Embracing Motherhood in the Age of Feminism | Louise Perry

we've never been safer we've never been more comfortable and yet it is not uncommon to hear young people saying something like oh how could I bring a child into this world and sort of subject them to the horrors of the world particularly when it comes to for instance climate change and I think our ancestors brought children into the world with the expectation that half of them would die before they turned fun [Music] Louise Perry is a journalist and author based in London she's a columnist for unheard she hosts Maiden mother matriarch podcast series and she's the author of The Landmark book the case against the sexual Revolution a new Guide to Sex in the 21st century so Louise thank you very much for your time today if we could kick off you've written a length about the sexual Revolution what was it and how is it still with us today because it's not new so I think the sexual Revolution was two things um that happened at the same time so so one was the enormous material changes of the second half of the 20th century the most important one being the pill which obviously is transformative and I don't think that we I don't think we recognize typically quite how transformative it was quite how important it was because For the First Time in our species history it suddenly becomes possible for women to control their fertility themselves invisibly you know and I think that actually the woman who um appears to be fertile that has in fact suspended her fertile her fertility is in a funny kind of way almost a different biological creature entirely right and she she enters the world in the late 1960s so the pill is the important one as well as things like uh washing machines enormous changes to the economy so we move from being an industrial economy to being a service and knowledge-based economy which is advantageous for women because women can more easily participate in those kind of sectors Etc there are lots of changes that come about all at the same time which have had enormous impact on relationships between men and women and have allowed women to participate more in public life um sort of good and Ill that's that's that's a a narrative and historical narrative which is normally interpreted as being straightforwardly a good thing I want to say look there are some trade-offs here which we need to talk about um the thing that happens at the same time is the material Revolution is also the ideological one so it's the the the the revolutionary ideas coming out of Academia in particular in the 1960s places like France in particular um where all of a sudden kind of everything is up for up for subversion and where reaction the reaction against traditionalism is this new this new Crusade adopted by intellectuals Across the west and highs in perfectly with um the the new opportunities presented by the pill and so forth so I think it's worth remembering that the reason that the you know it is not unique historically that kind of intellectual moment of that feeling of Revolution you know that's that's by no means confined only to the 1960s there does tend to be as you look historically a sort of roller coaster between periods of sexual um periods of prudish nurse and periods of of um licentiousness do tend to kind of um come in waves you know you have the you have the the the the the the Randy Georgians followed by the prudish victorians followed by you know um and there have always been examples of aristocrats in particular being behaving in very modern ways you know it's actually there have always been those examples of this but what's really unique about the sexual revolution of the 60s is that it's stuck it wasn't just confined to a few eccentric Elite people it wasn't just confined to intellectual circles it became it became hegemonic I mean now questioning the sexual Revolution is considered to be like you know crazy thing to do um and I think that's because it was backed up by the pill it's because it became possible to basically sever sex from reproduction for the first time ever um and um yes and now it's you know to even recall the fact that actually in um most times and places sex is probably the most consequential thing a woman can do in terms of the likely that the chance of pregnancy and the effect on her life you know that's for many young women now is unimaginable but for 99 plus of our species history that was that would have been common sense I'd be interested in hearing your views as I've I've watched the debate in Australia over recent years particularly in the context of me too uh in the context of inappropriate behavior and the public space in Australia and the Uproar including legal over some things that happened in the Australian Parliament among staffers and the public for raw that's followed it struck me that it's hard to think of anything that can be so powerfully forceful good in terms of deep human engagement with others expression of Love of commitment uh of Joy at the other end that can be so utterly destructive so demeaning so degrading and so cruel the way in which we conduct our sexuality in an age where people demand complete Freedom has often been carried forth without anybody thinking about the potential for good the potential for bad yeah uh yeah I think that's true I don't think there's there may be no other fast of Life which the extremes are so extreme yeah um I mean one of the um one of the mistakes I think of the um the ideology of the 1960s which we're all now the um descendants is that because it was rooted so much in a reaction against traditionalism of all kinds and in particular reaction against Christianity and of course Christianity and indeed all other religious Traditions hold sex to have a very important status to have a sacred status within marriage and so on um when you have a an intellectual movement which is all about reaction against Christianity and a rejection of everything that's come before which to some extent is you know is maybe not it's maybe not a surprise that that would have come out of the second world war that kind of enormous reaction against everything that had come before is sort of complete loss of faith in traditionally culture to date um that does include a reaction against the idea of sex having a sacred status or sex even having a special status a unique status of any kind so I I describe this in my book as um sexual disenchantment so so feeding off of Max baber's idea of dis of disenchantment as a process of um as a component of the Enlightenment where previously people felt that the natural world had a kind of special sacred um almost conscious status and that's all Stripped Away as part of the Scientific Revolution and people come to believe that it's a nurse and just subject to um rational forces and so on I think sexual disenchantment is the same sort of process that people used to believe that sex was was sacred was special and what the new ideology post-sexual Revolution tells us is oh no it's just a social interaction you know you can buy it you can sell it you can treat it as meaningless you know if you want to attach special status to it then like find whatever you know people can still get married people can still um choose to behave in traditional ways but the fundamental idea is that actually sex is is not really any different from shaking someone's hand playing tennis making a coffee for someone you know that that it has a completely neutral status people of course don't actually act as if that's true I was going to say yeah no one actually that's not special and yet yeah we're a sex obsessed Society in some ways yeah yeah so the theory is from the sort of hyper hyper Progressive position is that um you know sex can be commodified uh porn is just another kind of entertainment all this kind of stuff but then no one actually behaves as if that's true like people people care if their spouse cheats on them people care if their boss is sexually inappropriate to them you know is this funny component of me too where on the one hand you have uh enormous distress at sexually inappropriateness in in various circumstances including particularly in the workplace so you know I as a journalist this is obviously something that's that's been a big deal in journalism I know a lot of female journalists who on the one hand will be enormously upset at say inappropriate touching or being asked out on a date by a senior colleague all this kind of stuff which is felt to be completely inappropriate because sex should be outside of the professional realm you know but then on the one hand support the decriminalization of the sex industry and would say that sex works so called I don't use that phrase but would say that sex work is just the same as any other kind of work and that we shouldn't be stigmatizing pornography or whatever and I'm like come on SO sexual touching in your workplace that's that's beyond the pale but actually having a whole industry which is entirely based on sex which is you know whether buying and selling the sex is the point of the industry you know I think what what does what on Earth does sexual harassment look like in a brothel how can you have these and I think what's going on there is people are trying to hold to the idea of sexual disenchantment in an intellectual way but actually it's not true you know people feel very strongly instinctively that sex does have a special status even if they try and deny it to themselves and I think that that whole this whole effort to try and pretend otherwise has been an enormous mistake so this comes this sort of issue I was trying to raise before then in reality it can be a force for enormous least satisfying bonding at one extreme and the reality is it can be unbelievably cruel and destructive and degrading at the other how you use it does matter yeah what does it say about feminism in your view that they have in many ways you know feminism has adopted some fairly extraordinary positions as you've just outlined what what's been your own journey in terms of feminism and the way it's evolved over the last few decades uh so I insist on the defending myself partly because I think that um the way that feminism has largely been captured by you know a particular a particular ideology which which we've been talking about um is pernicious and I think that actually the the best way of defining feminism is just you know a political movement that thinks that women are disadvantaged in certain ways and wants to remedy that you know that doesn't have to come along with any of this um nonsense that I'm really critical of I think that what we're seeing in terms of say the The feminists Who Embrace sexual disenchantment the feminists who um uh who seek essentially in every way to permit women to live like men as much as possible who try and erase the differences between men and women across the board um I think that this is just a sort of feminist instantiation of hyper liberalism so an ideology that prioritizes freedom above absolutely everything else and doesn't see any other doesn't see Freedom as as something to be balanced with other virtues but sees it as a as the soul goal you know I think that we are seeing that ideology just brought to its logical conclusions with something like such the idea of sexual disenchantment because if you want people to be completely Nutley free then you do have to take aim at the idea of sacredness at the idea that we should be confined by any kind of traditional ideas even that we should have obligations to each other you know I mean one of the things that I [Music] um think is really disastrous about this this what I call liberal feminism in the book is that it it cannot accommodate motherhood because the nature of being a mother is that you have you have enormous obligations to your baby you have an incredibly strong link initially physical and then and then increasingly just emotional but you know very strong link with your baby to the extent that you can't really understand a mother or a baby as being individuals they're a dyad you know and if your goal is to promote women's freedom you can't reconcile that with the existence of the diet and with the fact that you know that [Music] um a comment that a friend of mine made um which I repeat all the time because it's because it's funny because it's true is that the only thing that will restrict your freedom more than having a baby is going to prison which is completely true you know I say we both had our first babies at about the same time um how do you how do you accommodate that within an ideology that sees the freedom of the individual is the most important thing you know you can't so basically you end up just rejecting motherhood is basically what's happened and we're even getting to the point now where liberal feminism is rejecting the female body full stop you know we now have the medical technology that will allow women to um you know use a surrogate if you don't want to be pregnant yourself allow you to transition to being a man if that's what you want you know we if if freedom is your goal then the human body is very much an impediment and and this and this is produced a kind of politics where actually the use of other people's bodies often the bodies of poorer people is seen as a completely reasonable sort of self-actualization project and the idea of having any social guard rails any tradition any you know anything sacred is also fair game um and I'm not convinced at all about ideologies and the best interests of women even if it may be in the best interest of a few women who are unusually powerful Etc I think that you know the the argument that I make in in um my my book in my writing in general is I think the Biggest Losers of the sexual Revolution have been poor women specifically you're painting a picture that some people are buying what you've called Freedom I'm tempted to call it license I think the two are very different yeah but they're purchasing it at the expense of other people's freedoms you mentioned poorer women but I'm also thinking of children themselves who really seem to be increasingly the victims of the indulgent fantasies of adults yeah I mean the way that they were on on the on the poorer women subjects the way that liberal feminists and others would justify this would be saying well they consent you know a woman can sense to be a surrogate a woman can sense to uh cell sex or to appear in pornography or whatever um these things are meaningless and kind of um profane so you can buy and sell them who cares if people are consenting there's no problem um I don't I don't agree with that I think that consent is a bare minimum legal requirement it is not it there's a very large gray area between something being consensual and something being good and I think that just having if your only moral framework is this consent framework you end up excusing all sorts of um terrible things that cause people terrible harm um including as you say to children I mean thinking about something like surrogacy um which I've written about elsewhere the interests of the children are basically out of the picture when it comes to most discussions around surrogacy I mean we're talking about this currently in the UK because the law commission has just built out a set of recommendations and is now parliamentarians in our tasked with deliberating on them which would basically liberalize the um the the the law around surrogacy in this country and give more I mean the the crucial bit of the recommendations which I think is um most concerning is that at the moment when a child is born the woman who gave birth to that child is considered to be the legal mother and if she has a a spouse then that person is considered to be a legal father and at the moment if um parents have the people who've commissioned the surrogacy arrangement you know the the intended parents um they had to apply for a parental order and so there's a there's a there's a slight time lag until they become the legal parents of the child if the surrogate consents to to them becoming the the legal parents what the law commission want to do is say that um the surrogate mother is not the legal mother at Birth so she signs away her rights to be the legal mother before the child is even born and it it becomes more difficult in practice for her to change her minds and to keep the baby this is this is essentially so it it uh it lubricates the process for the intended parents it doesn't commercialize surrogacy there's still resistance to commercializing it in this country although in practice there are instances of people passing money under the table and it kind of in practice being commercialized but that that's still that's still a hard limit um but we're definitely moving in a direction we're moving in a more American Direction we're already an outlier in Europe we're already more permissive in Europe that compared with other European States and what has been proposed would take us closer to America an American situation which is in some in some states very heavily commercialized the debate as far as I can tell is just all around the the rights and desires of adults the fact that what sorry I see privileged adults yes it seems to me yes and not coincidence presumably many surrogate mothers are doing it because they're in very necessities and difficult circumstances and they do it for financial reasons bearing someone else's child with the difficulties of pregnancy the challenges of child birth the emotional pain there must be emotional pain yeah of having grown another human being and your own body and then parting with it that doesn't sound very much like a commitment to freedom to me yeah so a lot of I mean that the the radical feminist objection to surrogacy is that it involves the instrumentalization of women's bodies that it involves exploitation there clearly are lots of examples of terrible exploitation particularly if you're talking about you know Indian baby Farms or the sort of Horrors that we've seen happening in um parts of the global South that's true I agree with all of that I would add though I think there is an additional objection to even altruistic surrogacy Arrangements where there's no money involved in that it necessarily involves separating mothers and newborns the point you know and yes we do this when it comes to say adoption we recognize that there are instances where babies have to be removed from their mothers and that that is a tragedy and that it's done only in the interest of the child and is closely supervised by social services and so on you know we recognize that that's a position of Last Resort and actually in recent years I mean Social Services have been moving away from adoption as much as possible and try and try and use it only them in the very most extreme cases what surrogacy does is it sets out to engineer that outcome deliberately and not for the sake of the child it's not done in the child's best interest it's done because the commissioning parents who as you say are often very privileged want to have a child that's genetically you know like a bespoke genetic child all of their own essentially that's that's the goal and I think if we know that there is we know that newborns suffer stress when they're when they're taken away from the women who've given birth to them you know newborns come into the world knowing nothing except the smell of their mothers the sound of their mother's voices you know that they their their instincts when they're born are entirely orientated towards the woman who's just given birth to them you know a newborn doesn't know that this woman doesn't have a genetic connection or whatever um and similarly the instinctive responses of women um my friend Mary Harrington who also writes for unheard um the phrase that she uses which I think is so is so good is pregnancy doesn't just create a child it creates a mother all of those sort of hormonal experiences of pregnancy are geared towards making a woman entirely devoted to her baby and orientated towards the enormous amount of care that a baby needs I mean I calculated when when my son was born that I was spending 40 hours a week in the first um months of his life just breastfeeding I was doing a full-time job just breastfeeding let alone all the other stuff you know like it's incredibly demanding role and natural selection has blessed us with the ability to perform that role because we are primed to do it by the experience of pregnancy and birth and what surrogacy does is it deliberately um severs the connection between newborn and mother and interrupts that natural process of love and bonding again for what purpose for the purpose of of providing people who want a particular kind of child with that child you know and I think that any kind of it makes complete sense if you are subscribed to this kind of hyper liberalism which sees the self-determination of the individual as the most important goal but if you hold anything else to be sacred you know not just thinking that sex is sacred thinking that the maternal baby bond is sacred thinking that the family so thinking that any of these things have a sort of have a value beyond the instrumental then I think you have to be distressed by surrogacy and by the sex industry and all you know all of the other things that I'm that I'm secret cloth to get right above us for a moment and just look down from a sort of uh bird's eye view of a culture there's an old saying that children are the future and we know from the research there's been a dramatic drop dramatic I mean staggering drop and the number of people in Western cultures who will say children are important to me and it seems to me that it's a culture that's no longer particularly committed to its own future to say that children are not important to me and that will so lightly take um this sort of approach to Children's well-being to babies well-being is to say well we're just going to place all of the emphasis on the license because that's the word I'd rather use you use the word hyper freedom I guess I mean the same thing just giving free play to that without considering the future which I still believe is our children yeah how did it get to this well it is a logical outcome of this kind of politics that we've been speaking about you know if you think that your own short-term pleasure is the most important thing then yeah children are not you know um what's that saying Parenthood is all joy and no fun it's hard to think of anything that is more counter to a sort of hedonistic consumerist culture than parenting because Hedonism is all about front loading the short-term pleasure even though you know we know that that that that pleasure Fades quite quickly whereas parenting is all about front loading efforts and particularly in the case of the mother pain and discomfort and everything um for the sake of a very long term sort of meaning and satisfaction so it makes sense that Parenthood is not really considered to be [Music] um an essential part of the good life the irony of that of course in terms of demographics most western cultures are going to face a situation where people have lived this lifestyle will get to old age and find there isn't a tax base there aren't the workers there isn't the infrastructure to keep them in the very Comfort to which they've been so addicted yeah I mean it's a strange irony that people don't think these things through yeah this is the subject of my next book actually I'm writing a book called the case for having kids which is sort of about the flip side of this right so the first book was about um the effects on sexual culture of the pill severing sex and reproduction and this is the other side of it you know the fact that we now that it is so much easier to not have children um because you can have sex without getting pregnant um so many people are are choosing to do that I mean the the cause of plummeting birth rates is a source of great debate because um it's easy to sort of it's quite easy to be parochial about it and say I mean like a common thing that I'll hear among my friends in London for instance is oh it's because house prices are too high so people can't afford to have children it's like yes house prices are very high and it probably is a disincenter for some people um but this is happening everywhere so only about three percent of the world's population live in a country where the birth rate is not falling um some countries have much lower birth rates even than even the NASA South Korea is currently the the out out in front by some distance and the Japanese the Chinese the northern Italians yes even Bangladesh has a four-league population it's amazing yeah um there seems to be something about modernity that causes this as soon as countries um and and the sort of income threshold is not even necessarily that high it's not even that you have to be really affluent in order to start on this declining birth rates trajectory and as you say Bangladesh places like that people aren't very rich but they've already they're already on in the second demographic transition um it seems to be something to do with people becoming modern particularly becoming urbanized and spending less time you know one definition of modernity which I find very interesting and attractive is it's it's essentially defined as spending more time with strangers than with people you're related to because in traditional cultures you spend basically all your time I mean a hunter-gatherer kind of tribes you're basically constantly surrounded by your extended kin Network um and then as people migrate away from rural areas live increasingly atomized lives you you know many people will hardly ever see their families they'll spend almost all of their time with people they're not related to and that seems to be very strongly linked with falling birth rates um for I mean we can we can we can speculate on the connection there but it does seem to be a very very strong one and yes as you say the the the current um the affluence currently available to Modern westerners it's the the welfare state state pensions socialized Healthcare all of this I I would be enormously surprised if I ever receive a state pension because I think by the time we probably in the UK I would guess of probably about the 2040s is when we're likely to see really significant collapsing of these kind of Public Services because that's when the baby boomers are gonna pass away and they were the last above replacement generation um but the whole system is a Ponzi scheme yeah people haven't realized it yeah it's extraordinary yeah mind you they have in Beijing they're desperately trying everything they can to get the birth rate up and it's not happening yeah yeah because that's what we've I mean that's what the Chinese are discovering to their costs it's quite easy to lower birth rates yeah the one child policy was pretty successful obviously incredibly coercive but it worked whereas trying to to move them in the other direction doesn't seem to be possible it seems fascinating to me that I can't see any great concern on the part of feminists but the other part of the equation there is the massive disappearance of vast numbers of um female babies yeah yeah well I mean some feminists do talk about it but it's a tricky one because if you're going to if you're going to be radically pro-choice I mean there are there are lots of arguments that you could make in defense of having some forms of legalized abortion right but if you're going to have a complete um sort of if you're going to argue for it from a position of radical autonomy the fetus has no personhood Etc it's quite hard to square that with them thinking that female fetuses being aborted are having some kind of harm done to them which is I think why that that that sort of dissonance to people tend not to look at quite telling though it's almost opening up a whole new sort of range of issues but what's happening in the sort of the psychology of the West prosperous you've mentioned house pricing but basically Western societies that enjoy the high living standards even today what's happening in the minds of people that they're not attracted to having children and they're not nowhere near as concerned as I believe they ought to be in ensuring that the child is nurtured appropriately it's funny isn't it letting them be victims of the cultural battles that are going on we've we've never been safer we've never been more comfortable and yet it is not uncommon to hear young people saying something like oh how could I bring a child into this world and sort of subject them to the horrors of the world particularly when it comes to for instance climate change and I think our ancestors brought children into the world with the expectation that half of them would die before they turned five you know with constant threat of Famine of War all of these things which we fortunately just essentially don't really think about um I mean I'm sure that part of what is going on with um people who say they don't want to have children because of climate change is it is sometimes more palatable to to to tell oneself that story or to tell other people that story that you're doing this for virtuous reasons rather than to stay well I don't want to take the hit to my lifestyle which is often a big part of what's going on it is true that you will it will take a hit to your lifestyle having a child it will because I mean a lot of this is to do with the fact that we are now all of society is set up on the expectation of two incomes and a big part of the reason why houses are incredibly unaffordable if you have children if you have just either you're paying child care costs or because um you have a stay-at-home parent and another Breadwinner is because you're competing against people who have two incomes and no children right so um it is true that it'll take a hit to your lifestyle that obviously doesn't sound as nice as saying well I'm doing it in the sort of valiant effort to protect the planet um but I think it is also combined with a very sincere sort of loss of confidence um among westerners I mean we see this elsewhere in all the cultural War battles a feeling that there's something kind of um something sick something bad about the West a real lack of um a real loss of faith in in everything really in the whole civilization and particularly of course when it comes to loss of religious faith um it was funny watching the um the coronation to see this very rare example of um of the old establishment almost it felt almost a little bit like a last hurray you know like the obviously it is the current the coronation is an explicitly Christian ceremony it it feels deeply medieval in in large parts of it despite the the efforts to sort of um uh inject some Modern elements into it it still felt deeply Christian too you know but it felt almost like the ghost of the past watching it because this is now so so much less prized than it once was and maybe it's just very difficult for people who who basically don't have any who basically despise their ancestors to to want to to want to invest in the future to want to you know make the enormous personal sacrifices that you do have to make in order to have children um yeah it's amazing it's like it's like Collective suicide it is well yeah at almost at our most affluent our most comfortable um safest period in history and everyone decides all of a sudden to commit Collective suicide it's very strange human behavior isn't it I have a very good friend who is one of the world actually is leading heart lung specialists and he writes uh extensively about the important Secretary of fathers being involved with their children's lives but that's incidental I asked him why he's doing that and he said at the time that I asked him he said I've had to tell about 300 men there's nothing more we can do you are going to die and he said all 300. have had as their first response something along the lines of I wish I'd spent more time with my family and children what does it say about our psychology that when we get to old age those relationships are well because By definition most of them are older they see the value and they regret they haven't put more into it not not had less of it hmm but somehow we can't think we've got a pandemic of loneliness emerging we're rapidly getting to the point where a lot of children will come into the world and won't know what it is to have a sibling they won't have aunts and uncles and they're going into such a fractured world that'll be harder than ever to join up relationally what on Earth has happened to us that we can't think clearly so I suppose the normal human life cycle you you you there's rarely a point where you are not in some way dependent on your family or they are depending on you so so little babies are completely dependent on normally their their mothers and other family members um and then you reach this brief period of relative Independence as a young adult where you're old enough to take care of yourself but you're not you don't yet have children or elderly parents to look after but then in a kind of normal human life cycle without the pill that's very brief and then you have your own children and then event and then you help get to care for grandchildren eventually your care for in turn and there's this constant kind of process of reciprocity um but to some extent what Modern Life allows us to do is to artificially extend that period of Independence and actually to present that period of Independence as being um has been the default but actually Independence is not the default in the human life cycle or you know and also of course many people disabled people for instance will never have that period of complete Independence it's kind of an illusion that's that's propped up by technology um but it's very fragile and I think a lot of people don't think about that because if we if we've also abandoned the kind of um uh Traditions or religious beliefs and so forth which basically act as social guard rails and encourage people to behave in in ways that are more conducive to long-term flourishing a lot of people will think well you know right now I I love being an independent person I love not having obligations to other people um without thinking about the fact that that's not going to last because it can't unless you don't you know Rolling Stones unless you die before you get old that's not going to last um and yeah but then how do you pursue this is this problem of having a culture of short-termness and how do you persuade people to make decisions that are going to benefit them when they're in their 80s because that doesn't seem real it's pretty switched on to their superannuation and making sure that nest egg is safe well yes but they're not investing in the same opportunities to ensure that they have meaningful relationships and and personally rewarding lives yeah interesting contrast can I drill into I mean the promise of the sexual Revolution was that sex could be fun and enjoyable and I suppose the argument would have been that that will make life richer and more pleasurable without stopping to think that short-term pleasure often compromises long-term happiness but the drill into what does it mean for women first and then for men today what is the sexual Revolution as it's unfolded meanful the happiness of of particularly young women today as they start to become you know as they leave school and start to go out into the big wide world for many of them I guess long before they leave school there's a playing out in their lives the the yeah I think this way to live is normal actually it's an aberration that's really only 50 years old yeah how's it working really for them well the promise of course was that this was in women's interests yeah this was all about allowing women to flourish and sort of um removing the old restrictions on female sexuality it sort of has done that but there's lots of polling to suggest that women have actually become increasingly unhappy over time um which um there are a lot of different possible explanations for that one I mean it's certainly the case I think that a lot of young women are deeply unhappy with the current sexual culture because a lot of them write to me and tell me that they are deeply unhappy with it because um our current sexual culture that prioritizes um casualness is much better suited to two typical male sexuality than to typical female sexuality but of course given that liberal feminism is so strongly orientated towards denying the difference that the existence of innate differences between men and women particularly psychological differences between men and women um a lot of young women don't realize perhaps until it's too late that those differences exist and that the idea of having sex like a man is not actually going to serve them long term I mean there are I mean the physical differences I just that to my mind it just seems so obvious that a culture of casual sex puts women at a disadvantage because women suffer all of the physical risks associated with a casual encounter right the the risk of physical violence given that women are so much smaller and weaker than men the risk of an unwanted pregnancy um the various burdens that come with using hormonal birth control I mean a lot of women find hormonal birth control give some terrible side effects and makes them um crazy and miserable you know um but also the psychological effects in that women tend to in general there are outliers but in general women tend to be just less interested in hopping into bed with neostranger than men are um so women basically aren't really getting anything out of this and I think a lot of women are starting to realize that but there is that feeling that it's compulsory that it's normal that this is what this is what you do if you're a young liberated woman etc etc like the that narrative is very um seductive and you know I've spoken to a lot of women who have gone through the experience of thinking as a young woman that having sex like a man was aspirational and that you know I'm doing this for myself I'm I'm a young header nurse or you know all that kind of that kind of Sex in the City lifestyle Etc and then some years later come to the realization that actually it was it actually caused them a lot of suffering I've never met anyone who's done the opposite he's trying the opposite path you know which is I think revealing um I think there is I mean we talked about me too I think me too was a really good indication of the facts that women aren't happy that this whole this sexual culture isn't really working for women you know a lot of what a lot of the stories that came out of me too were not really about criminality I mean some were you know Harvey Weinstein was was a criminal and was connected and so on but a lot of what was being talked about wasn't really criminal it was actually to do with it was this gray space between consensual and good and about which liberal feminism has very little to say and women were finding that they were they were having sexual encounters which left them feeling wretched even if no crime had occurred and that they were being asked to treat as meaningless something that they felt to be meaningful but because they were feminism Remains the dominant the dominant um um the dominant feminist iteration a lot of these women didn't have the vocabulary to describe what was going on they couldn't they couldn't reassert the special sacred nature of sex they couldn't talk about innate differences between men and women because these are all things that you're sort of forbidden from talking about and so they had to come back to talking about consent consent consent which is such a feeble kind of framework for understanding something as important and complex as a sexual relationship so I think that there's a very clear indication that women are not happy with the status quo but it's it's almost impossible to address the real source of their unhappiness through a liberal feminist framework which is why your work so valuable well that's what I'm trying to do so to come to men how's the sexual Revolution worked out for men so I think the the only beneficiaries of our current um casual sexual culture or minority of men so I write about the the Hugh Hefner's of the world yeah I start the book by talk about Hugh Hefner and Marilyn Monroe as the as the two icons of the sexual Revolution who had completely different experiences of it um Marilyn Monroe was basically destroyed bisexual relation whereas you have to had a ball you know he did eventually end up being fairly lonely and pathetic and and he ended his life um no longer being the Glamorous Playboy but he he had a lot of fun along the way yeah I think he's one of these rare people who um has been able to enjoy the fruits of the sexual Revolution um without really suffering any costs for most men that's not true and for most men um you know they don't have access to a harem of 20-something blondes as Hefner did and actually the this is peculiar thing that on the one hand we've never had a more hypersexual public life and uh had had sort of fewer inhibitions about sex but people are also actually having their sex this is the sex recession so called The Sex depression where young people in particular having much less sex actually than there supposedly inhibited prudish grandparents um which is a funny sort of a funny sort of contradiction but I think it's probably because people aren't um forming relationships so they're having they're having more casual sexual relationships and are they having more or is in fact is it true that for many young people they're delaying or not having sexual relationships in quite High numbers now it depends on which group you're talking about so very attractive men um are able to have lots of casual relationships with lots of women and most women will have no difficulty um getting casual sex at all you know whether or not they really want it they have they'll have no difficulty accessing it um but what women often struggle to get is a committed relationship and actually people we're all a good men they're enjoying being Hugh Hefner's well it depends on who it depends on who you're talking about but but there are it's this short-termism thing you know that if you're a young attractive man who can attract lots of matches on Tinder it may be more tempting to enjoy the Hugh Hefner lifestyle rather than to commit to a woman even though that would be that would be more meaningful and more satisfying long term um but if you can enjoy the kind of the harim experience what if you're a thoroughly decent very capable you know protect the provider type male that would be on paper very attractive but not through social media what happens to you then it's often really hard I mean I don't want to I don't want to be all doom and gloom because people clearly are they are still forming relationships they are still getting married having children you know it's not a complete Disaster by any means but it does seem as if it's more difficult because that's not the template now that's not the default setting um and I think people are people are being channeled into more dysfunctional um relationship Norms I mean one of the things that's worth remembering is that our species Norm is polygyny where you have it eighty percent of cultures on the anthropological record of being polygonous where you have high status men have multiple wives and low status men have no wives um and Christianity is unusual in insisting on monogamy is that we inherited it from from Rome um but yeah it was you know a very important component of 2000 years of Christian civilization which now of course would mostly would mostly rejected um and even though uh legally you're still only allowed to marry one person do you having sex outside of marriage is now completely socially permissible and so people are in practice seem to be kind of um being drawn back towards our species Norm having lifted the monogamous restriction you know but I argue in the book and I think I think really strongly that um that monogamous restriction produces much better outcomes particularly for women status men but you know there are all sorts of um there are all sorts of ways in which monogamous cultures do better than polygonous cultures lower crime rates lower domestic violence rates lessen economic inequality you know all sorts of good outcomes that come with insisting on monogamy and this is kind of this is a beautiful example of what happens when you just press the freedom lever and allow allow people to um to rid themselves of all restrictions people will often when you do that tend to unconsciously Rush towards actually less just ways of doing things you know that we will that we will revert to our species Norm suppose he is an expression of our freedom but in fact producing much worse outcomes particularly for the most vulnerable people particularly for women and children you know the the phrase I use um a lot was borrowed from um uh the historian Irish tourney uh is freedom for the particles death for The Minnow you know when you have when you have a social environment which is not equal where people are different from each other and all sorts of important ways physical psychological related to age related to um vulnerabilities of of of of of of of of Youth or disability or whatever just allowing everyone to be free you know very often results in the outcome where actually it is the most powerful members of society who through their freedom are able to exploit the least powerful on that uh that vein of thought I think you've indicated that you don't believe that it's necessarily right to say that because it was consensual it was moral or good that's an interesting line of thinking because our culture would say and this is where we're tying ourselves up in knots was it consensual was it not he said she said but you have a slightly different take I think I think it is completely plausible and in fact very common for um a man usually to behave in a way that meets the legal threshold for consensual but is not gentlemanly or not chivalrous or whatever kind of old-fashioned vocabulary you want to use we don't have modern words to describe this because we find it very hard to talk about such things in a modern context but um you know I really do think and I think this is a fundamentally feminist idea that men have men have various um innate advantages over women in being bigger and being stronger in not being vulnerable to unwanted pregnancy all of these things and I think that actually with with with that strength comes additional responsibility you know I think that this idea of chivalry yes it can sometimes translate into slightly annoying patronizing behavior that women find irritating but the it is absolutely essential I think the idea of just just just just just abandoning these old ideas of male restraint particularly male sexual restraints in the name of emancipation is madness because we're still talking about sexual asymmetries which are ancient and which are not going away um and so very many of the examples of me too you hear you know it's not it's not necessarily criminal it doesn't necessarily involve violence but it involves men not behaving like gentlemen essentially and not being told that they have to behave like gentlemen but there's actually the kind of ambient culture says that's fine it's interesting you you painted the contrast a moment ago you know with what you're effectively saying is that progressivism isn't actually progressing us to a better future so much as taking us back to the default position of the past that in escaping the Moors if you like of Christianity we think we're freeing ourselves up but actually we're locking up so a lot of people into prisons and then forms of enslavement that were there before the influence of religion in our culture yeah I don't think that history is shaped like this that's the fundamental Progressive claim right the history is shaped like this yeah the things just get better over time and that that's the natural course of things in a weird kind of way it's a very Christian idea but it's a sort of mangled version of Christian idea um I think that there are probably only so many ways of structuring a very large complex civilization like ours and Christianity was a very long-standing and with with many trade-offs a successful one and as we move beyond the Christian the Christian period I'm not the first to say that that this 1960s are probably going to be remembered as something like a second Reformation except that instead of rejecting Catholicism it was a rejection of Christianity per se and we're moving into the post-christian era now and I think what's happening is we're not um as the new atheist promised as the as the 1960s Revolution is Promised we're not moving into some enlightened utopian rationalist new way of being we're actually reverting to other forms of civilization you know whether that be say the ancient polygonus structures or something more pagan um I it seems very unlikely to me that we're going to just by throwing off Christianity going to come up with something brilliantly new I think the history is much more likely to be cyclical than it is to be linear learners that's a important and worse considering reflection I think um can you elaborate a little the last chapter of your book is called marriage is good and you're you essentially seek to sell the institution of marriage to to feminists amongst others why would a feminist buy that argument a feminist assuming that a feminist is somebody really cares about good outcomes for women well some of them haven't really quite a common experience of um uh reviewers and and readers of the book who are coming for a feminist perspective as they say I really like chapters one through seven and I really don't like chapter eight um I think there's a very strong feminist argument for marriage it's just not one that's going to be very appealing if you think that the utopian the utopian model is achievable um we've talked already about the monogram the ways in which monogamy produces good outcomes for women um it's really bad for women to be in a polygonous society where they end up living as co-wives in often very fractious households with a lot of domestic violence a lot of child abuse at the same time look for people who don't have children I don't think marriage serves much of a purpose really it might be it might be a way of expressing your love for one another it might be a sort of Cherry On Life's cake but it probably doesn't really serve that much of a purpose um I think that the the purpose of marriage makes sense when you think about the vulnerability of the mother and baby because the nature of of pregnancy and having a small baby is that you're really vulnerable you can't care for your you you cannot participate in the labor market as you otherwise could you need the care of at least one other adults in order to survive the pair of view I'm particularly thinking about really sort of um cultures of much greater probation than ours to some extent what feminists what many feminists have tried to do is to try and replace the husband with the state to say that well the state provides Universal daycare if the state provides um money from others um you know all the various things that states can potentially do then you don't need a husband anymore because the state's your backup husband you know and so we can do away with marriage and there's no need for it the problem is the state's very good at doing that and what most women actually want is not to have State actors stepping in and doing the husband's role or doing or doing the mother's role um but is it is what that what women want because of this intense biological connection that women have with their children is to be with their children but to also be supported by other adults and look there are there are countless examples of men performing that role terribly and being abusive and being exploitative and all the all the various ways in which human beings can be terrible to one another having said that I don't think we've yet come up with a better system than the Maori system for particularly the monogamous marriage system for supporting mothers and children all of the various experiments with communal living or with fully socializing the family or whatever that have been attempted all of them have ultimately failed resulted in worse outcomes and so if we are choosing if we're not trying to cook up some utopian alternative that's never been tried and likely never will be if we're if we're looking at the options available to us that history actually presents to us it's the one that seems to have the fewest costs is the monogamous marriage system which I know doesn't sound very romantic but if just on a purely kind of data-driven basis I think there's a really strong argument for it uh you know I'd have to push back a little bit gently there and say actually I'm not sure what's unromantic about the idea of deep lifelong commitment to another human being but that's not what our culture does anymore and romance seems to have largely disappeared out the door where is romance today does anyone defend Romance no probably not I mean it's this really funny thing that um I was having this conversation with a friend recently who's much more Progressive than I am um about uh whether or not grandparents have obligations to their grandchildren and whether or not um it ought to be expected that grandparents will will help with child care will help with financial support will do you know we'll we'll have some obligation to their grandchildren as they do to their children and obviously vice versa that everyone has obligations within the family and she was saying um basically that it's outrageous to expect that people will limit their freedom in any way in order to took care of their grandchildren or other family members what we should do is we should have a state do it so we should have Universal daycare we should have you know whoever you want whichever um typically poor migrant women you have paid by the state to perform these functions that were once performed by the family um and it should be paid for through taxation um which is of course coercive so there's an old bit of wisdom I think there's more joy in giving than receiving we seem to have lost that idea of being other person centered and finding ourselves and being generous spirited yeah um can I ask you about the impact of we live in the internet age firstly of social media on on relationships and how they're formed and what have you because most people now meet it seems in ways other than socializing physically and secondly the impact of our modern Technologies are instantly available pornography in every shape size and Imagination possible in vast quantities the impact of modern technology on relationships might be the answer the way I'm seeking some views I think that now meeting through dating apps is the most common um way in which people meet and so I don't want to rubbish them entirely because they clearly are people who have found their found their lifelong spouse through dating apps you know but it's very hard to find anyone who um uh he likes them very easy to find people who are depressed and appalled by them I mean dating apps really encourage a kind of shopping mentality to it is almost like using a shopping app you swipe through people who real living breathing human people and you just kind of swipe them away and no place for chemistry well it does encourage a very um a very superficial assessment but also it encourages people to focus in on certain things so like for instance a lot of women will say that they they want to have a partner who's taller than them and one of the things that you can ask for in a dating app is is to filter for say men over six foot which isn't very many men right so you're basically excluding the majority of men um whereas most women actually whereas many women actually would find themselves attracted to a man shorter than six foot in person if there were other if there were other ways in which they were attracted to him you know so it encourages people you might have a sense of humor it might be chivalrous yes might be unfailingly courteous yes all of these things which you basically don't see at all in a dating app so it encourages people to be um to be data driven in a way that is probably not actually reflective of what they really desire in a partner because I think most people actually they try to sort of write down exactly what they desired in a partner probably wouldn't actually do a very good job of describing what they really what they really want because it's actually quite mysterious um in terms of porn I mean I think that we have done a terrible thing to young people who the the guinea pig generation essentially who have been permitted access to millions of images of adults having sex with one another in every in the most degrading forms you can imagine um before they've even had first kiss with a real person and it's sometimes when um you talk about the idea of um regulating porn industry restricting access to the porn history particularly of children Libertarians will talk as if you're trying to sort of ban eating and drinking as if this is like a fundamental human right and I say we've not had that this is so novel online porn is is is maybe 20 years old less than that in its current manifestation we we manage just fine as a species up until five minutes ago without access to this if anything I would say you know the burden I take chesterton's vents very seriously you know they say this thought experiment GK Justin's that you come to a fence in the middle of a field and you don't know what what it's for and the the reformer the sort of thoughtless Progressive reformer says well we don't know what it's supposed to get rid of it it's useless whereas the the conservative and Justin's mind says no find out what it's for and then only then you might consider removing it um I think Chesterton Spence principle is extraordinarily important and particularly when it comes to something as important and complex and difficult as human sexual relationships and by just allowing the porn industry to basically have unfettered access to the minds of the world young in that by being in their pockets is just an astonishingly read this experiment I think and and as as far as we can tell um the early results coming in are absolutely not promising in terms of the effect that it has on these young people and it's very widespread yes I mean when it's now typical the boys in particular to be seeing this stuff from the age of 11. hmm yes I had the experience after a podcast I did with a lady in Australia about the early sexualization of children of having two or three young men explain to me what had happened to them and how they'd actually become physically um unable to operate so yeah just dysfunctional yeah and they described their Journey back from that place as being very hard uh so can I ask you as we think about drawing your extraordinary insights to some sort of close what has been the reaction from feminists do you put a very brave set of propositions out there very well argued very well researched but people tend to react these days so emotively that they can shut your work down without anybody stopping to think is there something important here what's been the reaction how have you found it it's not being as bad as I thought it would be I did have a moment before the book was published and it was out there you know it was going to be hitting bookshelves within weeks and I thought have I ruined my life writing this book um but actually no I would say about 90 of responses have been really positive and I think that that's revealing I think that what's I think actually an enormous number of people have been thinking this but perhaps not felt confident to say it and I get so many um emails and messages from um particularly from young women or from their parents saying thank you so much for saying this thing what I've been thinking and that I didn't feel like I could say I didn't feel it didn't feel permissible I felt that there was a I got this fabulous email a little while ago from the mother of the young woman who described how her daughter has had been on a podcast or something and I bought the book and her mum had bought the book and they read it together before she went off to University and then she went to University and um she didn't want to participate in hookup culture and had uh been interested in the young man who she'd hope to develop a relationship with but instead he'd shown up at her he'd expected casual sex or he'd got drunk and he'd he'd shown up at her at her room late at night basically expecting no string sex and she turned him away and said no with the knowledge that that probably meant that they would not be having a relationship you know that she was she was she was rejecting his advances and she said that she would in another circumstance have said yes possibly in the hope that it would turn into a relationship which I as I write in the book is you know it normally doesn't happen um but she said that she she said no to him because she felt armed with permission that was the phrase used armed with permission and I thought having having read me and I thought why would she need to feel permission to defend her sexual boundaries but this is that this is the problem that young women are facing now they don't feel like they have permission to do that and my hope is that some of them it it could be it could be as easy as that it could be just just to know that actually this is a this is a it is okay to feel this way it is okay to to not want to have casual sex to to recognize the ways in which female sexuality is different from our sexuality and all of this that for some women maybe a lot just feeling um just having the confidence in their own instincts and their own intuitions so there's a sense in which people can feel armed with permission to say no I want to do this differently I think so because I think it's the actual disenchantment when on the one hand you've got this ideological commitment to the idea that sex doesn't mean anything all this but you feel very strongly instinctively that it does and I think that a lot of what Progressive politics does is it discourages people from um listening to their own moral intuitions on things and what I hope that my book and many others you know I'm I think that there is a there is a a new kind of feminism Brewing which is much more attentive to these these intuitions and is very critical of the liberal Paradigm um of which I'm a part and I think that if people can feel it it might be as easy as as people feel as though they have permission to respond to their intuition rather than to try and suppress it particularly young women what advice would you give to parents who are really looking at their teenagers kids in their early 20s walking out into this absolute Minefield some would say cesspit of a culture where the taboos are gone the guidelines are gone respect seems diminished and no one talks romance anymore how can parents equip their children in your view it's very tricky I mean I I'm not currently really having to deal with this because my son's only two so you know I'm hoping in 10 years time maybe things will have improved and it will but the task for parents will be easier um because the task of parents is really hard it's true because you know you might want to be um reasserting some of these more traditional ideas but if children are going to school or they're being exposed to um to online pornography and all this stuff which is going to be potentially in conflict with your with your values that's really difficult I mean I would say that um often parents feel very scared of um placing constraints on their children and they want to be their children's friend it's completely understandable feeling but um children are not capable of making you know decision in their best interest this is why they need parenting and things like um I don't know giving very young children smartphones which seems to be increasingly ubiquitous you know the the Silicon Valley Tech Executives they don't give their kids internet enabled devices until they you know Bill Gates didn't give his daughter a smartphone until she was 16. now they know actually the effects that that this stuff has on Young Minds and it is very difficult for parents when all of their children's friends have smartphones and when your child is telling you you know this is social death not having access to this stuff but I I hope very much that there will be increasingly kind of better coordination efforts because actually I I honestly think that if the government tomorrow banned under 16s from having smartphones I think parents would cheer I think parents will be relieved because at the moment there are many many parents I speak to are really worried about things like porn about the effects of social media on their children Etc but they say I you know what can I do because they've all got it you know how do I there's kind of a prisoner's dilemma I think that we should be treating the internet for children in the way that we treat say driving and cigarettes and saying look there there can be there can be Pleasures there can be extreme there can be usefulness you know that come from this this new tech but actually it's um it has fear dangers and children aren't really capable of negotiating it um so that would be on a long laundry list that would be up there to be much much more skeptical about um giving children access to the internet you've been very generous with your time and what you've had to say is of profound importance to anyone who's concerned I think with human flourishing which in the end is surely about committed and functioning relationships so I can only say thank you very much indeed thank you so much [Music]

Channel: John Anderson

Views: 67,151

Keywords: John Anderson, John Anderson Conversation, Interview, John Anderson Interview, Policy debate, public policy, public debate, John Anderson Direct, Direct, Conversations

Id: G5jRm5EqDkw

Length: 76min 45sec (4605 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 27 2023