Louise Perry: The Case Against The Sexual Revolution
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Now this episode is a little bit different from our usual programming because this is an interview between me and Louise Perry, who's the author of the book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.

- The book in general is intended as a critique of liberal feminism and sometimes criticised by conservatives and Christians for not being conservative and Christian enough. - Now, before we roll the interview, it's worth sharing a bit of a trigger warning around this in that we do discuss topics around sex and sexuality in a pretty graphic way. And we also talk about issues including sexual assault and rape and consent. And so hopefully that's fair warning if you'd rather not listen to this episode.

I work for a campaign group called We Can't Consent to This. What we do is we document cases where UK women have been killed and their killers have claimed in court that they consented to the violence which led to their deaths. So like the sex game gone wrong. I think that the focus on consent as the sole framework for determining whether or not sexual behaviour is good or bad is completely inadequate. There's so much grey area between good sex and consensual sex.

All right, Louise, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. Hello. This is a very interesting book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century. How has it been doing, I guess, the media and publicity tour of the book? Because it's, I guess, a particularly sometimes controversial topic. Yeah, it's been better than I thought, you know. I knew while I was writing it that it was controversial. That was kind of the idea. But

But I would say the response has been 90 to 95% positive, which was much higher than I thought. What's the 5 to 10% like? What's interesting is that it comes from every possible angle, which I think suggests I'm at least being original, even if I'm not right. So the book in general is intended as a critique of liberal feminism, so obviously liberal feminists

you know, reiterate that point. Fine. That was, that's to be expected. I'm sometimes criticized by, um, conservatives and Christians for not being conservative and Christian enough because I have a chapter in there that makes the case for marriage, but then I also have a whole bunch of other chapters that they don't like as much. Um,

have been criticized by um radical feminists and some other feminists for being too keen on evolutionary psychology so completely different groups or have a problem with the book which i think is probably a good sign yeah so um

Up until I read this, I did not really realize that like liberal feminists and like radical feminists and sex positive and negative feminine was like a thing. What do these kind of terms mean? What's extra confusing is everyone calls themselves different things. Feminism is like an infamously factional term.

I write about liberal feminism in the book, but that's a term I chose to use, even though people wouldn't probably be more likely to describe themselves as intersectional feminists. I mean, liberal feminism is basically the feminism of like Cosmo, Emma Watson. Okay. It's what you'll most commonly come across in The Guardian. Okay. It's like the mainstream position nowadays. The main idea behind liberal feminism is basically that giving women freedom and giving women choice is the most important thing.

And that what was wrong about the past, the pre-feminist age, was that women didn't have their choices constrained. And post-1960s, we've seen this sort of explosion of freedom and that's a great thing, which I disagree with. Radical feminism is faded away a little bit. It was more prominent in the 70s and 80s. And that is...

as the name suggests, more radical version of feminism, which says that women are an oppressed class. It's like a Marxist framework where women and men are different classes and men necessarily oppress women.

I used to be much more sympathetic to radical feminism. I've moved away from it somewhat. But yeah, these are factions who are at each other's throats. Okay. A lot. I've had them for a long time. Sex positive and sex negative. How does that tie into this? So sex positive, liberal feminists, I think, are pretty much always sex positive. And what does sex positive mean? So the kind of steel man of sex positivism is it's the idea that there's nothing...

Yeah.

I think the problem with the sex positive view is it shades very, very easily from that general, we should be generally positive towards it. Sounds lovely. The problem is that it shades very easily into actually being into these things actually becoming almost compulsory.

So that we go from saying women should be allowed to have one night stands. There's nothing wrong necessarily with having one night stands. Fine. I think that anyone who's brought up in a vaguely liberal environment is going to agree with that. But then I think that the point that we've come to now is that actually not having one night stands is weird. Going through a period of your life, having one night stands as a route towards a monogamous relationship, which is what most women say they want, what most men actually also say they want eventually is almost like running the gauntlet of

And I think that what sex positive feminism does in practice, even if not in theory, is it provides cover for a culture that is actually very coercive.

Because we are all networked individuals. We all make choices in context. We're influenced by other people. And I think particularly when it comes to sex, because sex necessarily is something you do with other people. So you're going to be influenced by everyone else. And I think to say that to focus only on the individual and to think only about our own choices in isolation and the idea that we should regard all those choices positively, I think...

massively neglects the ways in which our choices are constrained in practice. What do you mean by the ways in which our choices are constrained in practice? So one example would be if you...

Pre the pill, right? The standard route for young women, particularly if you come from a kind of respectable background, let's say, is not to have sex before marriage. That's the default. And it means if you talk to women who grew up in that era, they'll say, yes, of course, there were instances where that didn't happen, teenagers being as they are.

But equally, it was the assumed thing. And if you went on a date with a boy or whatever, he knew that was a hard limit. You didn't have to negotiate on it. Whereas now, I'd say that that has flipped. And now the assumption is that you're put out, not necessarily on a first date, although increasingly, straight away. And the default therefore becomes a yes.

Okay. And that's the site at which you have to negotiate. And often, you know, it's very difficult because you're doing that within the context of you don't want to be frigid. You don't want to be approved. You don't want to lose social status. And so I think to say that you have a choice, yeah, you do. Of course, we all have choices. We all have free will. But if you're in a culture that says that putting out on a first date is normal, teenagers in particular care a lot about being normal. And that is the site at which our choices are constrained. So it sounds like...

So, I mean, and please correct me if this is not a fair summary of your position, but it sounds like you're saying that in an absolutely dream world, of course, we wouldn't be using the weapon of shame against people.

women or men or anyone to constrain their behavior. And people will do what they want in a consensual fashion. And everything is all fine and dandy. Because actually, people are as you know, Ayala was saying in the debate you had with her checking in with themselves in isolation and saying, How do I personally feel about this? There are some women who will enjoy having sex with multiple partners, some women who won't, and everything will goes because society is non judgmental. It sounds like you're saying in the real world, those kind of

that kind of dream world doesn't really exist? Not only that, but I think the war on shame is...

a complete dead end. I mean, not just in relation to sex and everything. Of course, shame is basically the term we use to describe any means of social control that isn't actually implemented through laws and police and whatever. We are shamed for being dishonest. There are all sorts of things that we're shamed about. We don't necessarily use that term because it is very loaded. But

I don't know, the shame that people feel about being racist. There's a newer form of shame and a good form of shame. You should feel ashamed of being racist, you know? So I think that the idea of doing away with shame entirely is not only impossible, but also I think bad. The question though is what we should be attaching shame to. And I agree with Ayla when she says that we should...

you know, women should be allowed to, if, if, if women really sincerely like behaving as men have historically behaved, you know, having sex like a man is the phrase that I use in the book. Fine. I completely agree. The problem I think is when having sex like a man is seen as an ideal and as seen as a, as a default setting because it doesn't suit the interests of most women. Hmm.

If we're saying that something that suits the interests of, let's say, 5% of women should be the norm, that inevitably is going to mean that 95% are nudged by shame, by social pressure.

One of the early chapters, it was kind of funny when I first got introduced to your book, because I have this other podcast that I do with my brother, and we just sort of treat it as a bit of a chit chat. And he came across your book a few months ago. This was just before I DMed you on Twitter. And we just sort of read the chapter titles. Sex must be taken seriously. Chapter two, men and women are different. Chapter three, some desires are bad. Chapter four, loveless sex is not empowering. Consent is not enough. Violence is not love.

people are not products and marriage is good and then the conclusion listen to your mother and it was just like kind of funny because immediately we knew that wow this is it's it's really clever in that some people are going to think it's like oh my god this is your this is like hate crime and some people are going to think this is totally reasonable why is there why do you need to write a book about it um how did yeah how did how did the naming of the chapters come about

It actually went a couple of months before the book was published in the UK. It's not out yet in America. It will be in a few weeks. The contents page, the publisher just uploaded the contents page and the cover to the site. No other details. And it provoked a minor Twitter storm.

well, quite a major twist storm actually lasting several days because of exactly this, because some people looked at those chapter titles and thought, this woman is a fascist, right? And then other people said, hang on, what am I missing here? And that exact kind of

clash of opinion was explosive. It's interesting just kind of reading through these because having read the book now, I can sort of trace the logic of your argument through just the chapter headings, which is kind of nice. So I wonder if we can start with sex must be taken seriously. I guess when I first read that chapter, it reminded me of a thing that I was

thinking and saying in conversations at university when like all of my friends, all my female friends would have identified as intersectional feminists. This was sort of 2014, 2015 era. And there was a lot of stuff going on that feminism, sort of white feminism is bad because it doesn't take into account like race and class. And the trans debate hadn't quite caught on back in 2014. But now I'm sure intersectional feminists would include

the trans stuff is part of that thing but putting all that aside um the way i was thinking about

sort of sex from a, I guess, ethical, moral, philosophical standpoint was the phrase having sex should be just as, you know, just the same as playing squash with someone. You wouldn't bat an eyelid if you're playing squash with someone, as long as both parties are consenting and it's mutual, then hey, anything goes. Why are we all making a big fuss about the sex thing? Religion is a little bit backwards because like, come on guys, sex is just like playing squash. And your first chapter, sex must be taken seriously. You talk about this idea of sexual disenchantment. I wonder like what's, what's going on there?

So I've borrowed the sexual disenchantment phrase from an American writer called Aaron Savario, who borrowed it from Max Weber.

who described the process of disenchantment during the Enlightenment, whereby people used to believe that nature was filled with spirits, agency. And then post-scientific revolution, we come to believe that actually it's all just kind of scientific forces and there's no specialness, there's no sacredness. It's just kind of like blunt physical forces kind of clashing together. And

sexual disenchantment is sort of the same thing it comes out of the 1960s and it's the idea that sex used to have a sacred status I mean in all religious traditions pretty much sex has some sort of special significance or some ritual associated with it in Christian tradition sex has to take place within marriage which is a sacrament and then that all falls away

And now the idea is exactly as you say, that sex shouldn't, it can have special meaning if people want to give it special meaning, power to them. But in the bare bones, it really is just like playing squash with someone, shaking someone's hand, making coffee, whatever kind of neutral social interaction you want to describe. I think there are two problems with the sexual disenchantment idea. The first is that it's nonsense. No one actually behaves as if that were true.

Right. Like people don't care if their partners go and play squash with someone else. People care deeply if their partners have sex with someone else. And even when they're trying really hard not to feel that way, it's a very common occurrence in the polyamorous community or, you know, any like poly platform you want to go to online, you'll find people who are desperately struggling with jealousy.

So this is even when it's not just a case of breaking the contract of the marriage, which is one easy defense. Exactly. It's not that your partner is being deceitful or anything like that. It's just that you have this deep, visceral response to your partner having sex with someone else in a way that of course you would not have to any of these other kind of neutral situations. So in my relationship contract, if I happen to have a clause saying that we're only going to play squash with one another and then my girlfriend plays squash with someone else, the fact that yes, it's a breaking of the contract...

I wouldn't feel as bad about it. It's a peculiar stipulation, but it clearly has a different kind of emotional resonance, doesn't it? Yeah. Yeah. People don't behave as if sexual disenchantment was true. Similarly, if your boss asks you to do something that's not in your job description, right? If you're asked to, I don't know, make them coffee, as the example I give in the book, or you're asked to do overtime, or you're asked to do something that's not strictly listed within your duties, right?

Fine, that's normal. I think we've all had experiences like that. If your boss asks you to give him a blowjob...

That's completely different. Everyone knows that's completely different. And the feminists who are loudest in insisting that sex can be just like playing squash are the first to say that, of course, your boss shouldn't be asking you to give him a blowjob, right? Because we know that actually this isn't like a neutral... There is something special. We might not want to use the word sacred, but there is something special about sex, which means that people just have a wholly different emotional response to it. So on that front, if we compare...

Boss asking you to work overtime versus boss asking you to give him a blowjob. Clearly those things are very, very, very different. What would the steel man feminist say in this situation if they weren't trying to use sacredness and specialness of sex as a reason as to why this feels different? So they might say that there's a kind of imbalance between men and women, which means that there's a power dynamic at play.

which makes that request more kind of charged than it would be, than some other interaction would be. I guess they might compare it to something like the imbalance between someone who's rich and someone's poor and the sort of inherent tension based on that power differential. You can't really apply that to two men.

If a male busks us, his male junior employees, give him a blowjob, that's also really bad. Yeah. Okay. So what would... I think that falls apart on that basis. I think the problem is just that it's very difficult to rationalize. It's not something you can kind of easily line up in a logical argument. But the fact is people feel differently about sex than they do about other things. And as far as we can tell, people have always felt that way. And that's just like a component of...

human life that we have to reckon with and I think the problem we're trying to explain it away and say oh this you know whatever people have these deep visceral feelings but they are somehow wrong too is that I think that down the line that's really bad for women I mean I think it's bad for everyone but I think it's particularly bad for women because um if you don't think that sex has a special status it's very hard to explain why rape would have a special status

Why would it have a special status aside from theft, you know, or some other kind of neutral... Yeah. I mean, you might say that it's more like violating of bodily autonomy than something like theft is. But I guess if you were then to compare it to, I don't know, getting stabbed or something. Like it just... So when you first said the blowjob thing on Chris Williamson's podcast, so he's a friend of mine, I was... I found myself...

trying to run circles around my own brain to figure out like there's got to be a reason why this thing is bad other than saying oh because sex is just special like because that feels like a such an obvious answer but also feels like the answer that i i'm almost loathe to concede that point that like surely there must be like power dynamics oh but

I think because it runs very counter to the liberal paradigm, which is all about rationalizing human behavior.

it's often been observed that radical feminists, so that's feminists who come out of the second wave and tend to have this kind of Marxist analysis of the relationships between men and women, reach many of the same conclusions as Catholics and some other religious groups, but Catholics in particular, Catholics, they oppose prostitution, porn, surrogacy, whatever you want to pick. They are often in agreement, although not entirely with radical feminists. And I've often heard people

academics and other analysts asking why that would be like what possible why would radical feminists have anything in common with Catholics and it's often used against radical feminists as well as kind of a suggestion that they're somehow like secretly really conservative I think the reason that they reach the same conclusion actually is not because they are unusual it's because the liberal secular alternative is unusual in that they they recognize the specialness of sex

they agree that for whatever reason people have this very very strong instinct to view sex as special in the same way that we have a very strong instinct to like love our children or any other manner of slightly strange irrational response right um it's just a given this is just how people feel and i think if you start with that prior then you are going to end up particularly if you're really concerned about the well-being of women and of children you're going to end up opposing things like porn and i think the reason that

people's attempts to deny the specialness of sex, why they end up being much more permissive. It comes from that prior, but I think the prior is a problem. And I think also that people are really inconsistent on it. People will say simultaneously that whatever sex is like playing squash, but then they won't behave as if that's the case. Yeah. Yeah. One of the other interesting examples that you talk about in the book is this situation. And I

I hadn't come across this before. So he just really sort of threw me for one when, when, when he posed in the book, this idea of, um, essentially sexual favors in return for rent. Yeah. What's like, what's the, what's the, what's the story here? Um,

Yeah, it had some media attention during the pandemic because it became... Landlords started doing it more. It's basically the problem when landlords will advertise, often surreptitiously, that they'll offer free or reduced rent in exchange for sexual favours from young, attractive tenants, right? And...

I don't think I've ever come across anyone who thinks that's fine. Yeah. Aside from the like handful of landlords who might propose it themselves. All political parties in the UK are unanimous. It's just like so obviously a terrible thing. Right. Yes. But then I, and I think it's very striking that say the Liberal Democrats are really opposed to the sex for rent. And there's been various calls to have like bespoke offenses criminalizing the advertising for it.

But they want to decriminalize the sex industry. And Jeremy Corbyn similarly was opposed to sex for rent, but also has said on the record that he thinks that decriminalizing sex work would be the more civilized option. That was the expression he used. I'm like, lads, this is the same thing. You're just exchanging one form of economic good for another. If you want to say that a tenant is far too vulnerable to be exchanging sex,

sex in exchange for housing or if you want to say that there is just something grubby and exploitative and sexist and whatever about even proposing this as an arrangement how can you possibly say that it's fine as long as it's cash it just doesn't make sense to me cash can be exchanged for rent so it's like literally just removing an intermediary exactly but clearly something about it feels really really bad i think it's because it highlights what's going on i think it's because um

I think that we've been sold a bit of a fantasy about what the sex industry looks like. A lot of people don't have any contact with the sex industry. They've probably never knowingly spoken to, they will have spoken to sex buyers in their lives because there are enough of them around, but probably they wouldn't know about it. And they probably won't have spoken to people in prostitution. So a lot of what we think about

a lot of what we think about the sex industry comes from fiction um things like diary of a call girl would be a very typical portrayal of the sex industry and a very unrepresentative one it's not to say that there aren't examples of high-class call girls who have unusual experiences of the industry but it's absolutely not the norm um i think part of the reason i um

I take a different view from the standard view of the sex industry is because of actually speaking to women who've been in it at the grim end, right? Not at the high end, at the worst end, where actually most of the women are to be found, right? So I think that's part of the reason why people tend to have a slightly more permissive rhetorical stance on it. Whereas I think with sex for rent, it's just so obvious what's going on, particularly in the middle of a housing crisis, is that people are desperate

and then and you can so easily imagine how someone could be coerced into that kind of really explosive and dangerous situation i also do wonder a bit like a lot of the reporting on sex for rent it's about university cities and about the possibility of students being trapped in this kind of arrangement because we know of course the students are don't have very much money and i can't help but think that part of what's going on there is class as well i think there's that feeling that

The women who end up actually in like normal prostitution are poor almost always, right? And it doesn't feel as if like it's something that could realistically happen to middle class women. Whereas a landlord making a sleazy request of you does feel like it could happen to middle class women. So I can't help but think that there's an element of like self-interest there. Yeah. It's just me being cynical, but there we are.

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It's available on iPhone and Android, and you can check it out by typing in Trading212 into your respective app store. So thank you so much, Trading212, for sponsoring this episode. I'm going to pose a hypothetical here. So these days, society at large considers something like OnlyFans to be a totally reasonable form of side hustle for mostly women. I don't think there are many men on OnlyFans. There are some, but they mostly have male clients, I think. Sure. Okay. Yeah.

But OnlyFans is considered a reasonable side hustle because, of course, sex work is work. And just like I debased myself on the internet through YouTube videos, you know, what's really the difference between that and OnlyFans? It's all consensual, et cetera, et cetera. And then you have people like...

who are kind of sort of outspoken about how great a lifestyle this is and how actually being sort of women having the ability to make money through something like OnlyFans, where they have zero risk of violence because it's all through the internet and where the alternative might be working in a really grim factory. So why not allow women this opportunity? Let's put that as like on the one hand.

And then if we sort of add in this sort of sex for rent situation, whereby hypothetically, if a landlord were to say, you know what, I don't want you to have sex with me. I just want to, I just want you to be a sort of webcam girl for me. And in return, I'll give you discounted rent. That would still feel really weird. And it's still, there's something about that that still feels really sleazy and not nice and bad compared to if that landlord happened to be a paying client on,

her OnlyFans account and it's just the relationship was just less obvious even though he's paying her money effectively she's getting a discount on rent what's going on yeah why does it feel so bad in that situation maybe it's because it feels much more real and immediate

You know what it also is probably to some extent. Things like a secret diary of a cool girl, that kind of thing. I mean, it's always really interesting whenever you see either fictional portrayals or you see media reports on the sex industry. You know, the classic photo they use in the sex industry is like a woman in a short skirt leaning into a car. Like the photos are always of typically sort of headless women in sexy outfits. You never see photos of the clients wearing

I can't remember her name now off the top of my head, but there's this German woman who did a project where she took photos of sex buyers, because in Germany it's legal, so they have sort of nothing to fear from being photographed. So she did this series of portraits of sex buyers. I mean, partly to demonstrate the fact that they are, you know, old, young, fat, thin, whatever, like the whole range of men. But also, like, they're not attractive, generally, kind of by definition, if you're seeking out sex with...

someone who you have to coerce through payment like there's a good chances because she wouldn't otherwise have sex with you right these guys are not attractive and I think that

I think it's actually important to remember that, not have it as this kind of fantasy arrangement where you've got like a sexy guy in a dinner suit or whatever that you might see on the TV. Like these are the, the, the, the line I've, I've heard from, um, Rachel Moran, who is a writer. She wrote this amazing memoir called paid for about being prostitution. Um,

is if you want to know what it actually feels as a woman to really imagine what it would be like to be in prostitution, go into any bar, cafe, pub, whatever, look around at every man in your vicinity and imagine having sex with all of them.

like no choice right doesn't matter how much you fancy them and I wonder if thinking about having a sex rent or a nudes for rent arrangement or whatever with your landlord is we all think of like our last landlord and we think no no thank you yeah I guess it brings to relief what's actually going on exactly like a visceral reminder of what it means with like an anonymous field of like OnlyFans viewers or shoppers and stuff it just

sort of separates that out yeah the argument I make in the book for why prostitution invariably causes trauma to women in particular you know is you know it's partly due to the fact it's extraordinarily dangerous and it is and has very high rates of violence of every kind but also I think I think the reason it's

invariably experiences traumatic with a few exceptions like Ayla for instance although Ayla actually did she stopped doing in-person sex work right so she didn't she didn't like it very much but anyway um is because a very very deep-seated instinct within women which has a very obvious and um

and clear evolutionary background is that we really care a lot about who we have sex with. Like mate choice is very, very important, which does make sense if you understand the fact that men and women have different mating strategies and it's very much in women's interest to be picky about who they get pregnant by because pregnancy is extremely demanding on the body, dangerous, labor is dangerous. You then have a baby to look after for however many years afterwards, which is a burden on you, a burden on your community.

You don't want to get pregnant by some bozo who either has terrible genes or is going to abandon you. So that desire to invest wisely in your sexual partners is very, very deep-seated. And what prostitution does is it violates that choice. You don't have the option. The mate choice is removed from your power. And I think that is a big part of the reason why it has this very, very deeply felt emotional power.

response. Yeah. So I think like with all these different hypotheticals and scenarios and stuff, I mean, the conclusion of chapter one is essentially sex must be taken seriously because sex is in fact a special good beyond a coffee or a handshake or staying late at work. It's like this special thing. And we might not be able to explain exactly why it's a special thing using the liberal moral ideology, but we all just kind of know it is like it's

It's something that feels very unfashionable to say out loud, but everyone just knows it. Like no one actually behaves as if sex is as irrelevant as getting someone a coffee. Which segues us nicely into chapter two, which is men and women are different. What's going on there? I guess kind of we're thinking physically and also psychologically and like emotionally differently.

physically is, I mean, even that is. It should be obvious, but yeah, it isn't necessarily. The obvious thing is just in the sense that women are the ones who get pregnant, which means that in any heterosexual encounter, there's that asymmetry. Also the fact that women are much smaller and weaker than men, but like a surprising degree. I think people, I think it's become easier to,

to trivialize that difference because we live in a modern world where strength differences aren't as obvious and even you can like if you don't have siblings and you don't go to the gym and you don't do any manual work you can go like quite a long way without realizing that like your sibling is going to thrash you in a fight if you're if you're if he's male and you're female you know particularly post-puberty because different upper body differences for instance between men and women are

are wild i think it's like a factor of two the male punching strength is twice as forceful as female on average and it's one of those things if you look at if you look at graph like a scatter graph showing different individuals like yes there are some isolated examples not as many as you might think though and definitely the extreme end like olympians for instance like if if women didn't have a protected category in the olympics they just wouldn't even make it anywhere close to

actually competing in the games because the difference is that stark which matters obviously right so if you're talking about like going home with the randomer if a man and a woman are alone together the man just inherently is going to have a physical advantage combined with the fact the woman is the one who risks getting pregnancy who suffers the risks associated with things like hormonal work control and

There are just a whole bunch of ways in which women are at a disadvantage in that kind of scenario. Yeah. This idea that men and women are different was pretty unfashionable when I was at university. And I'm not sure to what extent it still is, having been out of university now for several years. But often...

I would find that when I was talking to people about this, I'd be using the phrase, I'd be using the idea of averages and the idea of a normal distribution with just like an innate understanding of what a normal distribution is. And yet...

people would always say, oh, but my friend is six foot three and she's, she could take any man in a fight. And I'd be like, okay. Smart people can be really dumb about that. Yeah. Like what's, what's going on there? Even scientists. It's funny, isn't it? Uh, yeah. Cause people will tend to just come up with exceptions. Um,

And of course those exceptions exist. I'm completely willing to incorporate exceptions into this whole analysis. It is funny how people tend not to do it about more morally neutral things, like height for instance. We're happy to accept that men are taller than women on average, even if there are tall women and there are some short men, the difference is massive.

similarly on other physical differences. And I mean, the psychological ones is the one that people really get upset about. And obviously, psychological differences are much more amenable to cultural influence than physical ones. Still, there's loads of evidence and the evidence accumulates more and more because we now have more sophisticated research methods that makes it clear that there are some important differences between men and women on average, and they hold true cross-culturally.

So I guess, um, you know, we can, we can go into the psychological differences in a moment, but I, I guess someone listening to this might be thinking, okay, fine. But like, why does on average even matter? Like, why do I personally care about the average? I'm not necessarily the average man or the average woman. Uh, at one point, a friend of mine gave dating advice to me saying that, you know, uh,

On average, women prefer men who are sort of come across as more masculine and therefore wear a black T-shirt in your Tinder profile pictures. And like, don't sing those Disney songs and have Harry Potter posters in your house because the average woman will think that it's not particularly masculine. It's not particularly alpha male kind of vibes.

And I mentioned this on a podcast, but I'm sort of just in passing and all the comments were, oh my God, I can't, like, this is such a stupid way of thinking. Like, obviously, you know, you aren't trying to appeal to the average. You're trying to appeal to an individual. You should be yourself, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. Where do you see the balance of like, how much should we care about on average versus actually treating individuals as individuals? So, yeah.

Yeah, and on an individual level, people might make decisions unique to their situation and that would be fine. The problem is when you're talking about population level and you're talking about laws, obviously, the legal system applies to everyone regardless of where you are on the whole curve, but also applying to norms, right? Because my argument in the book is that we used to have quite an elaborate set of norms relating to regulating sexual relationships between men and women, right?

And we've mostly done away with them and left just the consent framework standing. And I don't think the consent framework is good enough. I'm saying that actually things like, you know, if you have a norm that is something like men shouldn't hit women.

I mean, the law says that too, but just in terms of what's considered to be socially acceptable. There are all sorts of things that are against the law people do anyway, right? Like speeding people, speeding people all the time, et cetera. If you have a really rock solid norm where you say men hitting women is really bad, but women hitting men, it's not good, but it's not quite as bad. Like that's asymmetrical, clearly. And there might be examples of a woman who really belts a man and, you know, he's small and frail and that's like very dangerous. But

The reason that you would have that slightly different standard is because of recognizing the fact that these average differences exist. And at the population level, a man hitting a woman is much more likely to kill her than a woman hitting a man. Because most men can kill most women with their bare hands. And the reverse is not true. And that matters a great deal when you're thinking about relationships between men and women. Yeah. Yeah, I think that was the thing that really struck me with the debate that you had with

on that unheard youtube channel podcast show thing where it seemed like you were both sort of saying the same thing but what she was saying was a lot of kind of but let's take the individual into account yeah and it sounded like you were saying okay but if we're making laws and deciding norms for a whole society we can't just take individuals into account we have to with all of the

All of the downsides associated with broad brushstrokes. We've got to draw broad brushstrokes somewhere. Yeah, we have to. And so why not do that in a way that protects women rather than that...

I guess, protects the interests of the Hugh Hefner's of the world, as you say in the book. Yeah. Have you come across Rob Henderson's idea of luxury beliefs? Only in the book. I recently followed him on Twitter. So I want to get into more of his stuff. So his idea of luxury beliefs is a fabulous idea. It has so much explanatory power. His theory is that as luxury goods have become cheaper,

It used to be a way for the elites to signal their wealth would be to own whatever precious item.

one of the consequences of globalization is that a lot of these goods have become cheaper and his theory is that to some extent elite the elite class have pivoted towards other means of demonstrating their elite status that are not just sort of material and one example of this is luxury beliefs so a luxury belief is a belief that confers status on on elite people and

And the costs of it are borne entirely by poor people. Oh, okay. So what's an example? So the example that's most relevant for us is polyamory. So Rob...

gives the example of being in a university town and setting your Tinder location to like a mile radius. And you'll find loads and loads of women at Harvard, Oxford, whatever, who will say that they are poly, they're interested in open relationships, they're doing this kind of, you know, bohemian thing, which is increasingly fashionable. And it's a way of them advertising their sexiness and their rebelliousness and so on in a way that attracts partners and, you know, confers status.

But then he describes setting your Tinder ratio, let's say in a city like Oxford, to like 10 mile radius. And then you start seeing women who are single mothers, right? Who are living the consequences of disregarding monogamous marriage as an institution.

and like suffering for it being a single mother is really tough in all sorts of ways and they don't get any status for that at all right like living the polyamorous life if you're poor and you live in a council estate is not high status at all and actually causes all sorts of destructive effects in your life whereas if you're rich you can be poly and you can basically pick up the pieces if everything goes wrong because you have that kind of buffer around you that's conferred by wealth and

It's a really useful idea. And I think that that applies to, I mean, it does apply to something like what Ayla's talking about in relation to prostitution. So she has an unusual experience of it. Not always a good experience, but better than many. And she describes it as being a lot better than, for instance, working in a terrible factory job that she used to do. And I respect that. I completely recognize the fact that in her individual case, that may be true. The

The problem is that she's experienced the tippy-toppy end of the best form of prostitution through OnlyFans. And other, you know, camming, whatever, there's much less violence. She earns quite good money. She's not pimped. Like, every possible dimension is better than it might otherwise be.

And the problem is that if we're going to legislate or construct norms around Ayla's experience and do as many intersectional feminists and so on do, talk about sex work being work, which is a luxury belief, right? It's the sort of thing that if you say that in a university common room, it will confer status on you or make you look open-minded and liberal and bohemian and all of this stuff, right? It might be good

for some women like Ayla, it's not going to be good for women at the opposite end of the scale. Because the argument I make around decriminalizing the sex industry

I mean, bearing in mind that all legal models in relation to the sex industry are like better and worse trade-offs. It's a difficult, it's just a difficult thing to legislate for inherently. But I think the key problem with decriminalizing demand, making it legal to pay for sex, is that there aren't actually enough women like Ayla or whoever who are willing to meet that demand. Most women really, really don't want to be in prostitution. They'll only do it if they're very poor or if they're otherwise coerced. And the problem is that

in societies where buying sex is legal more men do it obviously like the difference is quite apparent between a country like like in Thailand for instance like amazingly high proportion of men buy sex in Germany since the legalization of sex industry the proportion of German men who have bought sex has gone up a lot and it becomes routine things like stag do's you'll go to a you'll go to a brothel right which is not considered

normal in countries where it's criminalized, is you need to meet that demand. You need women who can supply the sex that is being demanded. And that's when you get things like increases in trafficking. So legalization is associated with an increase in trafficking because women

pimps need to find women who can you know meet this demand and make money for them and so what sounds like a great open-minded idea which suits the interests of like the high-end call girls yeah is a luxury belief because the women who are suffering for it at the opposite end of the social spectrum yeah

I guess you talk about the Nordic model for this. What is that? Yeah. So the Nordic model is when you decriminalize sellers and criminalize buyers. Decriminalize sellers. Oh, so it's not illegal to be the prostitute, but it is illegal to be the person seeking a prostitute. And this is good because it reduces the demand and criminalizes the powerful people, the men who buy the thing, but it doesn't criminalize the poor destitute women who are forced into it. Yes, which has historically often been what's done that the

The women are the ones who get locked up and the men go free, which is obviously horrendous. So it flips that. Okay.

psychological differences between men and women. What's the kind of worms here? And I guess, how is it relevant to this whole debate? Again, it's that population level thing. I mean, the degree of difference varies quite a lot depending on what trait you're talking about. One of the ones that gets the most attention, I think wrongly, is...

the idea that men are more interested in things and women are more interested in people. Do you remember the James Damore Google memo? Oh, yes. I can't remember if it was like five years ago, maybe a bit longer. James Damore was a technician at Google. I can't remember his role at Google. He worked at Google and he wrote a memo which he circulated among his colleagues explaining the fact that the fact that there's an under-representation of women in certain roles at Google is...

And then over-representation in others. You see more women in things like human resources, communications kind of roles, which are more people-focused. And then you see more men in more, say, the engineering roles.

He said that this could be explained by the fact that there are these average differences between what men and women are interested in. And if you're looking at the very furthest tail on the bell curve in terms of, say, how interested you are in hard sciences, you're going to expect to see more men at that tail because of the gap on average between the two sectors. His argument was completely sound. His research was completely sound. He got fired because...

It was just, you're not supposed to say this. I think you're specifically not supposed to say this if you're a man and you work for Google. So as a woman who doesn't work for Google, do you buy James's reasoning here? Yeah, he's right. I also think that, and he says this himself in the memo, that the average difference is not massive. So you will expect to see men and women across the whole range of fields.

people, things, you know, distribution. The same is true of something like agreeableness. Women are a bit more agreeable than men are, but there are still plenty of women who are really disagreeable and plenty of men who are really agreeable. Neuroticism, like there are lots of traits which see a gap, but the gap isn't massive. Right.

Something like aggression, though, the gap is massive. Like the average gap? Yes. But then obviously that's most apparent in the tales. So like the vast majority of people in prison are men? Yeah, 95% in this country. And there's also an age skew there. So men and women, but it's most striking in men, are by far the most violent when they're in their teens and 20s.

And then the violent offending falls off a cliff, which I don't think can be explained except biologically, right? I think if you just want to explain that on the basis of socialization, which is often a...

a theory that feminists have pursued to say that men are, particularly in childhood, are socialized to be aggressive through things like toy guns and that we should be focusing on. I think fine, and clearly there is some truth to that. And clearly there are certain childhood or other environmental experiences that can make violent offending more likely. But then also you look at something like the age distribution in violent offending, you think, hang on, why would a 20-year-old

be many many times more likely than a 40 year old to commit this kind of offense unless what we're kind of talking about here is hormones which is trivializing a little which is simplifying it a little bit because clearly there's a lot of there's a lot going on in terms of our biological makeup but the gap between um violence violent aggression in men and women is massive and

very important if you're trying to, if you're thinking at the population level. And, and the, I mean, the, the, the trait that's most relevant to me and that I write about most in most detail in the book is what psychologists call sociosexuality. So that's your interest in sexual variety. It's not quite the same thing as sex drive, but someone who was high in the trait of, has unrestricted sociosexuality as psychologists would say is someone who is,

really interested in having lots of partners wants to jump into bed with someone as soon as they've met them will um is much more likely to say things like having sex without love is fine um basically someone who's having an absolute ball post sexual revolution right is someone who is high in social sexuality and men i don't think anyone will be surprised to hear are higher on average in that trait than our women and the gap is fairly significant and at the tails it's the most marked

So that's why sex buyers are almost entirely male. Would it not be reasonable to say that this is all a result of socialization? Like women have been oppressed throughout history and slut shamed and stuff. And therefore, of course, they're going to be lower in sociosexuality compared to men for whom, even though we'd like to say the sexual double standard doesn't exist, it still does. Men are conferred higher status by having multiple partners. All of those things surely mean that

Actually, maybe the sociosexuality gap doesn't really exist and it's just a relic of socialization. So that's the argument. Yeah, that's the alternative to my thesis. The problem with that argument is if socialization is responsible for the gap, then the socialization is remarkably consistent across time and place.

It seems like every culture decides to flip. It's like you flip the coin and it's just coming up heads every single time. What are the chances? Because if you look at, there's some really great studies done of social sexuality across cultures. Everyone finds that men are higher in it.

on average. And I mean, I think to some extent we've done an experiment in the West post-sexual revolution in whether we could socialize it otherwise. And if women are encouraged, not just permitted, but encouraged to have sex like men, maybe they'll do it. And the argument that I make in the book is that a lot of women are trying pretty hard to have sex like men and are being quite strongly encouraged by the culture and by

the men in their lives to attempt the high socio-sexuality kind of way of being. One of the things I examined at one point is articles in women's bags about how not to catch feelings, like guides to how to have sex without emotion. And they're always...

framed very carefully in a gender neutral way so that one of you know of a person didn't want to catch feelings from their relationship with another person how would they do that but it's very obvious that actually what we're talking about here is women getting emotionally attached to

in these sexual relationships and not wanting to, like thinking, oh man, this is like holding me back because I want to be having this. I want it to be behaving as if I had unrestricted social sexuality. I want to be like participating in hookup culture like a man. But I have these like niggling feelings which keep getting in the way, which I think is, I mean, unless you want to say, I suppose it's socialization, the childhood socialization goes that deep that it can't be undone.

Maybe, but I think Occam's razor says it's just the difference. There's a difference. That's like by far the simplest explanation for what we see across the world. This episode is very kindly brought to you by WeWork. Now, this is particularly exciting for me because I have been a full paying customer of WeWork for the last two years now. I discovered it during, you know, when the pandemic was on the verge of being lifted. And I'd spent like the whole year just sort of sitting in my room making YouTube videos.

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which is why it's particularly exciting that they're now sponsoring this episode. And if you want to get 50% off your first booking, then do head over to we.co forward slash Ali, and you can use the coupon code Ali at checkout ALI to get 50% off your first booking. So thank you so much WeWork for sponsoring this episode. When I was in university in my third year, because, you know, in

in medicine, you can do that or whatever you want in your third year. So I did psychology. And one of our lecture courses was the psychology of individual differences. And this was comparing things like men versus women in all sorts of things, personality, IQ, controversial, different race differences between all these different things.

And a lot of it was like, well, you know, when it comes to things like aggression, when it comes to things like sociosexuality, there's a clear evolutionary psychology rationale for this. And, you know, Homo sapiens has been around for 300,000 years. It's really been an idling in terms of human history where the pill has been a thing. So, of course, our evolutionary brains are somewhat hardwired to, you know, for women to be choosier about who they have sex with and men's mating strategy to be like,

willy-nilly, you know, whatever. Show your wild oats. Exactly. And yet it felt like even at the time at university where

Like I had friends who were doing like anthropology and like art subject and stuff where one of the, one of the essay titles in like the third year exam was a biological sex is a lie discuss. And I was like, Whoa, I mean, gender. Okay. Like fair enough. But like, are we really going to talk about chromosomes and biological sex and like uteruses and stuff as if they're just completely mythical and how hormones have absolutely no effect at all. And it became very unfashionable to even suggest that there was a evolutionary psychology explanation for stuff that

To the point that anytime I bring up the idea, oh, but like evolutionarily, the response would be, look, that's what the men's rights activists say. You've been reading all this red pill stuff, haven't you? But it sounds like it just is the simplest explanation that there is a difference and let's acknowledge the difference and let's work with it rather than trying to, I guess, override our evolutionary instincts. Yeah. I think that the, so I do completely get and sympathize with the feminist view.

hostility to evolutionary psychology and indeed to sort of scientific sexism so-called in general it goes back a long way there have been some pretty egregious examples of historically of sort of attempts to rationalize um the subordination of women um the missing five ounces was the phrase that was used by some 19th century psychologists to describe the fact that given that women had like

given that women have smaller brains because women are smaller, that missing five ounces on average explained women's intellectual inferiority.

When of course we know that if you're not going to let women go to university, they're going to struggle to make groundbreaking achievements in intellectual fields. So that's clearly an example. And we found, I mean, you mentioned sexism and IQ. We know that the average IQ between men and women is about the same, even if the range is bigger for men. So I think that is a clear example of the fact that it was an environmental limit. But...

that doesn't mean that we have to dismiss all scientific research into sex differences and all of the evidence for it. And I think evolutionary psychology is just a morally neutral field of study and we can do with it whatever we want to do. It is an inconvenient field of study if what you want to do is kind of deny the existence of human nature per se and build kind of

build utopia off the idea of us being blank slates. We aren't blank slates though, is the problem. And we kind of have to deal with what we've got. And my view is that, look, if these sex differences exist, then that's just the fact. It's not a good or a bad thing, but it is what we have to work with. And I think actually there's a strong case for using evolutionary psychology to feminist ends in some situations. What's that?

So for instance, if we accept the difference in socio-sexuality between men and women and we accept the fact that actually it's going to be very difficult for women to be persuaded or persuade themselves into imitating a more masculine style of sexuality, then I think that the feminist argument against hookup culture becomes irrefutable.

Whereas if you're working with a blank slate model and you're saying, well, all of this is socialized, all of this can be undone, you're kind of giving fuel to the Hugh Hefner's, who are intent on persuading women out of their natural and self-protective instincts. So we talked about two areas in particular in which men and women are on average different, so aggression and sociosexuality. Mm-hmm.

Another area that I think you talk about in the book, but again, there's a specific example that I'm thinking of that brings this to light, is that I was having a conversation with a female friend a couple of weeks ago, months ago. And there was this person that we were talking about. This guy was going on a date with a girl. And, well, okay, cool. Guy's going on a date with a girl. They met online. No harm done. Like, let's... Okay, cool. But then it transpired that...

The chap in question had in fact booked a hotel room for the night around where they were having the date, just in case things went well. Now, in my mind, I was thinking, all right, fair enough.

And in her mind, she was thinking, oh, my freaking God, this is just completely unacceptable. Like, oh, this is an innate sense of revulsion at the thought that a man would have the audacity to book a hotel room just in case things went well. And of course, it would be consensual and stuff. And it's like we were a bit puzzled by this, she and I, because it's like we had a very clear difference in thinking.

Me not batting an eye to it, I mean, obviously, it's going to be consensual. And is there as an option? And worst case, he goes to his hotel room alone. Who cares? But for her, it was this real sense of revulsion. And I feel like this idea of kind of getting the ick and like feeling that innate sense of revulsion about certain things will give women a very different response than it does to men. Yes. What's going on there? Yeah, the ick. Interesting, isn't it? And the ick is one of those things that you read about in women's mags. And again...

Well, actually no, it's generally represented as being a woman thing. Women get the ick and men tend not to get the ick. And what's being described there basically in colloquial terms is the fact that women's sexual disgust threshold is a lot lower than men's. And that's one of those things that you can measure quite objectively because you can measure people's disgust response through things like sweating and heart rate. And it's much easier to trigger in women than it is in men.

There's interesting evolutionary theories around this. I mean, it might be partly to do with mate choice, the fact that women care more about it than men do. It might also be to do with the fact that women tend to be more vulnerable to sexual disease. So women are more easily grossed out by signs of disease in a potential sexual partner. And that might be because the nature of penchant of sex just means that women tend to be more vulnerable to disease transmission from sex and also

that women are more likely to pass sexual diseases onto their children through pregnancy and breastfeeding. So there's maybe a more like a deeply embedded instinctive protective factor there. Um, whatever the cause, it does seem to be, it does seem to have some kind of evolutionary cause. It could be several. Um, and yeah, it is deeply felt. And I think it's something that, um, um,

I mean, partly because I think we're very invested in our post-sexual revolution culture in denying the differences between men and women, pretending that we're very similar. I think it's something that men and women struggle to sort of instinctively comprehend that difference. I think this often is what's going on with conflict between incels and feminists. In that, like, I think from...

from a certain kind of maybe naive, in-cell perspective, the fact that any woman can go out into the street or anywhere really and pick up a sex partner within minutes is seen as heaven on earth. You're living exactly what I'm dreaming of, the ability to attract sexual partners. Whereas from women's perspective, they're like, I don't want to have sex with some random guy on the street. That's terrible. I dream of being left alone by creepy guys who scare me.

But there's like a visceral level in which each group can't quite understand the other because we have very different instincts around sexuality. Yeah, I remember sort of...

anytime this guy i think in the last year or so this is this sort of conversation has been had like two two or three times with with female friends of mine where they've mentioned that like you know they've got all these male friends and then at one point one of the male friends will just throw away you know drop a throwaway comment that oh of course every guy in your friendship group would would be down to have sex with you if you if you were up for it and they'd be like what what like it completely completely blows their mind because they cannot imagine cannot imagine a world in which like but like i see these guys as my friends they're like they're like brothers yeah and they're just

yeah there's almost no girl I've ever met who has actually appreciated the fact that men were willing to have sex with basically anyone as long as they meet a reasonable threshold for attractiveness whereas that's just absolutely not the case for women and there are like even studies where they've gone out on the streets and done this like

Yes, and 100% of the women say no to random requests from men. Whereas, I can't remember the figures, but it's probably a majority of men say yes, unless they're in a relationship or something like that. I mean, it's worth bearing in mind that men do have kind of different modes of sexuality. So men are not consistently behaving like cads. Men have a low bar when it comes to casual sexual partners, when, as you say,

Pretty much, you know, Julie Bindle, a feminist friend of mine, she likes to collect news stories about men having sex with inanimate objects because they do sometimes come up in like local news. And she has a little informal collection of man found having sex with a pile of leaves, man found having sex with a bike, you know, like imagine it and it's happened, right? So clearly there is an extent to which men can be persuaded to basically shag anything like living or dead. But...

Men aren't like that though about like potential wives, right? So when it comes to choosing a long-term partner, men have very high standards and care deeply about the whole package, not just how attractive a woman is but everything else about her. Women don't seem to have those two modes. Women basically will have sex. The criteria that women look for in a casual partner and look for in a long-term partner are the same criteria. And actually often women will have sex with a casual partner in the hope that he'll become a long-term partner.

um down the line whereas and i i think a lot of women don't realize that men have two modes which can cause heartbreak because if you've if you're if you're having sex with a man with the belief that you're on wife track and he doesn't think that yep then that's really painful yeah um yeah this is another one of the things where i think there's just such a clear like

basically everyone every man knows that there are two thresholds yeah there's the threshold for a good time and there's the threshold for an actual long-term relationship yeah and whenever women are confronted with at least from what i've seen it just again it's like really mind-blowing it's like oh my god men are the worst men are trash like i can't believe this is the thing and um this idea that women don't have two modes though so uh

What about the trope of women wanting to have sex with the pool boy or the personal trainer, but not actually wanting to... Those people aren't husband material, they're good time material. Is that not the same as cat versus dad? I guess it happens, although it is interesting. I wonder if it happens more in fiction than in real life, because it's interesting that...

Men and women tend to cheat for different reasons. So men are more likely to cheat on their partners basically just because they're horny. There's no difference between the level of reported relationship satisfaction between men who cheat and men who don't cheat.

It's not because they're unhappy in their relationships that they're cheating. It's they're cheating either because they're unusually horny or they're unusually unscrupulous morally or both. Whereas for women, women cheat when they're unhappy in their relationships and they don't otherwise. And that, you know, on average, whatever, there are exceptions, but that seems to be because what women are doing, the purpose of cheating for women is a lifeboat to line up the next relationship because you're unhappy in your current relationship.

So you normally wouldn't therefore cheat with the pool boy if your husband is wealthy. Normally you'd be cheating with someone who seems like a viable alternative partner. There's slightly different motivations at play there. Okay, interesting.

There's a great book by David Buss. I mean, David Buss in general is fantastic. Yeah, I recently read The Evolution of Desire. Yeah, it's really interesting. His latest book is called Bad Men. Oh, I'll check it out. It's very, very good. He covers a lot of this in great detail and provides the wealth of data that is very persuasive. Yeah, I have a surprising interest in this genre, the topic. I just think it's this combination of like

really taboo and controversial and also like clearly there's this whole like scientific and like sociological and evolutionary psychological backing behind the things that we don't like to talk about that we feel are controversial yeah um i think it depends on your personality and how much you enjoy that i find it thrilling yeah like to to sort of go behind the scenes and be like yes of course this is true um but some people find it confronting

Yeah. Okay. So we've talked about kind of two, two core differences between men and women psychologically on average, again, with all the caveats, aggression and sociosexuality. Yeah. And I feel like those are sort of the two pillars that form the rest of your thesis around sociosexuality.

sexual revolution being potentially not as good a thing as we might have liked. So if we accept that, okay, fine, let's say that Louise is right about all the evidence, the weight of the evidence suggesting that, in fact, men are on average more aggressive and more sociosexual than women. What does that mean about stuff regarding sex, relationships, gender dynamics? It means that the people who've actually won from the sexual revolution are high status men. Not necessarily all men,

Because there are some, there are, you know, quite a lot of men, if you're familiar with the data that comes out of dating apps, which shows that it's a minority of men who tend to be getting all of the attention from women and the majority of men are getting almost nothing. I think that holds true generally.

generally post-sexual evolution in terms of like who is actually like the Hugh Hefner's are not representative right the Hugh Hefner's the high status attractive men who can get loads of consequence free sex they're having a great time is that not true on the women's side as well no because what women do you familiar with hypergamy as a term so women are much more

than men are in general in having relationships with people who are, with men who are higher status than themselves. It's called hypergamy. And what that means in practice on things like dating apps where you've got a very large pool of partners to choose from is that women tend to all be flocking to the top, the men at the top of the tree. So I think the figure is it's like on Tinder, the 10% most attractive men are getting 60% of likes from women. And then the bottom 10% are getting like

zero it doesn't match up neatly based on your attractiveness level yeah women are all kind of aiming higher um and because on tinder and in general in a kind of casual sex culture those men are not obliged to stick to one woman they don't get married and then remove themselves from the dating market right they have simultaneous relationships or they have back-to-back relationships what those men are basically doing is they are like

living a polygynous life, right? Where they're accumulating multiple partners. The women aren't necessarily aware of this. Right. So you end up with some men who are having lots of partners

Most men are having none. And the women are also miserable because they're having these brief unsatisfying relationships with attractive men who then dose them. But this idea, for example, like the top 10% of men are getting 60% of the likes. Is this not also true of the top 10% of most attractive women are getting 60% of the likes? All women are inundated with likes.

Because men... That's fair to say. Just thinking of every single female friend I know who's on dating apps, just like dozens if not hundreds of matches a day. I mean, you'll have a bit of a range, but it doesn't accumulate at all in the same way. Like pretty much any woman on Tinder is going to have some options available to her, which is not true for men. Yeah. I remember there was a time a few years ago, this was when, back when I was a medical student, one of the chaps in our year was like incredibly attractive. And we just went on his Tinder one day and he...

It was just like something out of this world. It's like every single right swipe was, oh, you've got a match, you've got a match, you've got a match, you've got a match. And we were all just like, oh my God. Like it's just so totally different an experience. Whereas most female friends that I have who have made accounts on Tinder or Hinge have just been like, oh, I've got 143 matches today. I'm just like, wow, incredible. Yeah. Rob Henderson talks about, he's written a sub stack on dating apps and he talks about a friend who,

a very attractive male friend who was an early adopter of Tinder and had 21,000 women match with him over a period of some years. So much so that Tinder identified him as being like a stellar user and they gave him perks, which then meant that he accumulated even more. In contrast to another friend who wasn't that bad looking but was kind of

a bit below average. He had seven in the same period. So the inequality is amazing. I've read that if Tinder was a nation state and you're assessing its inequality, it would be one of the most unequal countries in the world.

OnlyFans would be the most unequal country in the world because OnlyFans creators are also subject to the kind of Pareto law and a minority of OnlyFans creators basically taking all the money. And the median OnlyFans creator has 30 subscribers.

Hmm. So, I mean, it sounds like the conclusion there is like, unless you are top 10% alpha male, then you're unlikely to have a great time on dating apps. Yeah. I think it's broadly the experience. And I think in general, I think that applies to other things too. I mean, so I guess something like porn, I mean, so some men would say that the fact that you now have copious availability of porn on every platform going and that there isn't

nearly as much stigma associated with it as there has been historically is great. I don't know though if, I think actually there's an increasing feeling among men that actually porn is bad for men.

Yeah, there's a lot of men's personal development YouTube channels that are recently peddling this narrative of like, "Porn is really bad. Delete all the porn. Stop spending all your time on it." Yeah, and nofap just becomes more and more influential with time. The argument I'm taking aim at is the idea that the sexual revolution has been fabulous for women and it was all about freeing women. I don't think that's true.

I think that it's been much more to the benefit of Hugh Hefner than Marilyn Monroe, right? But it's also not the case that the sexual revolution has been consistently amazing for men. I think the sexual revolution has been good for a minority of men who are able to enjoy its fruits, you know. But even then, I think it has a shelf life.

I think it's probably really good fun to be the man with 21,000 matches on Tinder when you're in your 20s and 30s. You're not going to have that in your 70s though. And I think that if you make the decision to just sleep around and not ever get married, not ever have children and so on, that might be great for a period when you're young. I think you will regret it later though, generally. So I would say that even Hugh Hefner

had a grand old time you know in his prime but he he ended up being a pretty pathetic figure by the end so yeah someone in the 70s having lots of say it's just a just a little you know it's just kind of pathetic isn't it yeah yeah exactly what was the story with Aziz Ansari and how do we land at the idea of that consent is not enough uh so Aziz Ansari is a actor comedian and he um

He was at the center of a Me Too scandal, which attracted a lot of attention. I think because it was a particularly sort of controversial example, which means that people love talking about controversy. So I think that's why it became prominent. He went for a date with a woman who they went back to his house afterwards. He kind of subtly pressured her into sex. He wasn't violent or forceful at all.

She didn't say no, but equally, she wasn't really into it. And he sort of persisted in trying to persuade her, even when she was lukewarm, and they ended up having sex. And then she went home. I think she texted him later and said something like, that was weird. And he said, sorry, something along those lines. And then sometime later, she wrote an anonymous account or a pseudonymous account of what had gone on.

And it became the source of controversy because the question was whether or not she had really consented to the sex. I think reading her account that it's clear that she did consent in a legal sense in that Ansari jumped the legal bar and

The legal bar, however, is very low. I think that the reason that she was distressed and the reason a lot of women identified with her account in relation to their own experiences is because he behaved legally, but not like a gentleman, right? But that kind of vocabulary is so old-fashioned. It's so unfamiliar to anyone who's kind of operating a liberal feminist framework that

she couldn't use words like ungentlemanly or chivalry or even I think words like respect or dignity you know words like these are a little bit kind of so she talked about consent and everyone else talked about consent and that became the subject of discussion because that was the only vocabulary left available

I think that the consent, I think that the focus on consent as the sole framework for determining whether or not sexual behavior is good or bad is completely inadequate. There's so much gray area between good sex and consensual sex.

I guess sort of consent is this sort of legal bar. Yeah. But then we're saying that beyond that, there is actually a moral, gentlemanly, chivalrous, respectable, dignified bar. Exactly. And you're not allowed to talk about that because that just feels a bit weird. Like, why would you bring up like gentlemanliness that harks back to the eras of, I don't know, the 1900s or something? Yes. And therefore, when trying to critique Aziz Ansari's behavior or otherwise, if the only word you're allowed to use is consent, it means that everything just is like, okay, I'm going to do this.

the people who are like pro Aziz Ansari, the only thing they're arguing about is was it consent? Yeah. To which the answer is probably yes, but like kind of gray area, but probably yes. The people who are anti Aziz Ansari are like, was it consent? To which they think the answer is probably no, but like gray area, but probably no. And consent becomes the battleground by which all of these things are figured out. And I think we're all talking past each other by doing that. Because actually I don't think consent is the source of dispute. I think the source of dispute is whether or not he behaved morally. Yeah.

To which I think the answer is no. He did also behave normally, right? Like this is a completely standard style of encounter. I mean, that was part of the reason why it was so widely publicized because a lot of women can, it resonated with them. They'd had those kinds of experiences where, you know, cause the expectation, particularly cause he's famous, she's not famous. You know, the, the expectation was that she would put out on her first date because that's normal.

And she didn't really want to, but she also didn't really have the confidence to assert her reluctance, which is why she kind of went along with it. And I think it's a really good example of the fact that understanding this solely in terms of individual decision-making just doesn't quite work because we're all functioning in an environment where there are parts of least resistance.

which are determined by the culture. And if the path of least resistance when you go on a date with a celebrity is to put on a first date, then of course that is the direction in which you're going to be pushed, even if you don't really want to. But again, how do you talk about that in terms of consent? It's a completely inadequate framework. Yeah. One of the passages that you quote in the book, I think it's this girl who had a consensual sexual encounter

but didn't really feel great about it and tried to convince herself that it's just sex. I think that phrase, it's just sex, highlights a lot of what's going on there. Yeah. So this is an anonymous, I think, Me Too contribution for a woman who had had sex with a guy who actually, you know, she fancied him. There was no coercion involved. Like it was kind of fine. It also left her feeling dreadful.

And I think that was often actually the case with a lot of Me Too stories. I mean, some of the Me Too stories were straightforwardly criminal, but not necessarily. A lot of them were to do with having kind of sex that was sort of fine and was supposed to feel okay according to what's considered normal. But women felt terrible about it and they didn't quite know why they felt terrible and it was difficult to articulate. And often the way of resolving that feeling was to talk about...

was to suggest that somehow consent had been absent and that the man in question had not respected consent in some way, rather than, as we were saying, to say that he had behaved in an ungentlemanly way, or moreover to say that actually maybe there is something wrong in general with the norms. Maybe the whole expectation that women will be having emotionless sex is

is setting women up to fail and that we shouldn't be surprised to discover that women are feeling terrible after having sex that actually is basically not suited to their self-interest. I mean, particularly when you think of it in terms of the physical imbalances, like the whole hookup culture set up is grossly unfair. The fact that you've got women are the ones who have to worry about pregnancy, women are the ones who have to worry about hormonal birth control, women are the ones who are at risk of violence.

Women are the ones who are much less likely to want casual sex, much less likely to seek it out. Women orgasm a lot less than men do. In every possible way, women end up on the losing side of this arrangement. So why is it being normalized? I mean, my argument is it's not feminist in the least.

And I suspect as well that the reason that it's been normalized as it has is partly due to ideology. It's partly due to sexual disenchantment. It all feeds back into liberal feminism and liberalism in general, which is sort of invested in seeing us as atomized individuals who are basically indistinguishable from each other in terms of sex. I think also part of what's going on is to do with this hypergamy thing. It's the fact that women are competing generally for the most attractive men. That is the 10% of men who are getting most of the attention.

offers of sex and it does mean that those men have an amazing amount of power in the dating market and whereas previously in a monogamous marriage system they would get married and they'd remove themselves from the dating market now they are like they can basically live an informal polygamy um which isn't actually codified in law but like that's that's basically what they're living which means that they can demand from women the kind of sex they like

which is casual, pornified, et cetera, et cetera. And so women feel like they have no choice because if you don't put out, someone else will. And I think often it's easier to resolve that feeling. It's not difficult to find women who will say that they like this, that they find it empowering, et cetera, et cetera. I think the reason for that though is because it's a much, much more appetizing kind of narrative for what's going on. You don't want to think of yourself as being someone who's just been kind of funneled into dysfunctional styles of

of sexuality and behavior, it's much better to think of yourself as being an agent. And there will be examples where that's true. But equally, I know so many women who have lived like that as younger women and then later have changed their minds and thought, actually, I wasn't doing that for good reasons. I was pressured in various ways. Bridget Fittazi, who's an American podcaster, said,

a comedian, she, I spoke, I spoke on her podcast and she read the book and she, she wrote an essay about it last week actually called I regret being a slut because Bridget used to work for Playboy as a writer, um, and, um, very much lived this like sexual disenchantment life of having lots of casual hookups. Um, and now says, she said that she opened the first page of my book and just burst into tears because she,

she completely recognized that mindset of sort of persuading yourself that this is good even if it feels wrong. This is one of the disputes I had with Ayla in the Unheard interview because her emphasis and like I get it on a rational level is that some people are well suited to this kind of

casual relationships, some people aren't. The task is to work out which category you're in and to like carefully examine your own responses, which is fine. And I'm sure for some people that works. The problem is that human beings are amazingly good at self-deception. And if the, and if the, and if the high status thing to be is the woman who likes the casual style of sex, then of course you're going to sort of, you have an interest in like

assigning yourself to that category and ignoring the extent to which you feel differently. Of course, it used to be the flip side, right? It used to be that the pressure was on women not to have premarital sex and women who actually wanted to would have suppressed that feeling in themselves. But this is the power of culture. So presumably you're not advocating a return to pre-1950s morality where there is a clear, you know, the vehicle of shame is used strongly against women to disincentivize

multiple partners and casual relationships as it is with men but like less so um presumably that's that's not what we're trying to get to no and actually i do worry a bit that the um i think that there's a correction happening now or starting to happen in the the this kind of sexual hyper liberalism has swung so far in the other in one direction i think that there is starting to be a swing back and there's starting to be a reaction against it particularly among gen z you hear a lot more kind of

criticism of sex positivism on things like TikTok. And I do worry a bit that that could take the form of slut shaming and that say women who went on OnlyFans in like the great OnlyFans Fest of 2020 are going to really pay the price later. I don't want that to happen. I really sincerely don't. I don't think that the, it's kind of like with the Nordic model. I don't think that the mechanism for change should be directed at

criminalizing or shaming women who've actually been taken advantage of. I think I want my shame to be directed at the playboys. The problem is that obviously on a societal scale, it's quite hard to coordinate. Yeah. We'll come to your action points in just a moment. I'd love to talk a little bit about

Love to talk is a bit of a weird turn of phrase about sexual assault and sexual violence. And I wonder if we can start with kind of your background in this, because I know that you have a background in this. Yes. My first job out of university was working in a rape crisis center. What does a rape crisis center do? It depends on the center, but generally emotional support helpline, helping victims through

the criminal justice process, providing therapy to victims and things like support groups and so on. My job specifically was doing one-to-one support with teenage girls. And I also did consent workshops in schools and trained helpline volunteers. What prompted you to go into this career path or this job after university? I was volunteering on it at university and then a job came up.

And I had actually intended to just stay in the charity sector, but then I sort of became a journalist by accident a little bit. So here I am. So what was your experience in this rape crisis center? I found the, because I did, when I started volunteering there, I was doing a degree in women's studies and I found the distinction between like the theory, feminist theory and feminist reality extremely jarring. Okay. How so? Things like the course that we did on,

introduction to feminist philosophy had so little in it about, very little in it really about violence or biology, almost nothing about motherhood. It was all this kind of angels dancing on the head of a pin stuff about defining women and gender presentation and all this kind of stuff. And I've always just felt like I don't really care about things like lipstick and drag and I don't know, all this performance stuff. It just doesn't seem to be very important to me. Whereas what you see on the ground in frontline feminists

services. Like an amazing proportion, for instance, I did not know this before I saw it on the ground, an amazing proportion of child sexual abuse is committed by stepfathers. So much. Which is something that evolutionary biologists have paid close attention to. So a step-parent is about a hundred times more likely to abuse a child than a biological parent. It's called the Cinderella effect.

And the theory is that it's because they don't have any biological investment in the child. And actually, if anything, the child might be a threat and a competitor within the household because they monopolize the resources of the new partner. Yeah. There's that quote from, I think, Steven Pinker that you cite in the book. Can you remember what that was? I think he said something like it's the single clearest determinant ever found for predicting child abuse.

Yeah, which just feels like, I mean, someone listening to that is going to think, oh, but like... I know a step-parent who's amazing. Yeah, agreed. There are loads of exceptions. We're talking about minority, but it is also very apparent on paper, the extent to which it raises the risk. Okay. So it sounds like one of the things you learned working at the Rape Crisis Centre was...

difference between kind of feminist theory and kind of reality on the ground yeah step parents abusing their children way more yeah i mean one example also just the youth of victims the modal rape victim is 15 15 yeah surprisingly young right that's surprisingly young yeah and the proportion of female rape victims who are over the age of 30 is in the single digits so basically your period of risk is from adolescence to 20s

surprisingly young it does kind of like it kind of makes sense actually with the sort of the stereotype I mean all stereotypes are kind of based in truth that's why they become stereotypes and but it's not it doesn't really make sense within the more academic explanation for rape which puts much more emphasis on um power and socialization and patriarchy and all these kind of social forces rather than thinking about possible biological origins of sexual violence like if you

The age of rape victims matches perfectly with the age of attractiveness to men, of women, right? Teens and 20s. Like that's why porn is all women in their teens and 20s, right? That's why teen is consistently the most popular category is because it's associated with fertility. And if...

If you think that the motivation for rape has nothing to do with sexual desire, that it's about violence and control and power, that doesn't really make sense. But I think if you recognize that actually sexual desire is in there too, then it does. And so I think what happened in my thinking is that seeing, noticing these things, noticing these trends and things like demographics,

made me think hang on i don't think the full story is is there in the academic feminist explanations for this phenomena yeah and and so you mentioned so i i remember when i was again what

when I was in my sort of undergrad years, around 2013-ish was when rape culture started becoming a thing that people talked about. And within a period of like a few months, it seemed like every college and every university society was putting on sexual consent workshops, which were always a little bit of like a

The impression I got was that people felt that they were a bit pointless, but no one wanted to say that they felt that they were a bit pointless because, I mean...

Obviously, there was an epidemic of... You don't want to sound like a rapist. Exactly. Obviously, there was this epidemic of rape going amongst college campuses, apparently, especially in the US, but also apparently in the UK. Every woman you would speak to has had some kind of experience of sexual violence. Every man you speak to says, hey, all my friends are gentlemen. They wouldn't act like that. Clearly, there's a difference. Clearly, there's something going on. Yes. So you said that you ran sexual consent workshops? At schools rather than university, but it's much the same thing. Yeah. What's going on there? I mean, I think that they are fine. I think that...

I think it's good for institutions to do them. I also don't think they do what people think they do generally. Because what people think they do is they educate would-be rapists. The idea being, I suppose, that rapists don't know it's wrong or they don't know that what they're doing is rape or that there's some sort of information gap that needs to be bridged.

then it's not normally phrased like that because when you phrase it like that, it sounds really stupid. It is really stupid. I think what consent workshops actually do is they provide signposting for victims. You say, if this happens to you, this is what you do. They make it clear to victims what the law is and when...

things that have been done to them like that they're allowed to object they're allowed to go to the police etc and i think it's also useful in an institution to make certain boundaries very clear so for instance i think it is good for schools to tell kids that if they share revenge porn there will be disciplinary consequences because then if they do they can't claim that they didn't know right fine so i think all this stuff is good the problem is i think that um

sex rape is not a consequence of misinformation or misunderstanding generally i think it is a consequence of sexual aggression combined with opportunity right and one of the things about universities i mean there's actually evidence to suggest that women who are at universities are less at risk of sexual violence than women who aren't if you're just for age so the idea that campuses are like uniquely um

infused with rape culture doesn't really seem to match up with the data it's also though the case that um you know there are certain environments to some extent found on university campuses but also elsewhere which are provide a lot of opportunities for would-be rapists like for instance environment with loads and loads of drunk women is like the perfect environment if you are sexually predatory and you're looking for you're looking for victims

Yeah. So one argument that I've heard is that this idea of sexual assault and rape being sort of violent, aggressive men finding a woman in an alleyway or in a club is not actually the majority of rape. The majority of rape happens within relationships or within families. I don't know the data on this. To what extent does that hold true? So the most common type of perpetration is an acquaintance.

It is true that boyfriends and ex-boyfriends, particularly ex-boyfriends, are also very common perpetrators. And it is also true that sexual violence within families is more common than I think anyone really wants to admit. So there are a lot of different circumstances and it's true that the violent rape in an alleyway is a minority of cases. I mean, stranger rape in general, I think it's like...

less than 5%. I can't remember exactly the figures, but stranger rape is quite unusual. Although women have a very intense fear of it. It motivates a lot of safety work that women do when they're out. But yeah, it is less common than something like an acquaintance. I guess if we put those situations aside and we then think about the college campus where clearly there's this

I want to say gray area, but depending on what side, depending on your perspective, it's not particularly gray. It is just black and white between women having, essentially being sexually assaulted by dudes in a college campus. And it seems like telling women to not drink alcohol feels like profoundly victim-blaming-y. And one of your kind of conclusion points at the end of the book where

essentially that the chapter is entitled uh listen to your mother is um you know the the idea of get drunk or high in private and with female friends rather than in public or in mixed company yeah now when we were kind of doing research for this for this podcast like this was a point where you know i just i've been discussing this book with loads of friends over the last like several several weeks and so since i first came across it this idea of it sounds like

Louise Perry is saying that the solution to male sexual violence is to tell women to stop drinking, which feels like not the right answer somehow. It's probably the most controversial line in the book. Yeah, I mean, I don't say women shouldn't drink. I say women shouldn't get drunk. Around men, they don't know.

So that is slightly different. But yeah, I know that's really countercultural. I completely agree. It wasn't countercultural until, you know, 1980s, 1990s, that wasn't considered countercultural. I think LADEC culture has had quite a lasting influence in terms of valorizing women drinking like men and getting like blind drunk in public. I mean, it's one of those things where I think...

I am very sensitive to the victim blaming risk and part of the reason for low prosecution rates of sexual violence is to do with rape myths being embedded in the criminal justice system. There are a lot of other reasons too, but that is one of them. And so we do have to be sensitive to that. And I say completely unequivocally that a man who raped a drunk woman is the only person at fault in that scenario.

Having said that, in practice, this is what we tell our friends. This is what we tell our sisters and our mums tell their daughters, right? In practice, everyone knows that it's not a very good idea to incapacitate yourself when you're around men that you can't necessarily trust. The problem is just that you're not supposed to say it, not publicly. You say it to people in private. You don't say it publicly. And I think the problem with not saying it publicly is that not all young women do have people who will tell them.

in private there's a certain hypocrisy there I think hypocrisy as in in that you can privately as a feminist choose not to get really drunk and you can tell your loved ones to do the same thing but you can't advertise it as a

as a guideline. You have to say publicly, well, no, of course women should be able to behave as men do. And of course they should, you know, this naturalistic fallacy. Like, of course it should be possible for women to do anything in public and to be completely safe from predators. But the fact is that they're not. And I think that any kind of norm which encourages women to behave in a way that will result in lives being ruined by sexual violence, I just think it's dishonest.

So I felt I needed to say it, even though I knew that it would get backlash because it's true. And I think that everyone does actually know that it's true. It's like with sexual disenchantment, you know, there's the rhetorical level where you say you should be able to do whatever you want and sex is like playing squash. And then there's how people behave. And the gap, I think, shows exactly how true the rhetoric really is. Do you think like...

What would our kind of steel man feminists say is like a good reason why we don't have this rhetoric in public? Because men will hear it and they will conclude that it is, that drunk women are asking for it. And jury members will hear it and will conclude that drunk women are asking for it and that it will feed into these things.

negative stereotypes around rape victims. And I agree that that is a risk. But I also think that there are trade-offs involved, which are really difficult. This was an area in which

And I just didn't have the vocabulary or like education or just like understanding to actually fully appreciate the different sides of the debate. Because every woman that I spoke to about this book and about the fact we were doing this interview and sort of, you know, the people who read it or looked at the headlines that said basically Lewis Perry's advocating don't drink around men broadly to kind of simplify it. We're just like,

Yeah, I mean, we all know this. We all tell our friends, we all tell our daughters, everyone knows this to be the case. But it felt like there was something damaging about actually saying it out loud. And I guess that's this fear of, well, it just feeds further into it. It's already hard enough to get convictions for rape. Yeah. Does...

Does putting a line like this in print actually contribute to this potentially getting worse for women? I also think that it's much more important to prevent sexual violence than successfully prosecute it. Right. If given the choice. It's really hard to prosecute sexual violence. I mean, for a whole bunch of reasons, some of which is to do with problems in the criminal justice system, but some of which is just to do with the nature of the act. Like if...

If the line between illegal and legal sex is entirely based on what happens between two people in a room with no witnesses, it is just very, very difficult to prove the presence or absence of consent. So I think that we're never going to have 100% prosecution rate, no matter how good the system is. Which means I think that it's more important to try and, you know...

If you do a poster campaign saying rape is bad, you shouldn't rape, you're going to prevent precisely zero rapes.

because that's not what's motivating rapists, right? Whereas, you know, a style of post-campaign that police forces occasionally release and which often gets feminist backlash is things like look out for your friends in public. If you're out drinking, make sure you know where they are, make sure they get home safely in a taxi. And it often gets criticised in the post-campaigns, even get withdrawn because of feminist criticism. But I think

Yes, maybe it's the case that women know this already and they're already doing this. Maybe not. I mean, teenage girls are pretty stupid sometimes. Teenage boys are pretty stupid sometimes. This is just the nature of being inexperienced and not having already learned it. I mean, I dedicated the book to the women who learned it the hard way because I think that the current setup is...

It's kind of all around these slightly unspoken truths and the existence of these differences, which we kind of know about. We don't talk about, you know, the fact that men have two modes of sexuality, right? The fact that men will treat women as if they're really cheap if given the opportunity. The fact that getting really drunk around strange men is risky. All this stuff that is true and we all kind of adults know, right?

But we don't necessarily say it and we don't necessarily tell young people. And so you have to go through that process of discovering it for yourself and you. And I think the problem is that there will be girls in particular who during that process of discovering it for themselves get really unlucky. There was a common refrain when I was at university, which is don't tell women how to dress, teach men not to rape. Yeah. Which I think was trying to get at the frustration of

with saying, hey, look, men are just trash or five to 10% of men are just trash anyway. So like, girls, watch out for yourselves. It's like, why should we have to do that? Why should we have to say that? Like, the problem is clearly with the men and not with the women. Yeah. Morally, that's completely correct. Morally. Yeah. It's just in practice that it's difficult. I mean, I think the how people dress thing is a little bit of a

I'm not really aware of there actually being that strong a correlation between what women wear and their likelihood of being assaulted. As far as I know, it's not the length of your skirt isn't very relevant. I think what's much more relevant is basically ending up in scenarios where that 5% to 10% of bad guys have an opportunity. So like the example that I give in the book is of a dating advice column

in the times where a woman's written in saying um i'm interested in bdsm i want to give it a go what should i do and the reply is basically well obviously you know consent is very important and men have to respect your consent given therefore what you should do is you should go on the internet and you should advertise the fact that you really want to be strangled and then you should invite men to contact you and then you should go to their house and have consensual strangling sex together

And, you know, it's incumbent on them to respect your consent. And I'm like, yes, it is incumbent on them to respect your consent. However, what do you think is going to happen if you go on the internet and say, I really fancy a strange man strangling me in his house? Like, I just, it just, like, the impracticality of that kind of politics. Yeah.

drives me around the bend. Because I'm like, I agree that it should be possible. I mean, it should be possible for us to do all sorts of things without having to protect against bad actors. But it seems like it's only in this area where we basically insist that young women should fake it till they make it. Fake it till they make it, as in? They should behave as if there are no bad actors because they have a right to behave as if there are no bad actors.

In the hope that down the line, there won't be any more and men will all be taught not to rape and then it will be safe. Yeah. But you can't just like... Sacrifice the bodies of these men. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. One of my friends who looked at the final Listen to Your Mother chapter kind of described this...

said that it sounded like the advice is quite defeatist and not particularly empowering to women. Yeah. I wonder what would be your response to that. Yeah, defeatist is sometimes the expression I've heard. Hetero-pessimism is a term I've heard as well. Hetero-pessimism. Hetero-pessimism. I mean, basically just...

I think that there has been, I think that there is increasingly a feeling among feminists of all stripes and men and women of all stripes that there is something wrong with the sexual culture, that people aren't very happy, men and women, that sexual violence has not gone away by any means. And maybe the whole kind of freedom experiment hasn't worked out very well. And I think that the very utopian style of thinking in the second wave is

The idea that we can tear down the family and we can kind of re-socialize everyone and live in new experimental ways, I think was very...

very valiant and very interesting, but also pretty much failed utterly. And I think that the point that we've, well, the point that I've got to at least in thinking about all of this stuff over so many years is to think, look, I think that actually what we're faced with is a much more difficult challenge than we might previously have recognized. I think that some of this stuff is baked in to an alarming degree. It doesn't mean it's hopeless, but it does, I think, mean that we have to be kind of working around reality

rather than trying to redesign society on the back of an envelope. Which also means that if we're looking for systems that seem to be more or less protective and produce more or less good and bad outcomes, what we have to choose from is not the status quo and some like imagined perfect alternative. What we actually have to choose from is the status quo and other alternatives that have been tried and tested in previous times and places. Because those are ones that have actually

Like if you're imagining a utopian system that no one has ever tried before, there's probably a reason for that. It's probably because it's not actually possible. Can I take a quick tangent before we come back to the action points? Another particularly controversial thing that you say in the book is that basically, and feel free to correct my paraphrasing, but all BDSM is basically bad. And, and,

I was in a group holiday with some friends a few days ago and we were talking about the book because we were doing this interview and they were all like, oh, come on, like, you know, I can be a totally nice guy but, you know, still have some, like, you know, it's consensual and, like, BDSM is a thing and, like,

clearly i'm into it and she's into it and it's like sometimes we swap roles and stuff yeah uh so it felt particularly controversial to say like yeah louis position seems to be that like actually just it's it's always bad so what's what's going on there um i mean i think it's bad at several different levels um i work for a campaign group called we can't consent to this um

What we do is we document cases where women have been killed in the UK, UK women have been killed and their killers have claimed in court that they consented to violence, which they consented to the violence which led to their deaths. So like the sex game gone wrong defense. The reason that my friend and colleague, Fiona McKenzie, founded the campaign is because she'd noticed that this was becoming something you'd see in the papers more often.

And so she went away and actually documented how often this defense strategy was being used and found that it was becoming more frequent and also that it was being used often with success. So men were able to, it's always been men who've used this defense. We've never found an example of a woman using it. They're able to get away with a man's thought of conviction rather than a murder conviction or able to get a very short sentence, you know, something like three years or something, right? If you take a woman's life, this is what we're talking about. And

The problem with this defense is that the woman isn't there to give her side of it necessarily. And very often what you're talking about in these cases is like,

a man who's picked a prostitute, a man who seems to have had like a long-term abusive relationship with his girlfriend, all sorts of scenarios which actually look indistinguishable from just like normal femicide, but they're able in retrospect to spin this narrative and say, well, she was asking for it and she can't say otherwise. And the fact is with BDSM that actually...

That is what it looks like from the outside. There is no way of telling without knowing what's going on in people's minds that this is, whether this is domestic violence or whether this is consensual BDSM. They look identical. And from a legal perspective, that's very difficult. How are you supposed to tell the difference? One of the cases I talk about in the book, which is an important piece of English case law, Emmett, involves a woman who suffered terrible injuries in

inflicted by her husband, went to the doctor because she needed treatment. And the doctor very unusually violated patient confidentiality and reported this to the police. When it came to court, she refused to testify either way. Her husband claimed that she'd consented to it as part of sex and the court believed him. And I think maybe that's true.

my spidey senses tell me that it isn't right. Like what's actually going on there is domestic abuse and the nature of domestic abuse is such that women or any victim of domestic abuse, male or female, will often say that they consent to things and will often be, you know, lulled into a false narrative spun by the abuser because that's the nature of psychological abuse, that it wears you down and that it...

dissuades you from leaving or from objecting or from, you know, the psychological component of domestic abuse is just as, just as, just as pernicious and just as dangerous as the physical element. And I think that this is the problem that you get to with BDSM. I mean, I, I,

I can accept in theory that there are people who genuinely do it with absolute consent and are entirely responsible and there is really no harm done to anyone involved.

But also in practice, there are so many people you can find who have been previously part of the BDSM community and have had terrible experiences. And we'll say in retrospect that they were taking advantage of it, that there was mental illness at play often, that there are varying degrees of coercion and abuse that are often quite subtle. And I think that the more that this is normalized and made mainstream, the more incidences like that

you've come up with. I mean, so something like choking, for instance, which is now

20 years ago was really niche. It was a niche within the BDSM community. I mean, like responsible BDSM practitioners will say that choking is actually really dangerous and you shouldn't mess around with it. And yet now it's on the front page of every porn platform in the world. It's completely mainstream. You've got, I can't remember the numbers exactly, but it's something like half of women in their 20s will say that they've been choked by a partner at some point, you know, and some of those women are consenting, some of them not.

But that's what's going to happen if you make it a really mainstream thing. You're going to end up with this being like a routine part of sex. And once something is part of the sexual script, like it's considered to be a normal thing, then the default setting is to do it. The default setting is to say yes, even if you're not sure. And actually it makes you feel bad. And I think as well that it, I would say as well for...

for men who do it men who are asked to do it by their partners I mean that's something that I hear often you know but my girlfriend asked me to choke her I'd say I mean her motivations for being asked to choke I mean it's partly to do with the fact that um a lot of women do are are turned on by like a bit of submission right and

that's very common it probably has something to do with evolution like it's it's much much more common for women to take the sub role than the dom role in any kind of biddism scenario and vice versa with men um i don't think that's necessarily a very like i don't think that's necessarily a terrible thing we have to dissuade people from doing but i also think that like choking is a really bad manifestation of that instinct it's like a particularly um

particularly aggressive and particularly risky thing to do. It's difficult to kill someone accidentally through choking in sex, but it is quite easy to injure someone. And in general, it's just not something you want to be encouraging. It's an extremely gendered form of violence. It's the second most common form of murder used by men against women in this country. And overwhelmingly victims of non-fatal strangulation

it's in domestic relationships, it's female victims, male perpetrators, right? So like, it's just, it's not good news. And the problem with normalizing it is that I think as well for men, like it re-inscribes dysfunctional arousal patterns, if that makes sense, which is I think a problem with porn as well. I think this idea that like,

our sexual desires are fixed in quality and quantity and what you have to do is just like siphon off your sexual energy in a like periodically i think that's wrong i think actually we need to understand this as being like a feedback loop um i mean i don't mean feedback loop right this is being reinforced by orgasm and if you are like if you are um

inscribing in your own mind the fact that choking is your thing, choking turns you on, you're going to want more and more of it. You're going to end up going down an increasingly dysfunctional road. This is one of the reasons why men using porn often ends up being really bad for the men, even though I think porn has other problems. But just in terms of the user experience, it's because you end up like your sexual desires become weirder and weirder because you're exposed to weirder stuff and you kind of reward the stimulus and

And you end up essentially going down a really grim road, which the porn platforms are perfectly designed to encourage. Yeah. There's a thing that you say here of, you know, I think this one is particularly uncontroversial. Chivalry is actually a good thing. We all have to control our sexual desires and men particularly so, given their greater physical strength and average higher sex drives.

Then the point after that is sometimes, though not always, you can readily spot sexually aggressive men. There are a handful of personality traits that are common to them. Impulsivity, promiscuity, hyper-masculinity, and disagreeableness. These traits and combinations should put you on your guard. I wonder if you can just kind of elaborate on that. I guess how typecast is the sexual offender, sexual assaulter kind of vibe?

So that combination of traits, I think, comes quite clearly from the literature looking at sex offenders in prison and how they tend to differ from the general population. And those traits are more likely to be found in sex offenders in prison, who obviously are not going to be quite representative of sex offenders because only about 1% of sex offenders go to prison. So they're not going to be perfectly representative. But it does suggest that there is a

there is a trend in that regard. So one of the interesting things I thought about that list, hypermasculinity, disagreeableness, impulsivity, maybe not promiscuity, but certainly those three sort of seem somewhat similar to kind of the dark triad traits that people talk about. Yeah, dark triad traits are a great predictor of sexual aggression. Which seem to be particularly attractive to particularly younger women.

And so it seems like we have this weird... It's a bit unfortunate. Yes. What's going on there? Yeah, I don't know why they would be. But yes, it does appear to be the case that some dark triad traits can improve your prospects on the dating market. I guess in terms of being...

you're effective in manipulating people things like that yeah and so i guess if you were giving action points to your daughter or something it would be a case of even though you might find these men somewhat more attractive sometimes yeah then but actually this is you know when you're 18 19 17 you don't necessarily know what's good for you so like you know be a little bit careful please is that the kind of vibe yes i mean just anecdotally i don't know about research on this but um

I think that there's a lot of variation between women in terms of how much women are attracted to the dark triad traits. I personally have never found them attractive. But clearly, anecdotally, it's the case that some women do like the kind of the bad boy image. And it is a, yeah, it's a risky combo in terms of the risk of sexual aggression. One of the other ones is, again, somewhat controversial. Don't use dating apps. Mutual friends can vet histories and punish bad behavior. Dating apps can't.

I totally get the rationale here because mutual friends can indeed vet histories and punish bad behaviors, but dating apps can't. And yet, if we look at the stats, it seems like, you know, the majority of couples are now meeting on dating apps. Yes. Do you actually, are you actually advocating for a blanket ban on dating apps? Oh, I'm not saying ban them. I mean, I think the base, I think people probably do mostly agree with me that they're not the, they're not the,

best way i think the problem you've got though is that now people are so it's so much become the norm yeah that doing anything else is difficult although i do have female friends who've like made a conscious decision not to use dating apps because actually it's not worth it i mean i just i've just actually filed an essay on this um and i spoke to loads of friends in depth about their experience of using the apps and like one friend told me i was really struck by this because she's like

super beautiful, super attractive in every possible way, has been on the apps for years and years, still hasn't found a boyfriend. And she said that 95% of the dates she's been on when she's met via apps have not had a second date. And another friend who said as well that she...

She tried the apps, they weren't working. And then she ended up actually having a relationship with someone who initially she'd seen his photo, who was a mutual friend, Link. Initially she'd seen his photo and thought, no thanks. And then she met him and was really attracted to him and it worked out really well. And both saying like, I don't think the apps are very good. I mean, they're good in the sense that they give you access to a very wide pool, particularly if you're in London or something. There are so many single people within your vicinity. But in terms of quality, yeah.

I don't know. And I think also that because, I mean, we spoke about the whole hypergamy problem in the apps, but also the apps do tend to encourage a sort of anonymous vibe, which encourages bad behavior. If you don't have any link to anyone, like,

there are basically no consequences if you misbehave. Everything from ghosting through to sexual assault, there are basically no consequences. And so like I totally get the appeal and I also totally get the fact that I'm like happily married so it's easy for me to say this. I didn't meet my husband via the apps but also that was the period before they were normal. Equally though, I think like the downsides are pretty stark. And again, I think particularly

For women. If you're one of these guys who are getting thousands of matches on Tinder, it's going to be pretty hard to resist. Yeah. But I guess as women...

I mean, every single woman that I've ever spoken to has had one or more or even more than 10 bad experiences on dating apps. Oh, yeah. Whereas very few men I know would have said that they had a bad experience. Because I guess like kind of worst case scenario for a dude is the date is kind of boring. Right. Worst case scenario for a woman is just like really bad. It's like a serial killer, yeah. There's this film, I can't remember what it's called. There was this film that came out last year or earlier this year.

um that was about um a woman who meets a guy on a dating app and it all seems to be going well but then it turns out he's actually a cannibal serial killer who like kills women and sells their meat on the black market and it's supposed to be a comedy this film yeah apparently it's i have not actually seen the whole thing but apparently it's it's like

horrific to watch but I thought it was really interesting that this it was female writer female director it's very much like told from the female perspective and I thought it was really interesting that this was like what the female imagination collectively was coming up with as like the film about dating apps because obviously it's everyone's worst nightmare but it's also I think expressive it was just like a general idea

When I texted a few of my friends earlier this week because I was writing this essay to ask for quotes about Tinder because it's the 10th anniversary of Tinder. Oh, right. I was just inundated with...

they're terrible. Let me list all the like horrible things I've experienced on them. Yeah. So, yeah. Um, I guess last thing I'd like to ask you about. So, um, you have a recent, well, I guess a year and a bit ago had a baby son. Yeah. Um, and you have like action points for what you would tell your daughter or, uh, but do you, yeah. Do you have any action points for what you would tell your son? How like, you know, how should men behave in the, uh,

sexual and dating marketplace so it is something that i've not really written about it but it is something that my husband and i talk about a lot because obviously with our sons are toddler so it's not irrelevant but it's something it's something to think about as a parent i think that um i think that it is really important to channel um

youthful male energy which is which is like a different thing from you know we're accepting the men and women we're on a different thesis right we're accepting that men again have higher sex drives just generally higher energy aggression all this kind of stuff like

You can't suppress that. And I don't think it's wise to try. But you can channel it in positive directions. So one of the things that my husband is personally very keen on is martial arts. And he's done a lot of kickboxing and boxing over the years. And he thinks it's very important for boys to do that. But girls too. It's fine. I've done a bit of martial arts as well. It's good fun. It's good exercise. But he thinks it's really important for boys because it's a way of taking that

instinct towards fighting and being like destructive and energetic and whatever and and taming it and making it a positive thing and i think that principle in general is a good one yeah in relation to boys nice um i guess um there is there is one thing i want to end with which is um in the book let me see if i can find it uh you've got this sort of list of four questions

that women should ask themselves and that men should ask themselves. I don't know if you can remember them off the top of your head, but I'll... I kind of crowdsourced them from people, from friends. Ah, here we go. This is a good one.

I did it because people love quizzes. Yeah, people do love quizzes. So I'll just kind of read this out by kind of quoting from the book. And then I just love for you to kind of riff on these for men and women and listeners or viewers can answer these questions for themselves and feel whatever you want to feel. So, yeah.

If you're a woman who's had casual sexual relationships with men in the past, you might try answering the following questions as honestly as you can. One, did you consider your virginity to be an embarrassing burden you wanted to be rid of?

2. Do you ever feel disgusted when you think about consensual sexual experiences you've had in the past? 3. Have you ever become emotionally attached to a casual sexual partner and concealed this attachment from him? 4. Have you ever done something sexually that you found painful or unpleasant and concealed this discomfort from your partner either during sex or afterwards?

And he got to say that if your score is zero, then congratulations, your high sociosexuality and good luck have allowed you to successfully navigate a treacherous sexual marketplace. But if you answered yes to any of these questions, as I suspect you probably did, you are entitled to feel angry at a sexual culture that has set you up to fail.

Yeah. I guess having done 50 of these podcast interviews now, how do you feel about these questions? This is actually the first time anyone's brought them up. Because I think, yeah, I think those are, I saw those questions from talking to lots and lots of friends, many of whom had sort of gone through this journey that I describe of, you know, previously basically like relying on cope in relation to

the the like casual sex is empowering narrative um and then later being like i can't believe i put up with that i can't believe you know believed all of that and i think that those questions do sort of drill down into that self-deception factor which is very difficult where you want to think i'm doing this for myself i i sincerely want this but actually yeah yeah

Yeah, and I think one of the things when I just kind of ran these questions by a few friends is that basically the answer from men for all of those questions is just like, well, obviously not. It's just not even a thing. It's not even a consideration almost. And yet it clearly is for every single female friend that I've run those questions by has always been like, oh, yeah. What's their average score? They didn't say. I didn't know. I was just like more than... Yeah, not zero. Yeah. There was one you had...

Uh-huh. Uh, hang on. Where's the one for men? So the male ones, I, yeah, again, crowdsourced from male friends who were pretty shifty about it, but I, I persuaded them. Here we go. Um, so you kind of talk about this, uh,

this situation where it's it's sort of like friends with benefits and the woman has quote caught feelings for the man and the man's just like he kind of knows but he's always seems a bit seems a bit surprised but like what really she she caught feelings what i had no idea um and you say that uh these men seem to be genuinely bewildered by the fact that the women that they have been having sex with for many months are unhappy in these pseudo-relationships

and the women seem to have drifted into this arrangement, not realizing how little regard that partners really have for them. This is a tragedy of mutual incomprehension. However, I cannot help but harbor a sneaking suspicion that many men, perhaps all, do realize that operating in, quote, CAD mode is not actually harmless. Male readers who have ever had heterosexual casual sex might like to ask themselves these questions as well.

a counterpart to the questions I addressed to female readers earlier in the chapter. 1. Have you ever had sex with a woman you'd be embarrassed to introduce to your friends? 2. Have you ever failed to contact a woman after sex? 3. Have you ever suspected that your casual partner was becoming emotionally attached to you and failed either to commit or to break off the relationship? 4. Have you ever encouraged a woman to do something sexually even though she showed reluctance?

The answer to all of these questions ought to be no, but a culture of casual sex incentivizes men to do such things, and generally with no social penalty. If anything, men who fuck and chuck, quote, good time only women, can often expect to increase their social status among their male peers, at least in the short term. Yeah. Shifty responses there. Lots of shifty responses there. Again, very much non-zero. Very much feeling like,

Like, again, this Aziz Ansari situation. Yeah. It's just so ridiculously common. Yeah. That. Yeah. And I remember when that article came out, it was like a real like, oh my God moment for like everyone I know who read that article because it's

Everyone knew that it was such a common situation and the language of consent was not appropriate to actually be able to have that conversation. Which was probably one of the good things that came out of me too, in that I think that there probably were men who were paying attention to it and who maybe were doing this stuff on a mild level who were like, oh man, I'm slightly guilty of this. I think the only problem though is that in general, when we're sort of...

trying to appeal to men in this way the men who are listening are the ones who are already pretty good like Harvey Weinstein doesn't care yeah right like he's not listening um and obviously there is there is it's a good thing to nudge men who are like like well-intentioned towards behaving better but there is an extent to which like the guys who are listening and the guys who are already on board yeah

What can you do? Anyway, thank you very much, Liz. This has been wonderful. Thank you so much. Any final piece of advice you would give to any young men or women listening to this or watching this podcast? There's quite a lot in the book. I mean, sometimes people ask me what's my one underlying advice to women. And I think what it is is the problem with liberal feminism and sex-positive feminism as an ideology is that it really discourages women from listening to their instincts.

And if anything, because the pressure is on you to be open-minded, tolerant, not to be hung up on silly traditionalism and all of this kind of stuff, that can translate when it's combined with female agreeableness. As we discussed earlier in the show, women are more agreeable than men on average. It can translate into just suppressing feelings of distress and anxiety more.

And trying to train yourself out of those responses. And I think, no, if your instinctive response is any kind of distress, any ideology that tells you that you shouldn't be listening to that is not a good ideology to follow. So I guess that's the basis of all of this. Trust your gut. Listen to your instinct. Trust your gut. Don't let society tell you that your gut is in fact wrong. Yeah.

pretty much. Nice. Well, thank you very much. Thank you so much. All right. So that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are going to be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the iTunes store. It really helps other people discover the podcast.

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