Hello and thank you so much for downloading episode 419 of the Speak Life podcast. My name is Thomas Thurgood, media producer at Speak Life, and it is my great pleasure to bring you this brand new interview with Louise Perry. Louise is a columnist at the New Statesman and author of the book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, and it's around that book that this conversation with Glenn Scrivener revolves. So I hope you enjoy it. I hope you find it interesting. And I will catch you at the end.
SPEAKER_02Louise, thanks for joining us.
SPEAKER_00Thank you so much. Hello.
SPEAKER_02Hello. Um, you have written a book that makes me so curious. Um, and the the first time that I was curious was on Twitter, where your publisher just released the uh the chapter headings for the book. And I wondered, is Louise just uh is she a Christian in disguise? Has she been a sleeper cell working for the New Statesman and now she is uh outing herself? Because your your chapter headings are sex must be taken seriously, men and women are different, some desires are bad, loveless sex is not empowering, consent is not enough, violence is not love, people are not products, marriage is good, and then the conclusion is listen to your mother, and obviously you mean mother church at that stage.
SPEAKER_01Nice try.
SPEAKER_02Nice try. Are you noticing some synergy between what you're saying and what what sort of Christians have traditionally said?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, okay. So that so on some points, yeah. On some points, yeah. I mean that the thing is with this book is that because I I guess because I'm coming at the topic from a slightly unusual perspective, in that um I come originally from the left and I work for the New Statesman, which is a left-wing magazine, and uh I went to super left-wing university, and you know, that's kind of my intellectual foundation. But also in some ways I'm in agreement with social conservatives on some issues, but the the the the way that I've kind of got there is via different priors, if that makes sense. I've started with some fundamental feminist ideas about, I mean, I'm defining feminism in an extremely broad way, just to mean protecting the interests of women, however, how well like wherever that leads. And I have, and and I've I've kind of followed my I've followed my intuition, I've followed the research on that front, and I've ended up possibly coincidentally, possibly not, reaching reaching some conclusions which many people perceive to be conservative. Although, you know, it's a bit patchy, and I say sometimes, and I'm joking, but I'm also not really joking, that there's something, something in the book for everyone to hate. And I have been criticized from every angle you could possibly imagine, but also praised, you know. I think that there's there's a lot of different stuff in there in it, and I think regardless of your own perspective, it does tend to provoke thought, provoke challenge.
SPEAKER_02Yes. Do you still um identify as a feminist? I know in Britain, um, like a vanishingly small proportion of people actually like I identify like like 10-15% or something identify as as feminist over here. Um, is that is that a label that you wear? And if so, do you add other adjectives to it?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, interesting question. So, yeah, I do call myself feminist. I think that uh the the the subcategory of feminism is contested. So I um would sometimes call myself post-liberal feminist because I'm kind of coming out of um the post-liberal political movement within within Britain, which is its own very specific thing, um, which tends to combine a combination of cultural conservatism and also um being left on economic issues, um, which is one of those in Britain, I believe in in many other parts of the West as well, is an area where a lot of voters are to be found, but not very many people in positions of power. Um so that's a you know, that's a kind of um intellectual scene which I'm swimming in locally. Um, I mean the thing is with feminism in Britain is it is it's it's a little bit of a broader church than in other parts of the world. It is true that um only a minority of women actually call themselves feminists. That's all I think that's always been true. Um feminism has always been a bit of a um perceived to be a bit of an elite concern, even if it sometimes has kind of um uh delved into the grassroots as well. But uh there is there is kind of more room for manoeuvre in Britain on the whole. There's there's there's um more space, for instance, for gender critical views than in America, for instance. And there's more um I think what's happening to feminism at the moment in Britain and possibly elsewhere is it's detaching a bit from the left. Because historically, of course, feminism is almost synonymous with the left, and and it does come out of certain left-wing movements of the 1960s and stuff, but it's always had a very vexed relationship actually with the left and a lot of conflict with with men on the left. And, you know, radical feminists and Christian conservatives, for instance, have have been in agreement on many issues down the ages, you know, whether it be prostitution, pornography, whatever, um, often sometimes to the chagrin of radical feminists. Um, but there has always been that kind of interesting way in which feminism is quite hard to categorize in political terms. And I think that actually that's that's something that we should pursue more. I think that actually trying to disentangle ourselves from that kind of left-right binary is a is a is a good thing and something that we should be doing very deliberately. Because I think actually that um what is good for women and and children or families, and you know, because like we can't just think about women on their own, right? Women are women women are entangled with other with other people in all sorts of ways, um doesn't necessarily have that much to do with what we might consider to be left and right in a strict sense.
SPEAKER_02So right, and that's where the post-liberal stuff comes in, doesn't it? That that you've got this sense, you know, John Rawls thought about this atomized individual behind the behind the veil of ignorance, and let's build up a society based on that person, that individual. And you just think, well, that that sounds like a frat boy, a 20-year-old frat boy. Like that that's yeah, that's the dream of very much a male psychology. Yes. To to want to be a little atom by myself or by himself, not entangled, as you say, with your biology, not entangled with society, not entangled with family and reproductive systems and and things like that. And so post-liberal feminism, I guess, is taking seriously nature, really, and taking taking seriously biology, yeah. Relationships.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely. So another term that um is sometimes used, and I think is Kathleen, Kathleen Stock, great My Forward, um the philosopher, her preference I think is for materialist feminism, which is quite good. Yes, because that that does that does kind of strike at what it's what it is we're talking about, even if it does sound a bit academic, I think that it's a good descriptor.
SPEAKER_02Yes. Well, let's press into that because um one one of your um chapter headings is men and women are different. And I guess, like coming from a Christian point of view, like first page of the Bible, you've got male and female in the image of God, both of them equally having dominion over the world. And I guess there's that dimension, there's that sort of vertical dimension of both equally in the image of God. If you've got a materialist kind of conception of male and female, um, I can understand why sort of a third-wave feminism would uh third wave feminist would say, ah, if you press in too much to the differences between men and women, you're going to lose the equality. Now, I I think if you've got a spiritual dimension, there's a little bit of a backstop there, and that men and women can be equal before the eyes of God and different in their sort of material reality. But if you're going to have a materialist feminism, how do you both uphold the equality of the sexes and the difference between them?
SPEAKER_00Well, I mean, I think you can still say, I mean, it's all derived from Christianity in the end, isn't it? I mean, this is the thing with so much um secular ethics and politics, and you know, everything, everything in the end comes um comes back to Christianity, even if it's not explicitly so. I think it's quite possible to say in a secular way that you can you can affirm the moral equality of the sexes um and our equal value as human beings without necessarily insisting on our sameness. Um the I mean the sameness is also in two in two dimensions that I write about in the book. So the first is the just the physical differences between sexes, which um, you know, ought to be obvious, have increasingly become non-obvious and a very strange detour within feminism. Although I think in a way, actually, that so one of the critiques I make of liberal feminism is that I think that it has historically um started off by being concerned with with men and women having equal legal rights. So things like access to professions and the ability for women to to borrow money and and and do all this kind of stuff. Um, and that was a really important battle of the 1960s and 70s in particular. And then the place it went from there, and I think that this is the error, was to, on a social and cultural level, to also aspire for sameness, which translates very often actually into just aspiring for women to be more like men, not actually generally wanting men to behave more like women, so for men to do for more care work or you know, whatever it might be, but for women to to live as men do, to to have working lives exactly like men's, to have sexual lives very much like men's. This is the argument I'm making in the book that women should aspire to have um more carefree sexual lives, where they can, you know, treat sex much more like a leisure activity, be much more casual about their sexual lives in every possible way, to have a more sort of masculine attitude towards sex and towards work and towards family and whatever. And and as you as you say, the the liberal individualist model in which we're these atomized frat boys who don't have who don't have relationships or responsibilities, or you know, this is this is I think that the route that that potentially goes down, where you end up um rejecting so much of um of what has traditionally been women's lives, w women's work, that you end up actually with trying just desperately to be like men in every possible way, which I think is an error. And I think you know, in has has ended up at this strange place now with the addition of transactivism to the tapestry, um, where even the existence of physical differences between men and women have become controversial. And we have things like um the current arguments over sports and whether or not people could can identify into different sports categories and so on, um, different prisons, you know, all that the the whole the whole question of sexual dimorphism is suddenly on the table in a way that is wild and would be considered completely wild to our ancestors. So there's that physical dimension, which as I say should be obvious but isn't necessarily um and then more controversially, there's the also the psychological dimension, the fact that even though there are not um absolute psychological differences between the sexes, and you end up with loads of outliers and and and loads of ways in which we just um people are not typically masculine or feminine on a personality level at all, but but there are some ways in which there are average differences, which you see at the population level. And the most crucial one for my purposes in the book is is in terms of sexuality and the fact that men are more likely on average to take a more casual attitude towards sex and to want to do things like watch porn, bisex, um, have hookups, that kind of thing. Whereas women are on average less likely to want those things. And if you if if you're looking at this from a sort of a cultural perspective and thinking, what is what is the sexual culture which best serves the interests of women en masse, I don't think it's our current culture.
SPEAKER_02Right. Because it is based around the needs of the atomized individual, which far more readily maps onto male desires and a masculine view of the world than than a feminine one. Why do you think that we are unable to name the differences between men and women anymore? I mean, th they they're pretty obvious, um, you know. You've got young children, I've got young children, you know, it's it's one of the first things they notice. It's it's it seems to be woven into our humanity, this this sexual dimorphism. Um to me, it it feels like um we have said that the word equality is equivalent to the word interchangeability. So that in order to be equal, we must be interchangeable. But again, as a parent, I don't say to my children, I love you all interchangeably. I say, I love you all equally, but you're different to you. And and again, I I wonder if we don't have a rich vision for the way in which male and female are equal, we'll just be so nervous about noticing differences because we'll we'll think that that will violate our highest ideal, which is equality. But instead of a uh a rich vision of equality where we're all equally welcome around the same table, we have to be all equally far up the same individual ladders. Um, which again is is my that so that's my that's my pushback about materialism. Are there resources within materialism to actually affirm the equality? Because I wonder whether our desire to hold on to equality is preventing us from noticing the differences.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think that part of the reason why we have um why it has become easier and more common to deny the differences is partly an ideological thing. It's coming out of it's coming out of liberalism and it's the sort of logical endpoint actually of so much liberal thinking for so many centuries. But I think that there is also a material reason, which is another reason why materialist feminism works quite well as a as a term, in that our society has changed so profoundly on a material level. Um, so things like the pill, um which is kind of the starting point of my whole book, that we suddenly have this technology shock, which enables women to suspend their fertility in a way they've never historically been able to do, at least not reliably and not within their own control, because most older forms of contraception are both unreliable and also it that men are in charge of them. Um and then that's combined with things like the move away from um an industrial economy towards a knowledge and service economy, which means also having much less the male physical strength becomes much less important than it used to be on an economic level, um, which results therefore in much more gender neutrality in all parts of life and particularly working life. Um, Western society used to be really sex segregated in a way that people tend to forget, and men and women used to do quite different work and to quite rarely socialise with members of the opposite sex who weren't who weren't kin. Um, whereas now that's not the life we exist in at all. So all of these material changes, which are coming from uh technology ultimately and other, you know, sort of um changes beyond the social, translate into these vast social changes, which mean, which give us the impression, I think, the false impression, that we are that we are interchangeable, that there aren't any meaningful differences between men and women, because you if you say um are able to suspend your fertility by taking the pill and you do the sort of job which doesn't require physical strength at all, um, and you exist in a very kind of gender-neutral social space, you might think that actually the differences between us are trivial and easily surmountable. But but actually that's a false impression. And it's also an impression that depends on technology, um, which is quite fragile. Um so yeah, so I think so part of what the material feminist descriptor is is describing is that is that fundamental insight that the thing that's driving what looks from from one perspective like feminist progress and what's generally um attributed to the work of feminist campaigners, and obviously feminist campaigners have had influence, and there've been lots of very admirable campaigners down the years, but I think the thing that's driving this has a lot more to do with economic change than it does with anything done on the ideological level. You know, things like votes for women, I think, are much more likely to be the result of the internal combustion engine and the fact that you suddenly have this radical change in the the economic importance of male physical strength at the end of the 19th century into the 20th century. Like that's so much to me more the story than anything to do with suffrage.
SPEAKER_02Yes, yeah. So the the pill absolutely is massively important in breaking the connection between sex and babies. Um, or at least between sex and pregnancy. And then another technology, I guess, is abortion that breaks the the link between conception and the a child that is born. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Um, obviously there've always been um abortion efforts um in every area, but yeah, you're right that that that safe abortion is a moral phenomenon. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Right, right, right, right. Um we've just recently had uh Roe vs. Wade in the United States overturned. Obviously, the US is a very different um ecosystem to um the UK or Australia where I'm from, but um what what kind of reflections do you have? Um, because if you've you've made a case against the sexual revolution and and part of what made the sexual revolution possible was contraception and more widespread access to abortion. Um the the Supreme Court sort of ruling that that was not a constitutional right, um, and now it goes back to the states, so it doesn't, you know, it it's not that the Supreme Court uh has the final say. Now it's back to the back to the states to figure out what what they want to do with it. But how do you react to that um when you've made such a case you know against the sexual revolution and and abortion has played such a part in it?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. We recorded for for listeners, we're recording this like a few days after the Roe announcement. So yeah, this is this is this is a question that everyone is going to be asking me because it is super, super relevant to my thesis. Um I think what happened historically um with decriminalization of abortion is that you had um, which happens across the Western world at much the same time, is you have abortion, uh, sorry, the pill becomes available in the early 60s. Initially it's available just to married women, and then some years later it becomes available to unmarried women, and then a similar period of time after that, you have the decriminalization of abortion. And I think the reason that there's that sequence is because the pill, um, particularly in its earliest forms, was a was a reliable, was an was an unprecedentedly reliable form of contraception, but it wasn't actually that good. It's never really been 100% effective. I mean, very few, I mean, some modern forms of contraception, like the um interutrianine device, are close to 100%, um, but nothing is 100%. So it was just effective enough to produce really radical social change in the sense that the um social norms that had existed through all of human history, really, to try and control young people's sexuality. The the the element of it that feminists focus on is the control of female sexuality. And of course, of course, that exists. That was a very, very strong theme through all of this, you know. Invariably um male kin and other and female kin too, but male kin in particular, taking great pains to control the sexual behaviour of their daughters. Um, but it also controlled male sexuality, like the there are all sorts of ways in which um young men in particular were controlled. And the reason for that was because it was the community, like the community cared about childbearing. It wasn't just a matter of individuals, it was just a matter, it like it mattered to families, it mattered to communities if young people were having sexual relationships that were producing illegitimate children. So, of course, this is why you have this elaborate set of social norms, which basically exists to keep um horny young people apart. But then the pill comes along and suddenly that's kind of goes out the window because sex is no longer necessarily going to lead to reproduction. And so Instance a shotgun marriage is gone, yeah, but then to the 70s because it just doesn't seem to provide any kind of obvious purpose. But then what happens perversely is that because it's not 100% effective, you have a lot more um extramarital sex happening. But that means that actually the absolute number of unwanted pregnancies also goes up because you've got whatever a 10% failure rate, a surprisingly high failure rate. And that's when, of course, you need abortion as the backup. And I think the reason that there's an incentive among lawmakers in the late 60s, 70s to support decronisation of abortion is because it's their, you know, it's their daughters who are having these relationships and who are having unplanned pregnancies, and it suddenly becomes um much more urgent than it has been historically.
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SPEAKER_00I have a complex view on abortion, and this is, I think, a point where I diverge from many of my Christian readers who'll agree with me on lots of other things. I don't think that abortion is um a good thing for a woman to go through. I think that efforts to try and represent it by a small, a small proportion of feminists, but a vocal one, to try and represent abortion as meaningless, like having a wisdom tooth pulse, you know, just a minor kind of medical procedure. I think that that's I don't think that describes reality, even if that's true, maybe for some portion of women. I mean, the vast majority of women who've had abortions, which obviously a lot of women, will describe it as uh, you know, with some degree of of trauma and sadness, because it is a difficult thing to go through and it's not something that you would wish on your worst enemy, to be honest. Um having said that, I think that it is an error to criminalize it, and I think that the reason for that is that it's very unlikely you can't resurrect those social norms overnight. There's a Roger Scrucion quote quote, I can't remember exactly what it is, but it's something like it's very easy to break things and very difficult to make things. You know, we had a very imperfect but durable system of social norms and also you know legal institutions like marriage and so on, that um dealt with the problem of the fact that um young women can easily become pregnant, and you know, we we need a way of of looking after them and looking after their children and so on, and and the the kind of slightly hodgepodge method that was come up with um is gone, you know, like you now have something like half of children in the UK um reaching age 15 without their biological father at home. Um, I think also about half not born in wedlock. So the the the old system is gone. And I think that it's just not possible to resurrect it. And I think sometimes that the um this will sound like a strange comparison, but I think sometimes that the um the move to criminalize abortion reminds me a bit of the move to abolish prisons, which is obviously coming from a completely different political space generally. But you know, the prison abolitionists are right that prison is miserable and brutal, and you wouldn't want to live in a perfect society, would not have prisons, would have no need for prisons. You would just um either intervene earlier to prevent crime ever happening, or you would have some sort of excellent rehabilitation services, which meant that people um would do far better in those than they would in prison. You know, all of that is completely true. But also, if we if we abolish prisons tomorrow, that is not going to be the outcome. The outcome is going to be pandemonium. And that's the thing that worries me with abortion as well. You know, I would think it would be better if we lived in a world where no one ever had to have an abortion ever again. And the way of getting there might include, you know, greater support for young families, um uh women being able to rely on men more to stay with them and to support them through pregnancy and and and the you know to to raise families together, you know, all of that stuff is good, and many Christians would agree with me on it, for even if we're not for quite the same reasons. But I don't think that banning abortion is going to get us there. And I think it's much more likely actually to result in um the tragic deaths of women and miserable lives for unwanted children. And I look at, for instance, what happened in Romania when abortion was criminalized under Chaoscu. And I think that doesn't look like a good like a good outcome to me. So that's my very long way of saying that I have a complicated view on road.
SPEAKER_02Sure. Well, you won't be s surprised to learn I'm I'm pro-life and and yeah, I I I look at the the million babies per week in the world uh that are killed um around the world um via abortion. I I do think it's it's a a human rights issue. I think it's the front edge of of where human rights should be applied to the most marginalized kind of groups in society today. But I can I can agree with you that yeah, simply the the the change of of legislation is nowhere near enough. Um and funnily enough, I I think something like um the the precept of your book going widespread is is you know exactly what needs to go hand in hand with, okay, if you're going to have uh if if abortion is not going to be the backstop um for contraception, then yes, sex must be taken seriously and consent is not enough and marriage is good and and all those sorts of things. So um, yeah, so I uh that's why I commend your book and and and think it's uh it's part of uh a part of an honouring of the weakest among us. And I th I I do think the weakest among us are the unborn, but but next in in the queue, absolutely, uh women and families and and how we how we honour that. Um do you have any comeback on that?
SPEAKER_00I mean there are different ways, yeah. You can I think there is a very respectable um view within the pro-life movement that sees the way of um the way of pushing at this coming not from the legislative angle, but coming from other angles, like for instance, you know, providing more care for um for young mothers and you know all this kind of stuff. And and I I get frustrated with um some American pro-lifers in particular who don't think of those other angles at which they might be pushing at this issue, who only think of the banning direction, um, which obviously doesn't necessarily represent the whole movement, but but yeah, I think I think we're in agreement on that.
SPEAKER_02It's in a it's a whole cloth thing. And and you know, one thing it's I've started thinking in the last week or so is is if the pill was a kind of a um a technology that that ended up outstripping our our you know supposed Christian values of the 1950s, etc. Um, is it in any way like um there was the technology technological advance of the new world getting discovered, which which led to the greatest sort of historical evil of all, the transatlantic slave trade, in which you know 12 million Africans were were trafficked and and worked to death. Um but there was there was then a movement, it came 350 years far too late, um, but there was a movement of both re-envisaging society and banning the thing. Um but you yeah, you you absolutely simply cannot cannot ban the thing if you if you want uh if you want society to to progress. Um should we talk a little bit about um the sexual revolution of the first century? Because um when I when I heard your um the the title of your book, uh The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, um, the first thing I wanted to say provocatively was, I believe in the sexual revolution. It's just I believe in the sexual revolution of the first century. And I'm sort of picking up that language from Kyle Harper, a historian who wrote a great book called From Shame to Sin about the sexual revolution of the first three centuries AD. And he drew a really interesting comparison with the 1960s. He says, if the 1960s equalized the sexes by saying women can now be as promiscuous as men have always been, basically the sexual revolution of the the the first century was basically saying men must be as restricted as women have always been. And into that culture, you know, in the Roman world, that there are 25 Latin words for prostitute, um, and there's literally no way in Latin of referring to an adult male virgin. If you talk about a virgin who is an adult, you're always talking about a woman in Latin. And and it's just odd to even talk about male sexuality that is chaste, and even the key word modesty about sexual uh morality was different and unapologetically different. If you were a woman, it meant chastity and and virginity before marriage and then absolute fidelity within it. For a man, modesty simply meant um not going overboard. And ironically, if you if you gave too much vent to your sexual lusts, the charge you opened yourself to was effeminacy, which is ironic because what you wanted your women to be was, you know, utterly chaste. But that there was just this brutal kind of sexual culture in which a trip to the brothel would cost you the same price as uh as a price of a loaf of bread, um, in which every male had the absolute rights to everybody within his family, including the slaves and and um and in which pederasty, um, you know, known as child love, was celebrated, you know, by by everybody. Um into that culture, Christians started calling pederasty paid of thoros, which which means child destruction. And suddenly Christians are saying what what has been celebrated as love is actually abuse, is actually just destruction. And it's that sexual revolution that's kind of built our modern world. Have you have you sort of come across that kind of argument that what has really tamed male sexuality and therefore unleashed our potential has been the sexual revolution of the first centuries?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, so I should preface this by saying I'm no expert on the history of the first century, but I am familiar, I am absolutely familiar with this argument. Um, it's a really interesting one. I mean, when people refer, accuse me sometimes of being old-fashioned, I say, excuse me, how old fashioned do you mean? Because, you know, in antiquity, as exactly as you say, there is there is that no one would question the right of Harvey Weinstein, for instance, to have sexual access to his employees and his indeed his slaves in that era. Um, the fact that we would even consider that to be an unacceptable thing for him to do or to request. I mean, bearing in mind, of course, that you know, some of what Weinstein did was criminal rape for which he was convicted. But some of what he did was also um about requesting sex or making, you know, or putting pressure or you know, adding incentives for women in his employment or prospective employment to do to do sexual things for him. So it was about you know abusing that position of power to sexual ends, which, yes, in many other eras would not be considered illegitimate in the least. You know, we I think it is true that we consider that even in a post-Christian era, we consider that to be illegitimate because we are coming out of that long history of understanding egalitarianism to be such a fundamental virtue. And yeah, it's this Tom Holland's book Dominion that kind of set me thinking about this, because he wrote exactly about this. That actually, me too, in a sense, is often um thought of as being anti-Christian in a sense, because particularly in the American context, this is feminism is typically seen in opposition to evangelicalism in particular, but actually it at its core has this very old Christian idea of exactly this male restraint, and the idea that actually, you know, every culture pretty much thinks that female virginity is every culture we kept ours, thinks that female virginity is something to be um to be prized and protected. And um the sexual double standard exists in just about every part of the world and every area that we know of where women are judged more much more harshly for promiscuity than men are. Um, but what's very, very common in many parts of the world is for men to basically have license as long as they're sufficiently high status. Um, rape has very often been considered not to be a crime against the woman herself, but to be a crime committed against her male kin. Um, this is this, you know, this is absolutely correct observation made by Susan Brownler in her famous second wave text against our will that rape is historically a property crime, not a not a crime against a person, really. Um, and yeah, the idea that actually men should be restraining themselves, and that actually female practices of chastity are preferable and actually aspirational, um, is a is is a very strange idea. And it does come out of, yeah, as you say, the first sexual revolution, the Christian sexual revolution. Um which I think, yeah, kind of messes with people's brains a bit because we because that's not that's not generally how how mon feminism is understood. But that's it, that's its long history though.
SPEAKER_02I think I think it's increasingly kind of coming to the forefront. Like Joseph Henrik's book, The Weirdest People in the World, that came out, I guess, uh 18 months ago, a big fat book from an evolutionary biologist sort of saying, what what is it that sets the West apart? And he says, Well, it's Christianity, and what in particular about Christianity, he calls it the marriage and family program of Christianity. And he said, somehow the church managed to reach down and grab men by the testicles. Um, and you know, a very romantic phrase, but um that that kind of um idea, which which I find extraordinary when you think about the first three centuries in which the church had no cultural heights from which to reach down. So how how are, you know, as Joseph Henrik points out, you know, elite males in all human societies, they take a lot of women, a lot of concubines, a lot of wives, leaving uh which is terrible for the wives and the concubines. It's terrible for every other male as well, because now they're an involuntary celibate, an incel um, because of that elite male behavior. And yet in all these societies around the world, that's that's exactly what we find. So I I guess the like, are you are you comfortable with me phrasing it like this, that the feminist cause like depends um at least as much on men as it does on women, and and depends on men absolutely getting their act together and and and restricting themselves.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's the whole project.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. The the question is what tools you use to try and achieve that end.
SPEAKER_02Right. Grabbing testicles is frowned on.
SPEAKER_00Well, I mean, it depends on your school. Um the the the method that is more considered more mainstream in um say liberal feminism, also radical feminism to some extent, has more to do with persuading um men of the virtues of gender neutrality, of trying to kind of uh eliminate the differences between the sexes as far as possible, um, in a in a social sense and to some extent in a physical sense as well. I mean, that's what the pill does, right? It allows women to function in the world roughly as men do. Um the problem I think that we've come up against is that we've we've we've we've had a really good go at this at trying to eliminate, eliminate sexual difference. And we're reaching that point where we're really coming up against the buffers of biology and the extent to which you know it just isn't moving. Like something like the gender pay gap, for instance. It is true that historically um women used to be quite explicitly paid less than men for the same work. That generally isn't what's happening now in explaining the gender pay gap. It's overwhelmingly actually just a motherhood pay gap, um, because women slightly out-earn men actually right up until they have their first child, and then you see that the earnings fall off a cliff, and it's to do with the fact that there is just a fundamental incompatibility between the labour market and the care of young children, because someone has to do that care, and whether you um outsource it to some other paid woman, invariably, or if parents themselves and mothers generally are the ones who who who do it, do it themselves, you know. This is you just you just get down to this like you cannot wish away these differences. It is only women who bear children, it is only women who can breastfeed children. You know, mothers have a very, very intense bond with their children, which is very, very hard to resist, even if you wanted to. Why would you want to? Um, so I think this is where we we get to, where we've tried desperately hard and with good reason to try and eliminate the differences which have historically made women's lives very difficult. The problem is that we can't actually limit those differences. And and I and I guess where I'm coming from in the book is I'm saying chapter two, men and women are different. Like if we accept this as our right from the get-go, where next? You know, what do we, how do we manage this? How do we try and ameliorate the downsides of those differences, bearing in mind that absolutely everything has trade-offs and it isn't possible to find a perfect solution? I don't believe in utopia. Um and I think that actually unexpectedly, perhaps, there are old, there are old tools which actually work better than some of the new ones, marriage being an example of that. Um, as you say, the um anthropologists call it the puzzle of monogamous marriage? Why is it that a system that doesn't suit the interests of elite men? Because as you say, the elite men, their instinct is to have lots of wives and to have sexual access to slaves and you know, to live to live the kind of ancient fantasy. Um why would a system that doesn't suit the interests of those men become as dominant as it has? Because monogamous marriage has become the dominant system, you know, through much of the world, up until recently here. And the answer seems to be because monogamous marriage is a really good system, not necessarily for the elite men, but it's a really good system for the whole of society. You end up with lower crime levels, for instance, because you don't have this well of frustrated men who don't have partners. Um men are are are tamed by marriage and by children in the sense that it gives them incentives to behave prosocially and actually tames men even at the biological level.
SPEAKER_02We know that testosterone levels drop when men are it's the testosterone suppression system, as Joseph Henrik calls it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, yeah. When men are involved in care for their own for their children, their testosterone levels drop. Um, they commit less crime, they they they they drink less, you know, all sorts of ways in which this is obviously not to say that there aren't that aren't counterexamples, of course, there are, but on an average level, you can see their taming effect across all sorts of dimensions. And it monogamous marriage also makes productive um societies more productive on an economic level because elite men instead of investing in wives, they invest in in new businesses, you know. It turns out that this thousand two thousand-year-old tool is actually really, really effective. And in in ways that we maybe didn't expect, um, and is effective actually, it lowers it, it lowers um domestic violence rates and child and child abuse rates because households which have lots of co-wives and their children in them tend to be generate a lot of conflict. Um, yeah, it actually meets all sorts of feminist purposes that we wouldn't couldn't necessarily have foreseen, except that we experimented with the alternatives and found them not to be very good.
SPEAKER_02Did you come across the there was a Vice article maybe a few months ago, and it was uh it was all about this this new sexuality you can try. It's called radical monogamy. And then you read the article, it's just monogamy, people. It's just like when you've tried everything else, it's like and I was like, Yeah, no, it kind of is radical though, isn't it? You know, because you know, among
SPEAKER_00primates they that's not how they do it among other human societies that's that's not how they do it it it is kind of radical and it doesn't necessarily come naturally the um uh Alex Cashuta podcaster I think her take on the radical monogamy piece was this is the product of stepping on a thousand rakes you know like trying trying everything else and be like oh no right actually there was something in this all all along and we'll we're like with trade-offs obviously you know there are all sorts of the the response I get sometimes to the book which I find a bit annoying is when people say but what about this exception but what about this exception but what about this exception I say yes I agree with you there are obviously exceptions to absolutely everything but I also say look around you know the current system isn't working that well either there isn't there isn't a solution that will absolutely solve every every every form of human misery um but there are there are there are better and worse ones.
SPEAKER_02Yeah yeah absolutely what what is your hope then as because I mean you're you're really having to change minds you're really having to get people to reimagine everything actually um because if the sort of the liberal conceit is that we're all individuals who are simply will driven and it's it's purely about consent, it's purely about choice, nature can take a hike um gendered reality can take a hike family and marriage can take a hike um you know I mean there's a meaning crisis that is sort of orbiting around that um but you're you're you're here coming along and and I guess how how are you going to preach to people and I guess I guess I use that language advisedly because you know Christians come along we we kind of say well look God is love and history is a love story and heaven and earth are like masculine and feminine in in you know the Hebrew Bible and that's because they're meant to get together because history's a love story and man and woman get to play a part in the cosmic romance and you know bodies are temples and you know sex is a proclamation of the love that preceded and predated the the the the universe and and you can cast a kind of a a cosmic vision if you like with all the baggage that goes along with being a traditional Christian as I am but the I guess Christians are used to speaking out this sort of moral vision for life wrapped up in a spiritual like cosmic vision as well. How can you how can you how can you sell this vision? I I want you to sell this vision um yeah how and and how are you finding it going as you're sort of casting this vision for people?
SPEAKER_00How do you make the secular argument for it? Well I mean it's going surprisingly well in the sense that I thought that the book would I mean I obviously have had some I've had negative responses. What tends to happen though is I've got a I've had a lot of positive responses, like 80% I'd say of of of feedback I've had has been really positive. And people tend to say I agree with this, I agree with this and not this um which is fine. They're not this is different completely different depending on what what direction they're coming from. But um no there's like the the the probably the most common response I've had is people saying thank you for saying it. Yeah I've been thinking this this whole time and haven't really felt able to so I think it was sort of in the air um I just put it down on paper. Yeah I mean I think that it is possible to um to make a very rational argument for some of this like as we were talking about in relation to monogamous marriage you can you can actually do a fairly empirical piece of work and say well here are all the ways in which societies are better if we decide upon this collective source of action even if it might not necessarily be better for some individuals it's better for everyone on maps you know um I've had I can't remember who said it but I've heard um a monogamous system described as sexual socialism. Redistributive yeah yeah yeah um what you come down to in the end though of course when you're talking about when you're talking about virtue which is what I'm talking about in the end and I do I do use the word virtue is that you you do sort of end up appealing to Christian virtues without without God without the theology behind it. But you know as Tom Holland points out that we are we are um we may be a post-Christian culture but only just and I think that that it's still very much in the waters um that we do still we do still prize egalitarianism for instance um and protective the weak and charity and modesty and all of these virtues which actually um many people would be surprised to know come directly from history of Christianity in the West. So yeah I suppose I can't help but kind of touch those buttons in talking about these issues even though but I think it is quite possible to to do so without without without necessarily having the theological foundation and without being a believer and speaking to people who also aren't believers um who have been some of my most positive readers.
SPEAKER_02Yeah I'm sure that I'm sure they have been yeah yeah and like I guess like the whole Western experiment is is sort of based on you know can we can can we preach these virtues without having to go you know upstairs and um and and I guess as as Tom Holland says you know it remains to be seen whether we can you know maintain the fruits if we cut ourselves loose from the roots.
SPEAKER_00Yeah yeah that's yeah that's an ongoing experiment isn't it?
SPEAKER_02Yeah yeah and I say why take the risk Louise um come on nice try again I gotta try I gotta try um Louise I wish you all the very best uh with this book I I think it's a a phenomenal um project that you're on I think it's a thread that is so worth uh keeping on pulling and uh I really hope people uh get out and get the book it's called The Case Against the Sexual Revolution by Louise Perry.
SPEAKER_04Louise thanks so much for joining us thank you so much well there we go hope you enjoyed that conversation I for one found it absolutely fascinating and we've got some great conversations lined up so stay tuned. One quick thing you can do to support the work of Speak Life if you haven't done so already is subscribe to our YouTube channel. So that's the kind of central hub for our content. All the podcast episodes are available as videos on the YouTube channel along with tons of other resources, short films so if you haven't done so already why not go to youtube.com forward slash speaklifemedia or just type YouTube into just type speaklife into the YouTube search bar and it will come up and just click the subscribe button you just need a a Gmail account uh a Google account uh so if you have a a a Gmail email address you will be able to subscribe and it will take about five seconds and that's a great way of supporting the channel and it will allow our content to be seen and and heard by more people so you know what I'll give you five seconds to do that now if you haven't done so already five four three two one you legend thank you so much well that's all from us today have a great week God bless and we will see you next time