was it that you, didn't you say you'd worked it out that you were doing a full-time job breastfeeding?

• 35:15Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 35:16Chris Williamson?

  You were doing forty hours a week of breastfeeding?

• 35:17Louise Perry?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:18Chris Williamson?

  That's the third shift.

• 35:19Louise Perry?

  Yeah, exactly. Like crazy levels of, of crazy levels of work that you have to do, which is obviously, you know, joyful, meaningful, et cetera. But it, like, there are only so many hours in the day. You, like, you need, it isn't feasible unless you have loads of money available to you or whatever. It isn't feasible to not have a husband father who goes out and does all of that.

• 35:47Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 35:48Louise Perry?

  And still be as good a mother as you want to be.

• 35:51Chris Williamson?

  It's, I'm so interested in paradoxes. You know, Mary taught me about a ton of them. You have the pill, gets introduced, increase in single motherhood, increase in abortions, like paradox, interesting. Another one that I found from Candace Blake, who's over in Australia, is that.

• 36:10Chris Williamson?

  Gender inequality in the pay gap between men and women positively predicts both male and female satisfaction in relationships.

• 36:20Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 36:20Chris Williamson?

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

• 36:32Louise Perry?

  And stare at handads is a really strong predictor of divorce.

• 36:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, if the woman is the primary breadwinner, men are 50% more likely to use erectile dysfunction medication.

• 36:44Chris Williamson?

  You know, increases in domestic violence. The women are more likely to be on the receiving end of domestic violence if they're the primary breadwinner because the male partner switches from a benefit-affording to a cost-inflicting mate-retention strategy. You know, if you begin to feel a disparity in mate-value, you have two choices, right? You can either start to raise yourself up or try to drag the other person down and, you know, making them fearful of you is a pretty good way to drag them down. But that, you know, that's kind of dark. That being said, the patriarchy is so powerful that we've somehow convinced women that they both need to earn the money and that we can stay at home while they bear the burden of children.

• 37:27Chris Williamson?

  So maybe this is just a psy-op from all of us to not have to do anything except for Xbox now.

• 37:34Louise Perry?

  What we've worked, what we've discovered, all right, so I don't really believe in, okay.

• 37:41Louise Perry?

  Patriarchy clearly has like a strict anthropological meaning in that societies where only men are allowed to be in positions of power and authority have traditionally been described as patriarchal by anthropologists. We don't live in one of those anymore. We haven't lived in one of those for a half a century now in that, I mean, in this country, we've had like three female prime ministers and so forth, right?

• 38:05Louise Perry?

  But I think that there's also a different way in which people use the word patriarchal, which still to some extent applies to contemporary culture, which is that there's this quite deep-seated feeling shared by both men and women, and I think cross-culturally, that masculine things are higher status than feminine things.

• 38:30Louise Perry?

  And that's why you see this great eagerness, actually, of women now that they can to participate in like masculine coded things to be.

• 38:39Chris Williamson?

  What like?

• 38:40Louise Perry?

  Well, professional work, right? There's been this rush of women into into into the pub into public life, into traditionally masculine roles. There has not been a rush of men into traditional feminine roles, not at all.

• 38:53Chris Williamson?

  Because there's no status associated with them.

• 38:55Louise Perry?

  Because there's no status associated with it. And I think often that's what feminists are describing when they talk about things being patriarchal, like they they recognise the fact that there's that kind of status gap.

• 39:04Chris Williamson?

  Remember who's ascribing that? At least fifty percent of society is ascribing that like on their own behalf, right?

• 39:09Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 39:10Chris Williamson?

  You know?

• 39:11Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 39:11Chris Williamson?

  Like, I said, this is what Richard Reeves's book was so interesting, where he talks about heal, right? What was it? Like, health, education, maybe like administration or something else?

• 39:20Louise Perry?

  Yeah, feminine jobs.

• 39:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, for more feminine jobs.

• 39:23Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 39:23Chris Williamson?

  There are four times more female fighter pilots in the US Air Force by percentage than there are male kindergarten teachers in America.

• 39:30Louise Perry?

  Yeah, makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, because there just hasn't been this rush for men to try and attain feminine status, right? And I think that I don't think that our culture is misogynist, right? Like misogynists exist. There are there are like, there are some of them out there, but that's not typical. I think, though, that this sort of

• 39:56Louise Perry?

  deep-seated assumption that women are, like, you're familiar with the women are wonderful bias?

• 40:04Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 40:06Louise Perry?

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

• 40:21Chris Williamson?

  But both men and women are more positively predisposed to news stories that compliment women's outcomes, or say that a woman achieved something than say that a man achieved something.

• 40:30Louise Perry?

  Exactly.

• 40:30Chris Williamson?

  And vice versa is true, too.

• 40:32Louise Perry?

  Right, which doesn't fit at all with the idea that we live in like a misogynist culture. I don't think that we hate women. I think, though, the way that women are sort of regarded, all else being equal, is as, um, like your mum.

• 40:45Louise Perry?

  Like you love your mum.

• 40:47Chris Williamson?

  You don't wanna be her necessarily.

• 40:49Louise Perry?

  You you don't necessarily respect her.

• 40:51Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 40:52Louise Perry?

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

• 41:08Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 41:08Louise Perry?

  So in the same way that we love children, but we're not gonna let them vote.

• 41:13Louise Perry?

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

• 41:28Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, which is why I suppose it ties into something that I've been saying for a while. Uh, modern women have been taught that true freedom is having sex like their brother and working like their father. That's the pinnacle.

• 41:43Louise Perry?

  Cause it's this like clambering up, trying to retain that masculine status, which for some women, particularly women who have a more masculine temperament, you know, like some women are more disagreeable and competitive and not maternal.

• 41:55Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 41:55Louise Perry?

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

• 42:13Chris Williamson?

  Well, Chelsea Conneboy in the New York Times last year wrote that article, maternal instinct is a myth that men created.

• 42:19Louise Perry?

  No, that's not true. Yeah, right, like, yeah.

• 42:25Louise Perry?

  You can go around sort of pretending that's true. It's a blue in the face, but I just don't think it's true.

• 42:30Chris Williamson?

  It's such a Hydra-headed problem that we're talking about because it's the convergence of the denial of sex differences. Uh, this sort of tyranny of the minority, uh, a selection for the most outspoken, gregarious amongst a group.

• 42:44Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 42:44Chris Williamson?

  To focus on the outliers. It's not even tyranny of the minority as in uh some underspoken class that's uh speaking up for themselves. But also tyranny of the minority that appears to have. Have outsized achievements like the male CEOs that oh, well, that that's exactly what we've got going on here that will skew data that people will focus on and use. January, January or February of this year is the highest percentage number of new female CEOs ever in America. It was thirty four percent of new of CEOs in America were female new CEOs. You go like, that's insane. That's so that I would guess if you to actually poll from a

• 43:24Chris Williamson?

  nature predisposition perspective, that that's over indexing for it. Like, how many women actually want that life, that job? CEO sounds like a fantastic title, but what's the reality of CEO?

• 43:38Louise Perry?

  Appalling. I would hate to.

• 43:39Chris Williamson?

  Eighty hour weeks, stress.

• 43:41Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 43:42Chris Williamson?

  You know, it's horses for courses. And again, like, this is Peterson fucking two two thousand and eighteen stuff. You know what I mean? Right? Like, how many times do we need to bang this drum?

• 43:52Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 43:53Chris Williamson?

  Evidently more, because it's not happening. One other thing I wanted to really dig into. What do you think the fallout of Me Too has been now approaching ten years hence?

• 44:05Louise Perry?

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

• 44:38Chris Williamson?

  If you were a raper, the recent social media campaign, probably, well, they've got a hashtag on Twitter, I'd better stop going around raping.

• 44:46Louise Perry?

  Yeah, which is, I mean, there's a, I always.

• 44:53Louise Perry?

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

• 45:32Chris Williamson?

  You're smearing the entire group with the same solution.

• 45:34Louise Perry?

  So what you end up with is moving the threshold for being like reluctant to go out to a woman in a bar or whatever, slightly, just to mean that like some of the nice guys are not doing it. But that doesn't actually improve, it doesn't affect the rapists, and it doesn't improve women's experience of it.

• 45:49Chris Williamson?

  David Boss's book, Bad Men, talks about it's one man doing a thousand sexual assaults, not a thousand men doing one sexual assault.

• 45:56Louise Perry?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 45:57Chris Williamson?

  You know, it's repeat offenders over and over and over and over again. And unfortunately as well, repeat victims, that there is something about the way that, again, this isn't victim blaming, but it is like something about the way that women hold themselves, where they showed this to, I think, maybe criminals in prison or assaulters or assault, yeah, men that had assaulted people, and showed them a number of women walking, and they asked them to pick which one they would attack if they were going to, and they converged on the same women.

• 46:30Chris Williamson?

  So, you know, for all that we can say, you know, it's not about wearing the skirt, it shouldn't be about being in the dark alley at the wrong time, all the rest of it, like, correct.

• 46:39Chris Williamson?

  But there is something about particular women that causes predators to see them as viable prey. Does that, excuse it, no, does that, you know, is that them choosing it also no? But like, this is just the way that the world appears to be.

• 46:57Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 46:57Chris Williamson?

  It's ruthless.

• 46:58Louise Perry?

  Yeah, and it drives me mad that we tell lies to girls all the time about this, because we're so desperate not to appear to be victim blaming, that we'll say, oh, no, you can, you know, you can behave like a man, you can do whatever you want, go back to some random guy's house, it'll be fine. And then when it inevitably isn't fine, we're like, oh, well, you know, he shouldn't have, he shouldn't have been sexually aggressive. I was like, yes, obviously, but.

• 47:21Louise Perry?

  We don't, you know, I would love to just like delete every rapist from the world all at once. I can't do that. Like if the advice that I'm going to be giving my daughters is is going to be unfortunately different from the advice I'll give my sons.

• 47:34Chris Williamson?

  What would be the advice that you'd give them?

• 47:36Louise Perry?

  It's like, for instance, don't go back to a random man's house that you've just met. Like, basic, okay, like complete, considered to be completely commonsensical up until, up until even like the nineteen eighties, you know, this is like recent stuff, but basically unsayable now, in feminist circles at least, except everyone quietly says it, you know.

• 47:58Chris Williamson?

  Well, again, it's the stated and revealed preferences thing. Like, how many parents that will proselytise about this on CNN and say that, you know, we shouldn't be telling women, oh, so you're saying that we should just accept the fact that men are going to do this. It should be, it shouldn't be that women should change their actions, men should change their behaviour. Okay, what did you tell your seventeen year old daughter to do last weekend? Did you, did you say, make sure that you text me when you get home, make sure that you're home before eleven, et cetera?

• 48:25Louise Perry?

  Don't get an unlicensed taxi, whatever, yeah.

• 48:27Chris Williamson?

  Stated and revealed preferences.

• 48:28Louise Perry?

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

• 48:42Chris Williamson?

  Oh, this is like the luxury beliefs of me too, in a way.

• 48:44Louise Perry?

  Yeah. And so I, I feel as if actually we have a duty, people who, who are speaking publicly, to tell those girls the truth, on the assumption that they're not going to hear it from anyone else.

• 48:54Chris Williamson?

  The cultural surrogate mothers, in a way.

• 48:59Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 49:00Chris Williamson?

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

• 49:07Louise Perry?

  I think that a lot of what, so I mean, there's a lot of things that came under the Me Too banner. Some of it was just unambiguously criminal and, you know, Harvey Weinstein or whatever got sent to prison for. For criminal acts. A lot of what came up, though, a lot of the stories that got shared were things that weren't actually strictly criminal. They were just, it was just like bad behaviour. It was behaviour that actually in another era, you probably would have been, probably would have been called ungentlemanly, or something like that. But, but that vocabulary isn't available to a sort of contemporary feminist who's really bought into the, to, to the sex positive message. And so they'll tend to just talk about things being consensual or not consensual. And actually, the consensual, not consensual

• 49:49Louise Perry?

  bar is, is like a low one. It's a legal bar. It's not actually a moral bar, really. Like, there's a lot of, there are a lot of things that a man can do on a first date or whatever, that are legal but are bad. Plenty. But we don't really have the vocabulary to describe them, which is why I try and make, you know, like, the feminist case for chivalry. We shouldn't have got rid of that as a concept. Like, when you have as stark a physical difference and psychological differences between the sexes, you know, ninety nine percent of men can kill ninety nine percent of women with their bare hands and not vice versa. We have to operate with that, with that recognition. Chivalry in

• 50:31Louise Perry?

  those circumstances is obviously in women's interests, even if occasionally it will mean being, feeling slightly patronised. Like, who cares? I'm so happy to have my, the door held open for me and my bags carried. It's completely fine.

• 50:43Chris Williamson?

  If it means that someone's not going to assault me.

• 50:45Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 50:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. I mean, this is, I, I quote you and Mary about this all the time, that it is a straight line from, you should hold the door open for a woman, to, you shouldn't beat your wife. It is one just continuous, women are worthy of protection and there is an asymmetry between what men and women can do. And again, Rob Henderson's coming a couple of days later than you. It's like luxury beliefs all over again. Like, the women who come from societies where their husbands already knew that beating your wife would be a bad idea, or they had the support networks where that wouldn't be accepted, were trying to deconstruct a, a support structure that was needed for the underclass women whose husbands had grown up without a father and whose stepdad had beaten them,

• 51:30Chris Williamson?

  who just presumed that the way that you were supposed to be in a relationship was to hit your wife.

• 51:35Louise Perry?

  Yeah, I mean, I just like Chests and Spence, like the wisdom of it. You know, this, this idea from G K Cheston, you know, you, you come across a fence in a field. You don't know what it's there for. The, the progressive, the reformer, whatever vocabulary he uses, says, we don't need this fence. Let's tear it down. Whereas the conservative says, no, let's find out what it's for. And then maybe we might tear it down if it turns out that it really isn't necessary. I mean, just the whole last hundred years has been like nonstop vindication of Chesterton Spence principle. Yeah. And, and I, and I honestly think that most of it actually has to do with technology. Like, much as I love to, to complain about my political enemies, like it actually, the main thing that's changed for people

• 52:17Louise Perry?

  has not been the intellectuals of the nineteen sixties. It's been, um,

• 52:25Louise Perry?

  like the dissolution of the family has as much to do with the pill as it does with anything any feminist has ever said. You know, like the real, I, I, I'm, I'm, I'm very sort of materialist in this sense. I think the real engine of history is, is technology. Or as, as Mary Harrington, our friend likes to say, it's material reality plus memes.

• 52:50Chris Williamson?

  Meme first, explain later. Me and Mary are on board with that. What was it that you told me the last time we spoke? The washing machine has done more to liberate women than any feminist ever did.

• 53:00Louise Perry?

  That was Phyllis Schlafly's observation. Like, Phyllis Schlafly is such an interesting figure because she-

• 53:06Chris Williamson?

  Who is this person?

• 53:07Louise Perry?

  So she was a sixties, uh, when was she even born? She, she, she was at her height in like the seventies. Um, and she was a, I mean, she was one of these really interesting women, American. Well, so she billed herself as like an American housewife and she was, she had, I think she had five kids. Um, but she also was like a foreign policy expert who'd worked in, in, um, Um, not Westminster, Washington, um, and had like incredible degree, actually a professional expertise, but she always billed herself as like, you know, a lowly housewife, whatever. And she led the campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment, which was a second wave feminist effort to basically enshrine in the US Constitution that men and women are equal and ought to have

• 53:49Louise Perry?

  equal rights. And Schlafly said, in retrospect, not unreasonably, men and women aren't the same. And so actually, if you were to enshrine this in the Constitution, you would frequently end up with things with, with, you know, having to do things that are actually not in women's interests. So the example she liked to give, because this was during the Vietnam War, was do you want to get, you want to see women drafted? Because that's, that's where that ends up. If you say that men and women are the same, then why wouldn't you draft women? Why wouldn't you be sending pregnant women into combat? Men and women, you know, men and women are the same, whatever. And it's like what feminists used to say, because they were all into war, they say, well, we don't think anyone should be drafted. And I was like, okay, okay. But if you're trying to like future proof your constitution, which

• 54:32Louise Perry?

  is, I think, very much the point of the constitution, that does seem to be an obvious. I mean, I don't completely agree with Schlafly. One of the things she used to do, which I find so cringe, is whenever she showed up at a public event, she used to thank her husband for allowing her to be there.

• 54:45Chris Williamson?

  Ah.

• 54:46Louise Perry?

  I don't, I don't do that when I go to public events. So like, she was, she was on a different time in that sense, okay. So I'm not, I'm not going to hold Phyllis Schlafly up as like feminist poster girl. But she did, like, she had insights at the time which, on which she has been proven right. Um, and the Equal Rights Amendment was never passed because of her efforts.

• 55:08Chris Williamson?

  What do you think about this lack of approach at the moment? Alexander, one of my friends, Alex states like, uh, put a study up recently, uh, 50% of men aged 18 to 24 have never approached a woman in person in their life. And, uh, like even higher percentage, 18 to 30 haven't approached a woman in the last year.

• 55:28Louise Perry?

  Hmm.

• 55:29Chris Williamson?

  Is this downstream from me too?

• 55:32Louise Perry?

  I have a slightly weird take on this, which is that actually the thing you hear about as sort of, isn't it Gen X people talk about of going up to someone in a bar and this being a way of striking up relationships? I think that was a very brief period of history, sort of post-sex revolution but pre-internet, where that was considered normal. And I'm slightly too young to have ever actually experienced that.

• 55:59Louise Perry?

  The normal way, actually, that people start relationships in the vast majority of cultures is to be like, is like semi-arranged marriage, right? Like, not the full, you've never met this person before, you know, thirteen-year-olds, whatever, getting betrothed, like, not like that, but the sort of, you're introduced by

• 56:21Louise Perry?

  family members, mutual friends, you're known in the community, you go to the same church, whatever it is, and then you're, both of your families, like, consent to the marriage, and it works out okay. But the expectation isn't like, the expectation of marriage up until relatively recently was that you would have an economic relationship, a, you know, and a reproductive relationship, but you weren't best friends. And actually, I don't think, I don't think husbands and wives used to talk to each other as much as they do now. I think people used to have much more homosexual kind of lives. You'd hang out with other men, you'd hang out with other women, you wouldn't necessarily

• 57:01Louise Perry?

  hang out a lot with your opposite sex, including your spouse. So this idea that, like, the going up to a person in the bar is like the normal and natural way of starting relationships, I don't think is historically accurate.

• 57:14Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. So the male aversion, felt fear of approach anxiety, which every guy listening is aware of, apart from the psychopaths, right? There is a girl that I find attractive, that I either know or don't know, or partly know, or whatever.

• 57:29Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 57:31Chris Williamson?

  Hi, how are you? Nice to meet you is kind of like a miniature war that you have to go to. And the felt sense of palpable fear is just ripping you apart inside. That isn't, or the modern aversion to that isn't some novel new problem. It was a, in your opinion here, a bar that kind of never really needed to be gotten over in the first place. In some regards, because you had seen each other at church for ages, or her father owned the farm next to your father's land. And you guys had known, blah, blah, blah, like.

• 58:07Louise Perry?

  Yeah, yeah. People have much more kind of static social lives. So, yeah, just approaching some stranger and ending up getting married to her is not.

• 58:16Chris Williamson?

  I had this, I had this conversation with a guy called Mads Larsson, who is a mating ideology researcher. I'll send it to you. It's phenomenal. And he talks about this, all of the different arrangements that people went through. And the romantic to the confluence, which is what we've moved through most recently, has left us with a really interesting vestige, which is, previously it was, they own the farm next door. It was almost like a tactical marriage between the two of you. And then it's, no, no, no, no, you're supposed to, you guys are supposed to be together forever. You know, there is supposed to be deeper meaning instantiated in this. But then as soon as you have the sexual revolution, you have confluence. So for as long as you can benefit me and I can benefit you.

• 59:01Chris Williamson?

  I think even Mia Khalifa, who obviously paragon of sexual virtue, said on a recent interview that, people think that marriage is some sacred thing. It's not. It's just a piece of paper. And if this person isn't helping you grow, it's time to move on. So they just confluence like ideology there.

• 59:21Louise Perry?

  Helping you grow.

• 59:22Chris Williamson?

  Front and centre. You need to be helping them grow. I'm not sure.

• 59:25Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 59:26Chris Williamson?

  Helping you prepare for your next porn scene. I don't know, whatever she meant. So. You have this really interesting thing, which is that both the two most recent cultures have kind of got like conceptual inertia inside of our heads, that we have this sense and we were kind of told, and maybe some people think that it's true, that you're supposed to find a person who fulfills you, who is your confidant, your best friend, your sexual paramour, you're the co-owner of your children and the household and all the rest of the things.

• 59:55Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 59:56Chris Williamson?

  And yet, modern culture is this more confluence thing, which is they're supposed to benefit you and help you grow. And these two things kind of bounce off against each other. And then, you know, if we look back ancestrally, what we're predisposed for, it's fucking neither of those two, right? Like, you can say what you want about the truthfulness or utility of both of those. It wasn't that. And it seems like serial monogamy is what we're built for, some combination of polygyny and serial monogamy. And all of these, the existing base rate of what we are, plus the two most recent cultures are just like, like the Bermuda Triangle of mating ideologies inside of our mind.

• 1:00:33Louise Perry?

  Yeah. There's this book called The All or Nothing Marriage, which is about sort of, yes, this modern conception of marriage, where we're exactly this. You put so much expectation on your spouse that they will be, you know, you will be perfectly sexually compatible, perfectly like conversationally compatible, you know, everything, everything is perfect. And obviously, for loads of people, that isn't going to be true, and that's not going to be true for 60 years or whatever that you might be together. And so you end up with this all or nothing thing, that like, some people have absolutely fabulous marriages, and some people just, they can't possibly take the strain, and so they collapse. And the authors compare it to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Well, like, if you're in a position,

• 1:01:17Louise Perry?

  if you're in a situation of economic subsistence, you basically just see your spouse as like your economic partner with whom you have children. But your expectations are not that high. And then you reach the point where you're so affluent, right? Contemporary culture, where you kind of regard marriage as, yes, as fulfilling all of these like esoteric psychological needs, which is just not reasonable. So I honestly, this, again, Mary Harrington, endlessly quotable. She has this, uh, this, this, this saying that we should abolish big romance.

• 1:01:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:52Louise Perry?

  That the idea of having these incredible, like, romantic expectations of your spouse is just pretty much setting yourself up to fail.

• 1:02:00Chris Williamson?

  One woman meme machine, isn't she?

• 1:02:01Louise Perry?

  Yeah, she really is.

• 1:02:03Chris Williamson?

  What was your thing? It was you that reminded me of a story that I'd forgotten from my childhood about ladies dropping handkerchiefs.

• 1:02:12Louise Perry?

  Oh, right, as a way of like demonstrating.

• 1:02:14Chris Williamson?

  Interest.

• 1:02:15Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:16Chris Williamson?

  So I had this thing with, me and David Bus came up with this solution around women cultivating receptiveness if they want to improve their dating prospects. Now, in a post Me Too world where we're worried about women's safety, especially sexually, this is something that is kind of difficult to say. But again, if you want to work within the confines of how reality is and how you want it to be, I think that women cultivating receptiveness accounts for the male approach anxiety problem.

• 1:02:45Louise Perry?

  Hmm.

• 1:02:45Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:02:59Louise Perry?

  Men are gonna be so bad at receiving those signals though, don't you think? Have you ever heard that, uh, the average man of a hundred and thirty IQ has the like emotional social receptivity of a woman with seventy IQ? Like the difference, this is why my husband and I.

• 1:03:15Chris Williamson?

  So you're saying that we're actually socially retarded?

• 1:03:17Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:19Louise Perry?

  My, my husband and I, like, my husband calls me a witch because I can like, I'll be able to like sense there's something off of this person.

• 1:03:27Chris Williamson?

  You are particularly witchy today with the, with the olive as well.

• 1:03:29Louise Perry?

  Yeah, I think it's just women. I think we are just.

• 1:03:31Chris Williamson?

  Witchy.

• 1:03:32Louise Perry?

  Witchy.

• 1:03:32Chris Williamson?

  That's why you were burned at the stake.

• 1:03:34Louise Perry?

  You can just like sense that something, I don't know, facial expressions, whatever, something, which most men are just oblivious to.

• 1:03:41Chris Williamson?

  Blinkers on.

• 1:03:42Louise Perry?

  With some exceptions, clearly, but.

• 1:03:43Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so, yeah, well, let's take that as the, again, the thermodynamics of the situation, that men are, uh, they're. EQ is 50% of what a woman's is essentially. If that is the case, leaning in even further to not being receptive is going to make said blinkered man even less capable of understanding that maybe you're interested.

• 1:04:05Louise Perry?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:06Chris Williamson?

  Right? So I just think that, again, another confluence of the hydra's head of lots of stuff that's going on, the multifactorial problem, women are maybe being a little bit more masculine, working in more masculine environments, thinking they need to be more disagreeable to be more effective at work, concerned about their own safety, generally skeptical of men that come up to them, strange men that come up to them in a bar, which has led to absolutely less receptivity from women. And it's like, look, if you are complaining, like, where are all of the good men at? Look around a little bit, if you can, when you're at your CrossFit class, or you're doing yoga, or you're doing whatever. And if someone, if some guy comes up to you and asks some awkward, clunky question, but he's kind of cute, like, don't just presume that he's asking the question.

• 1:04:49Chris Williamson?

  Like, use the witch clairvoyance, right? Tap into the astral realm, or whatever it is that you do. And think, oh.

• 1:04:57Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:57Chris Williamson?

  Have you heard of the male overperception and the female underperception bias?

• 1:05:02Louise Perry?

  Is this with sexual interest?

• 1:05:03Chris Williamson?

  Correct. Yeah. Yeah. So that's in David, David Boss's book, that men overestimate the degree of interest that women have to them, and women underestimate, which is largely why you have awkward passes by male coworkers and stuff. Well, what do you mean? Like, her eyes, and you saw the way that she looked at me every time we went to the copy machine, or whatever.

• 1:05:23Louise Perry?

  And you know, alcohol exaggerates that.

• 1:05:25Chris Williamson?

  Does it really?

• 1:05:26Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:26Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 1:05:27Louise Perry?

  So men are more likely to falsely perceive sexual interest when they're drunk.

• 1:05:30Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic.

• 1:05:30Louise Perry?

  Which, again, it just makes so much sense of all the, you know, like, were you, you know, that there was like, Me Too but for schools in the UK a few years ago?

• 1:05:41Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 1:05:42Louise Perry?

  It was called Everyone's Invited. It was like a website that some girls set up to describe, like, bad sexual experiences that they'd had with what they-

• 1:05:52Chris Williamson?

  In school?

• 1:05:54Louise Perry?

  Well, not, also not normally in school, this was the thing. So it ended up being a big headache for teachers and head teachers, because parents were obviously really upset, understandably. And they said, you know, you should be teaching consent workshops in schools, you should be doing all these things. And the teachers were like, this isn't happening in school. Very rarely is this happening in school. This is normally happening, happening Friday night at some house party, the parents aren't there, everyone's drunk.

• 1:06:20Louise Perry?

  And like it's kind of the parent's responsibility, honestly, to stop that.

• 1:06:23Chris Williamson?

  Step in.

• 1:06:23Louise Perry?

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

• 1:06:46Chris Williamson?

  It's a dirty bomb.

• 1:06:47Louise Perry?

  Yeah. Like I was, I was getting a train recently in London and there was a school girl who was probably like 16, who was walking ahead of me and she was going up the stairs. And she was wearing such a short skirt going to school that I could see absolutely everything. And I like, I almost jogged after her just to say like, you're lucky it was me who was walking behind you. And I know that you're doing this because you wanna, I like, there is a kind of thrill of feeling sexy that young women experience for the first time. And they have no idea how potent and dangerous that, that tool is. So, you know, you do it because there's like a particular guy who gets the same train as you, who you wanna catch his eye or whatever, fine. But like, I could have been a creepy bloke. And this

• 1:07:30Louise Perry?

  is why I think parents have to be banning their daughters from leaving the house looking like that, basically. Because they have no idea. Like teenage girls are just, I mean, teen, you know, teenagers are dumb.

• 1:07:43Chris Williamson?

  The, the, the sort of me too conversation around victim blaming and, and, and stuff is such a deep hole when you get into it to talk about, should things be this way? No. Are things this way? Yes. Do you want to play within the confines of the thermodynamics of this particular system? Well, you probably should, right? And to thread that needle, especially because I, I often think about this. Douglas Murray once taught me that it doesn't really matter who makes the best logical argument in a debate. If you manage to get two or three big laughs, you win.

• 1:08:18Louise Perry?

  Yes, that's true.

• 1:08:19Chris Williamson?

  And it's almost.

• 1:08:20Louise Perry?

  It's all vibes.

• 1:08:21Chris Williamson?

  Yep. It's just vibe. You're a vibe architect, right?

• 1:08:23Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:23Chris Williamson?

  And the problem with this discussion, if you have somebody who is very anti this and is saying that's victim blaming you, absolutely, you're saying that you're giving men a pass, you're saying that women should be fearful of what they should wear. And it's like, that particular talking point is so.

• 1:08:42Chris Williamson?

  Empathetically robust in its signalling that it almost always wins.

• 1:08:48Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:49Chris Williamson?

  Because the most

• 1:08:52Chris Williamson?

  obviously caring argument upfront that sounds like the one that sounds right, that sounds like the one that you will get the most support for on Twitter.

• 1:09:00Louise Perry?

  Hmm.

• 1:09:01Chris Williamson?

  It's so tough to put, it's like, right, yeah, yeah, no, I don't disagree. But look at the outcomes that we get from this.

• 1:09:09Louise Perry?

  One of the things that progressives really have on their side rhetorically is that if you're, if you're a conservative who's saying, look, actually, you know, there was a line that one of my readers sent me from, from all places, it was a book about making wine. And the line was traditions are experiments that worked.

• 1:09:34Louise Perry?

  You can say that when you're talking about wine making and it's not too like politically explosive, but you can obviously apply that to, to, to, to social issues as well.

• 1:09:41Chris Williamson?

  That's so perfect.

• 1:09:41Louise Perry?

  I know, it's not a great line.

• 1:09:42Chris Williamson?

  Traditions are experiments that work.

• 1:09:43Louise Perry?

  Exactly. But what you end up, if you're trying to make that argument, and if you're, and if you're, you know, proposing anything remotely conservative, is that you have to, you end up having to defend other cultures or cultures of the past. So you'll say, look, actually, you know, there was a lot to be said for the sort of slightly arranged marriage, there's a lot to be said for teenage girls being encouraged to dress more modestly, whatever. And people say, oh, what, so you're saying that you support domestic violence? You're saying that you support, you know, cholera and imperialism and like everything that might have happened during the era that you're talking about. And you have to say, no, no, no, I don't, you know, I mean, you just end up on the back foot. Whereas if you're a progressive, you can say, I can see this vision, you know, like in the future, we'll have this amazing society where everything's great.

• 1:10:26Louise Perry?

  And the fact that this is, this has never happened and is never likely to happen, means that you never, you're never in the position of having to defend anything unfortunate. You never have to talk about trade offs. I think that like acknowledging the existence of trade offs is a fundamentally conservative trait.

• 1:10:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Thomas Sowell, there are no solutions, only trade offs.

• 1:10:45Louise Perry?

  Yeah, it's really painful, but it's true, unfortunately.

• 1:10:48Chris Williamson?

  You'll have seen a lot of the stats coming out about the happiness or lack of amongst young girls. You know, sixty percent of girls aged twelve to sixteen have regular or persistent feelings of hopelessness and stuff like that. What's your assessment of the current mental health of young women?

• 1:11:07Louise Perry?

  I mean, it seems to be really bad. But I mean, there's all the obvious stuff about why, you know, young people, they don't go outside enough. They don't do enough exercise, all that. But that's, that's true for boys as well. I think Jonathan Haidt's done lots of work on this, that the main thing that's going on for girls is social media.

• 1:11:27Louise Perry?

  Because girls use social media differently from boys. One of the ways that girls use social media is to torture each other. Right? Girls are so, like, you know, they're all, basically all contagious mental illnesses start among and predominate among teenage girls. Things like, someone like anorexia, for instance, is like a classic example, or like now, apparently all these teenage girls have got Tourette's that they've acquired from TikTok.

• 1:11:55Chris Williamson?

  There was a period where multiple personality disorder and that others were coming out on TikTok too.

• 1:12:01Louise Perry?

  Precisely. And I think it's because, it's kind of like that witchy thing we were talking about earlier, like women being very, very socially sensitive for obvious evolutionary reasons, you know, that women being smaller, not having the kind of physical capacities that men do. The main advantage you have in terms of your own survival and the survival of your children is making alliances.

• 1:12:26Louise Perry?

  Particularly among other women, you know, recruiting other women to assist you in your endeavors and whatever, requires this social sensitivity. And I think that that can misfire in terms of, say, being so receptive to whatever, getting Tourette's from TikTok. That you, that, you know, you do, you do yourself harm, basically. I mean, it's not terrible harm, but like anorexia is terrible harm, right? That you might acquire sort of memetically.

• 1:12:56Louise Perry?

  And I think also it means that girls. I mean, one of the things I always think about Instagram is like the it's the image based social media, which seems to be particularly bad for girls. Twitter is bad for journalists, sends them completely insane. TikTok and Instagram sends teenage girls insane. I think it's because one of the things that looking at these these these platforms, one of the things it does with girls is it gives them a completely false impression of their intersexual competition pool. That normally they would look around at the young women they actually know who are as like

• 1:13:30Chris Williamson?

  Plain and normal as that.

• 1:13:31Louise Perry?

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

• 1:13:58Chris Williamson?

  This also explains the social contagion theory for F to M transitions.

• 1:14:06Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:07Chris Williamson?

  Because if the you've heard of the left handedness argument for trans people, right? That as soon as you remove the societal impositions and judgments, people can truly be their real selves.

• 1:14:21Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:22Chris Williamson?

  Okay, if that's the case, and that very well may contribute. If that was entirely the case, why is it four girls that all sit together at the same lunch table in school?

• 1:14:30Louise Perry?

  Right.

• 1:14:31Chris Williamson?

  Like, why is it not evenly smeared across the entire populace? It's not, it clumps together.

• 1:14:36Louise Perry?

  Right.

• 1:14:36Chris Williamson?

  Right?

• 1:14:37Louise Perry?

  It's also gone from being like diagnoses of gender dysphoria have gone from being primarily a male thing to being primarily a female thing, like by a big margin, like the huge explosion has been among teenage girls specifically.

• 1:14:50Chris Williamson?

  There was a study in Finland that I found that I put in my newsletter last week that said they could attribute 15% of the negative mental health outcomes of teenage girls to their use of birth control.

• 1:15:05Chris Williamson?

  And I I realised this when I spoke to Dr Sarah Hill last year, as she's talking to me about how young, forming brains can have particular types of negative mental health outcomes locked in for life if you're on hormonal birth control during this particular period. And I remember thinking about the coddling of the American mind at the time and going, I 100% bet that no one's factored in the base rate of the increase of hormonal birth control and the predisposition that it's caused amongst young girls.

• 1:15:37Louise Perry?

  Yeah, I'm sure that that's true. This sounds random, but that I, there's this debate you might be familiar with about whether or not it's ethical to use chemical castration for paedophiles. In some countries they do, so like Germany, I think is an example of a country that will that will offer chemical castration as an alternative to prison time.

• 1:15:56Chris Williamson?

  Oh, it's an alternative?

• 1:15:58Louise Perry?

  Yes, or maybe you have it when you're on parole.

• 1:16:01Chris Williamson?

  Pretty sure Alan Turing got something similar like that.

• 1:16:03Louise Perry?

  Which is one of the reasons why I think it's not popular in the UK, right? Because Turing is a famous example of it being used against gay men. But a lot of paedophiles will say that they would prefer that and that actually they're really tortured by that. I mean, I I am generally of the opinion, I think that this is scientifically sound, that it is an innate sexual orientation that is found in a small number of men. And a lot of them report being absolutely tortured by it. It's awful. It's like the most stigmatized, like you wouldn't wish it on your worst enemy. What a horrible curse, right? They would actually choose chemical castration to relieve them of that. And and yet there's a there's a general feeling, at least maybe in the anglo sphere, that there's something really

• 1:16:46Louise Perry?

  dodgy about using sort of pharmacological punishments, right? And you can imagine, of course, using it in other contexts as well. You might sedate, aggressive, you know, whatever. I was talking to a friend about this who works in politics and who's a gay man. And and I was saying, well, you know, you could use like, you know, that the arm, the implants you get in your arm, you could you could use that to sort of release small doses of this every day. And he said, the implants you get in your what? And so, well, you know, you can get hormonal contraception, either you get it in your arm or you get the like the the um intrauterine devices or whatever, which secretes more. He had no idea because he's like innocent to these.

• 1:17:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:24Louise Perry?

  Um, but it occurred to me like, isn't it crazy that we're so, it seems so outside the Overton window to um use pharmacology to like alter the minds of criminal offenders. And we've had teenage girls on these drugs for decades. Like, we know them to be mind altering to some extent.

• 1:17:42Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 1:17:43Louise Perry?

  And we put like no hesitation about putting an arm implant on like a fifteen year old girl. Um, well, it's basically quite an experimental drug. I mean, the argument against is to say, yeah, but pregnancy is also a pretty like.

• 1:17:57Chris Williamson?

  Poor outcome for a fifteen year old.

• 1:17:58Louise Perry?

  Uh, that, but also quite an extreme thing to go through full stop physically, mentally, et cetera. So if the choice is pregnancy or hormonal birth control. Hormonal birth control has fewer side effects.

• 1:18:11Chris Williamson?

  It's, you know, there are no solutions, only trade offs, right? And it's rough, man. I I think about some of my friends who've got young girls that are, you know, maybe twelve or thirteen and are gonna be starting to be around boys that can get them pregnant and are gonna become sexually active at at some point in future, but also know about the risks of hormonal birth control and don't want to condemn their beautiful daughter to a life of potential, you know, ten percent more anxiety and depression risk, plus the weight gain and the all the rest of the stuff.

• 1:18:45Chris Williamson?

  But also really don't want them to get pregnant at fifteen. And you go, okay, are you again playing within the confines of the world as it is, not as we want it to be, but saying, well, make sure that you use protection and make sure that like you don't get too drunk and blah. It's like they're fifteen or sixteen or seventeen or something, you know? Yeah, the the you said there about the um uh. Sexual predisposition of the paedophilia being a sexual orientation. Peter Thiel's got a famous question, which is, what do you believe that most people would disagree with? And for a long time, that was mine, that non offending paedophiles need way more sympathy than we give them.

• 1:19:29Chris Williamson?

  Because I've had a bunch of neuroscientists on the show and they've put people in FMRI's with arousal responses. And they can show non offending paedophiles everything. They can throw every sexual kink under the sun at them, nothing. And then they are able to show them something that tickles their fancy and it's.

• 1:19:53Louise Perry?

  It's really disturbing, isn't it? It would be so much, it would actually be so much more like psychologically reassuring, which is why I think most people prefer this explanation. To think that it's just some manifestation of evil or something, or it's under people's control. Cause it's just, it's awful to think.

• 1:20:08Chris Williamson?

  It's so uncomfortable.

• 1:20:09Louise Perry?

  Imagine being cursed with that. Awful.

• 1:20:13Chris Williamson?

  I remember learning about it. I was at uni and I was dating this girl, a smart doctor, medical student girl. And she taught me about this and she'd given a presentation on stage, basically saying like, you know, we need to give these people more sympathy. Because it wasn't that long ago that gay men were seen basically as the same. Now, the difference being that gay men could enact, not they couldn't, but they were in the right future, able to enact it without doing something that was taking advantage of a person that can't consent.

• 1:20:46Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:48Chris Williamson?

  But ever since that, I've always had this in the back of my mind as one of those. And yeah, the discomfort, it was the same reason, I think, that even before the lab leak hypothesis was something that was put forward. People were so prepared to lay Covid's origins at the feet of a malign scientist. Because it was so much more comforting than believing that it was the chance mutation of some silly little microbe. Because one.

• 1:21:17Louise Perry?

  Or normal failure.

• 1:21:19Chris Williamson?

  One at least was just. Not chaos.

• 1:21:23Louise Perry?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:24Chris Williamson?

  Uh, uh, and it felt like it was more in your control. With the right intervention, we could have fixed it.

• 1:21:28Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:28Chris Williamson?

  It's like, no, you can't.

• 1:21:29Louise Perry?

  Yeah. Yeah, I read someone, I forget who now, but I read someone writing about Israel. This is relevant, I swear. The, and the, the failure to, the, the, the failure of the, of the Gaza borders and, and the fact that Hamas were able to get through on, um, uh, on, uh, seventh of October. And that so many people have assumed that there was some sort of conspiracy at play, you know, that it was, that there was, it was, it was either, you know, some faction within the Israeli government or the Americans or, you know, whatever conspiracy you fancy for deliberately permitting Hamas to do this in order to whatever justify flattening Gaza, whatever it is.

• 1:22:11Louise Perry?

  And this writer said, is it, you know, isn't it telling that people will jump to that conclusion rather than the much more likely conclusion, which was normal failure? Which is that when you have any kind of complex system, like sometimes.

• 1:22:24Chris Williamson?

  There's a blow up risk.

• 1:22:25Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:26Louise Perry?

  And that that's actually true of everything. Like, what a horrible thought. But, but that's actually true. Our entire civilization is basically resting on these very, very delicate, complex systems that no one really understands.

• 1:22:36Chris Williamson?

  Matthew Sayed wrote in The Times, it, the bias is called compensatory control.

• 1:22:41Louise Perry?

  Hmm.

• 1:22:41Chris Williamson?

  Uh, so when things seem like a outsized blow up risk has occurred, we want to lay it at a sequence of events that at some point we could have interjected. A compensatory control.

• 1:22:52Louise Perry?

  It's almost like magical thinking, isn't it? It's like, you know, praying to the gods to send rain or whatever. It's that feeling of wanting to have some kind of external agent who controls all of this because it's actually so much worse to think that it's, that it's random.

• 1:23:06Chris Williamson?

  You spoke about, uh, intrasexual competition. I've got a pretty spicy theory about body positivity.

• 1:23:15Louise Perry?

  Go for it.

• 1:23:15Chris Williamson?

  That I want to teach you about. So this is the rivalry theory of body positivity. And the TLDR is female support for body positivity is at least in part fuelled, deep down, by female intrasexual competition, which pushes other women out of the dating pool by discouraging them from losing weight.

• 1:23:33Louise Perry?

  I mean, yes, but I also think to some extent it's just cope.

• 1:23:39Louise Perry?

  It's just, it's just trying to, it's just because it is because sexual attractiveness is like brutally hierarchical. It just is for men and for women. I mean, for women, it's more physical. For men, it's more to a status or whatever, but it like is just brutally hierarchical. Um, and no one, particularly if you have a generally egalitarian outlook, if you're on the left. Um, no one wants to face up to that, particularly if you're at the bottom of the hierarchy. And so trying to say, oh, no, the hierarchy doesn't exist. Actually, I'm trying to persuade men to agree with you. Is one way.

• 1:24:12Chris Williamson?

  Good luck, good luck with that.

• 1:24:13Louise Perry?

  Well, exactly. But it is one thing that you can do. Um, you probably can't persuade men to think differently, but you can, I don't know. Get into like Lululemon ads.

• 1:24:20Chris Williamson?

  Well, no one's, no one's ever been guilted into an erection. I don't think.

• 1:24:24Louise Perry?

  It doesn't work.

• 1:24:25Chris Williamson?

  No. Well, yeah, you try, you could try harder.

• 1:24:27Louise Perry?

  But this whole, I mean, like, there's a, there's a, there's also a deep principle there, isn't there? That like human nature is kind of immovable. Not completely, like we do have a little bit of control over ourselves and there are like, there is, there are cultural structures that will incentivize some things and not others and whatever. There is room for maneuver, but we basically have some fairly tight.

• 1:24:48Louise Perry?

  Controls around us at all times.

• 1:24:49Chris Williamson?

  Well, it's, what I've got in my head is kind of, human nature is easier to constrain than it is to enable. In that regard, like it's already operating at max RPM and you can bring that down with social norms and, and judgment and stuff. Uh, but going, the whole argument of, uh, a M to F transition, if you as a straight man are not attracted to that person, regardless of how they present. You are, that's homophobia, transphobia or whatever. Uh, I actually don't know which of those two it is.

• 1:25:30Chris Williamson?

  Just doesn't play within the confines of of reality.

• 1:25:33Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:34Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:25:35Louise Perry?

  And actually, that's one of the things that I think is so cruel about so much of the sort of discourse around trans. Like, there's this line, actually, there's this great, there's a writer called Andrew Long Chu, who is trans and who disagrees with me on absolutely everything, but I would say he's a great writer, right, really, really good prose. And Chu has this line, when you are trans, you become permanently dependent on the kindness of strangers, in the sense that basically no one passes, it's really hard to pass convincingly, particularly if you transition as an adult. It'll always be kind of physically obvious that you're not actually a natural female. What you depend on is people playing along

• 1:26:18Louise Perry?

  every single time, every social interaction for the rest of your life, so as not to feel dysphoria. And sometimes people won't do that, little children aren't going to do that. Or like some elderly person with Alzheimer's isn't going to do that, you know, people aren't always going to cotton on that they're supposed to play along.

• 1:26:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:35Louise Perry?

  And so it means you have this incredibly fragile.

• 1:26:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's a social minefield.

• 1:26:39Louise Perry?

  It's terrible. Yeah. And what you're basically, and that's what's being inflicted on people when they're encouraged to go through irreversible surgeries, living their entire life dependent on the kindness of strangers for like to avoid complete psychological dissolution.

• 1:26:54Chris Williamson?

  Douglas Murray's got this quote that he throws around saying, you know, when you've reached true equality, because you have to put up with the same level of shit that everybody else does.

• 1:27:02Louise Perry?

  That's true, yes.

• 1:27:04Chris Williamson?

  And the lack of special dispensation is the exact opposite. And, you know, I think it's all about dispositions, but I think if it was me and I was being coddled, I would feel incredibly patronized. And this is how I think, you know, to even put, regardless of whether the Ls, the Gs, the Bs, the Ts, as groups want to be together, it's not like T is just a group or G is just a group, right? Within that, you have a number of different factions of people. And, yeah, I don't think that, that wouldn't

• 1:27:45Chris Williamson?

  be how I would want to be treated. What was your, what's your theory on the normalization of cosmetic surgery?

• 1:27:55Louise Perry?

  I think that unlike other industries, which are more obviously supply, demand, ed, whatever. I think that there is a completely bottomless desire from women in particular for beauty enhancing treatment. And they will basically spend as much money as they can, right, on average. And that the thing that really drives the beauty industry is technological innovation. So like as soon as something new comes on the market and it's typically very expensive and then only celebrities use it and it trickles down, whatever like. I didn't know this, for instance, it wasn't that long ago that actually dying your hair was considered to be quite unusual for women who were going grey.

• 1:28:35Louise Perry?

  That was considered to be kind of in the realms of like quite, not extreme, but like quite, uh, you know, expensive time consuming, whatever. Like it was at the edges of what was considered normal for women, say in their fifties or sixties. Now everyone dyes their hair, basically. Now going grey is a weird statement. And we've had this like ratcheting up of the things that you have to do in order to be considered well groomed. And the sky is the limit. And so it's, and, and it's just driven by what's available. So now it's not just wearing makeup, it's also fillers, it's also botox, it's also weird wonderful facials, whatever, like all the, all the things that you can do.

• 1:29:15Louise Perry?

  Having your, you know, having your nails done is like a standard, it's a completely standard thing, right? It's really expensive to have like perfectly manicured nails all the time. And women, women who don't have much money will send so much money on this, it's amazing. Um, and I mean, what a wonderful time to have invested in the beauty industry. Cause honestly, the tech, the tech that they do is actually incredible.

• 1:29:38Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean? What like?

• 1:29:39Louise Perry?

  Like, okay, nails, one example. Men won't know this. The, the, the bottles of nail varnish that you can get in the pharmacy for like a few pounds. They'll, the, the manicure will look really bad and it will last you a few days. So presumably back in the fifties, women used to do that, but no one does that now.

• 1:30:01Louise Perry?

  Maybe 10 years ago, it started to become possible to get manicures that would last for 10 days. But they're quite bad for your nails because they have to like soar away at it basically when they remove it. But yeah, it's not very nice and it doesn't feel very nice. So you don't necessarily want to do that. Now you can get nail varnish which lasts you a month. And it's more expensive and yada yada. But like the technological breakthroughs, Peter Thiel is always talking about like technological stagnation, right? Like we haven't improved on the jet engine and whatever. We have improved so much on beauty tech in that period. It's amazing. And I think it's just because there's a bottomless market for it. People don't actually care about flying across the Atlantic slightly more quickly. You know, that's why.

• 1:30:43Chris Williamson?

  They want nail varnish that lasts for another two weeks.

• 1:30:46Louise Perry?

  Yeah, yeah. And fillers that look more natural and never to get wrinkles and yada yada yada like.

• 1:30:52Chris Williamson?

  Right. So it's a race. It's not only a race to the bottom, which women have an endless desire for how

• 1:31:01Chris Williamson?

  much enhancement they will go for. The minimum bar, like the Overton window, the minimum base rate of that has also been raised up.

• 1:31:12Louise Perry?

  And it's because of intersexual competition. It's because now if you only did the beauty routine of 40 years ago, you would look relatively bad compared to the other women in your peer group.

• 1:31:24Chris Williamson?

  This is precisely the same, but not disincentivized. Instead, it's just an unspoken about cartel across the board as why women slut shame more than men. It's a price enforcement mechanism.

• 1:31:36Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:36Chris Williamson?

  But instead of it being price enforcement, it's just competition.

• 1:31:39Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:40Chris Williamson?

  But that is related to the female rivalry theory of body positivity, right? That if you can somehow manage to get

• 1:31:47Louise Perry?

  To drag other girls down, yeah.

• 1:31:49Chris Williamson?

  Their way out of your horizontal competition league.

• 1:31:54Chris Williamson?

  There's this Bill Burr bit, he's alive at Red Rocks, some theatre and he says.

• 1:32:01Chris Williamson?

  If you ladies could only support the WNBA like you support a fat chick that keeps on gaining weight and is no longer a threat to you, they'd be doing more numbers than the NBA.

• 1:32:10Louise Perry?

  It is amazing. Whenever you go and women post selfies for other women.

• 1:32:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:15Louise Perry?

  Because you look at the comments underneath any woman who's posted a selfie ever and it will always be like, baby, look amazing, baby, look amazing. And, and the expectation, I think, is that then when, when, when those women post selfies, they get the same thing back. Um, and it's all very kind of, you know, like, I, it's funny, like, this is the nature of sort of human instinct, right? You'll, you'll do things with having no idea why you're doing them. And then sometimes you'll look back and be like, oh, okay. Like, you, you read David Buss or something. I'm sure you've had this experience and you're like, oh, yeah.

• 1:32:46Chris Williamson?

  That's me.

• 1:32:47Louise Perry?

  I've done that.

• 1:32:48Chris Williamson?

  There I am.

• 1:32:50Louise Perry?

  And you'll keep doing it anyway.

• 1:32:51Chris Williamson?

  Well, think about why women buy luxury goods. Like, why is it that women are so concerned about having a YSL purse?

• 1:32:58Louise Perry?

  It's, it's for the girls and the gays. It's not for men.

• 1:33:01Chris Williamson?

  A Mulberry handbag.

• 1:33:02Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:02Chris Williamson?

  So there was a really interesting study that I looked at that showed the, the gift that highly intrasexually competitive women with wealthy spouses wanted the most was a gift card to an expensive department store.

• 1:33:19Louise Perry?

  So they could choose it themselves.

• 1:33:20Chris Williamson?

  Precisely correct, because they want to use

• 1:33:23Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:23Chris Williamson?

  the signal of my mate is so invested. Oh, you want to go after my mate?

• 1:33:27Louise Perry?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:33:28Chris Williamson?

  He spent five grand on this tiny piece of leather that I carry my phone in. He spent 10 grand on this wedding ring or whatever.

• 1:33:37Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:37Chris Williamson?

  Right? It's an intrasexual, intrasexually competitive threat display of mate investment.

• 1:33:45Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:45Chris Williamson?

  Even when the mate's not around.

• 1:33:47Louise Perry?

  Yeah, yeah. And because men are completely insensitive to, they don't care about the brands.

• 1:33:51Chris Williamson?

  You think we know the difference between a fucking Mulberry handbag and something from like Primark?

• 1:33:55Louise Perry?

  I don't think men notice things like manicures either. I think a lot of the beauty stuff, like some of it, yes, is orientated towards looking younger. You know, that's like, that's always going to be sexually attractive. But I think a lot of the looking really well groomed is about signalling to to girls and gays. Cause they're the ones who are actually receiving the signals.

• 1:34:11Chris Williamson?

  Did you see my post, that study that was floating around last week? To do with that hairdressing experiment that had been done? This is phenomenal. So this is where I originally justified using science, my rivalry theory of female body positivity support. A recent study published in Personality and Individual Differences found that women who are high in intrasexual competitiveness are more likely to advise women who they perceive as potential mating threats to cut off more hair in an attempt to sabotage their attractiveness. The researchers studied four hundred and fifty women who were presented with hypothetical salon clients. Participants were asked to recommend the amount of hair to be cut off for each woman.

• 1:34:54Chris Williamson?

  Women who reported high levels of intrasexual competitiveness were more likely to recommend that clients have more hair cut off when the hair was in good condition and the clients expressed a preference for minimal cutting. Another finding is that women advise clients of similar attractiveness as themselves to cut off the most hair. Participants effectively targeted women they perceived as being on the same attractiveness level, potentially to try and reduce their attractiveness. Longer hair is a cue to to youth and health.

• 1:35:21Louise Perry?

  Yeah, men love long hair. I don't think women realise how much men love long hair. Like if you if you if you read the, men are actually incredibly easy to please, right? In terms of like physical cues. But the problem is that there are two parallel status status games going on when it comes to female beauty and appearance. One is attracting men, which is basically just looking youthful, like fine and fertile. And then the other is is is the much more difficult game, which is the intersexual competition game, which is about making yourself look high status in other ways. And that's where the brands come in. That's where, you know, like keeping up with fashion comes in. Men don't care about that. But but you you have those two things going on in parallel and occasionally they'll come into tension. Occasionally there'll be some trend.

• 1:36:05Chris Williamson?

  There are no solutions, only trader.

• 1:36:07Louise Perry?

  Which makes you fashionable, but the men don't like.

• 1:36:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's interesting.

• 1:36:12Louise Perry?

  Yeah, like short hair would be an example of that, although it's quite rare for that to be really popular. But I don't know, like.

• 1:36:19Louise Perry?

  Baggy clothes or something like that.

• 1:36:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I was gonna say like boyfriend jeans and stuff.

• 1:36:22Louise Perry?

  Yeah, exactly. Men aren't gonna be interested in that. But that might, that might like occasionally come around.

• 1:36:25Chris Williamson?

  Guys would be happy with girls just permanently wearing leggings, like hot leggings, like gymshark leggings or something like just, just, just go out in those with heels.

• 1:36:36Louise Perry?

  Yeah, like it's very basic.

• 1:36:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:37Louise Perry?

  But then again, but then, I mean, also part of what's driving fashion is the fact that gay men are so overwhelmingly overrepresented in fashion.

• 1:36:44Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:36:44Louise Perry?

  And they don't care about that stuff.

• 1:36:46Chris Williamson?

  Have absolutely no interest.

• 1:36:47Louise Perry?

  No, so that's why you have like really skinny women on catwalks and stuff like it's partly because the clothes kind of hang, it's easier if if everyone's a small sample size to deal with the clothes like fitting everyone. Um, but I think it's also because the more androgynous look is just considered to be more beautiful by gay men.

• 1:37:04Chris Williamson?

  You see that Victoria's Secrets have made the radical decision to go back to using hot models. They tried three hundred pound mannequins, they tried a trans person, they tried a man, they tried the captain of the US soccer team. And radically now they're just gonna use hot chicks.

• 1:37:19Louise Perry?

  You know, you know the gym brand Lululemon, like expensive gym where I can't tell you how much Lululemon I own, it's disgusting anyway. Um, they used to have a rule that they didn't even stock sizes over like a UK size twelve or UK fourteen, like the average woman is a sixteen.

• 1:37:34Chris Williamson?

  That's a smarter version of what Abercrombie and Fitch did where they wouldn't give away their clothes to homeless people, they'd just burn them.

• 1:37:41Louise Perry?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:42Chris Williamson?

  They don't even give them away to un, uh, like acceptable customers, let alone.

• 1:37:48Louise Perry?

  Yeah, yeah, no, I really think that Lululemon, and actually the guy who founded it would say quite straightforwardly, like, I don't want fat chicks wearing my clothes, basically. Like, they, they knew that having it being associated with skinny women was aspirational, but then they changed that in like twenty twenty ish.

• 1:38:03Chris Williamson?

  Couldn't survive, couldn't survive.

• 1:38:05Louise Perry?

  And now they have, now they have loads of plus size models and stuff. Um, it's a fashion though, it won't last.

• 1:38:13Chris Williamson?

  Louise Perry, ladies and gentlemen. Louise, I love you. I really, really enjoy bringing you on. Your podcast's great, your writing's great. Where should people go if they want to watch the stuff that you're doing?

• 1:38:21Louise Perry?

  So my podcast is called Made Mother Matriarch. It's on YouTube, Substack, all the places you get your podcasts. My first book was The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, which came out last year. I'm working on another one as well, which is going to be out in about 18 months, which is on motherhood, fertility, birth rates, all of this stuff. And I just write, I work too much. I write for too many places, like countless places. I'm on Twitter.

• 1:38:50Chris Williamson?

  Everyone should go and read The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. It's phenomenal, and I'm excited to see what you do with your next one. Thank you for today.

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