Louise Perry: motherhood in crisis and the feminist case for marriage | SpectatorTV

in general the way you make things cool again is when high status people adopt them so I guess if you wanted to make marriage cool again you'd have rich men and hot women adopting it as simple as that okay hello and welcome to martial matters of me Winston Marshall at spectator today I'm joined by feminist theorist columnist at unheard author of the book the case against the sexual Revolution a new Guide to Sex in the 21st century and host of the maiden mother matriarch podcast Louise Perry hello thank you so much for joining me you're very welcome thank you having me so I want to jump in if I can before getting into your book and and other such things with what I think is a motherhood crisis and perhaps it's something that I'm over worried about but the office of national statistics suggests that I might not be entirely wrong to be worried about it but just they've reported this year that now half of women are childless at 30 which is for the first time ever this is in Britain that 18 of women aged 45 were childless by 2020. and that mothers have on average 1.92 children now which is lower than the 2.08 that their mother's generation had now I think you answer some of the some of these issues for why this is the case in your book which I'd like to get into but I was speaking to this morning to someone and I sort of assumed that this was a bad thing and his reaction was like well that's good we need fewer people and um we need to have managed Decline and so what might be a very simple question is is why is that bad do we need mothers and do mothers do women need to have children yes you don't have to look far to find people he'll say that that's a great thing um and he will see this gradual decline in childbearing um which by the way goes back a surprisingly long way the decline in birth rates associated with the Industrial Revolution um and also there's a decline in mortality particularly infant mortality described as the um described by by demographers as the as the first demographic transition that's when basically every country almost every country in the world now has undergone the first demographic transition fruition was the first country to do so because we were the first country to have an industrial revolution and that's when you see uh birth rates dropping from you know seven children per woman or something extraordinarily high like that to just above replacement and then you also have low mortality and whatever that's so so even before the pill comes on the picture women are having for your children but it's in the 1960s when the pill arrives that you see this very very sharp dip infertility and again not just here right this is I I think I'm I'm trying to recall statistics exactly only three percent of the world's population now live in a country where birth rates are not declining so declining birth rates are the norm and they started declining as I said first in Britain but it's basically happened everywhere it seems to just be an inevitable consequence of modernity mm-hmm the people people have fewer children and there are a whole bunch of reasons associated with this um the one that you'll hear most commonly shrimp um London Millennials is that it's considered with house prices and that here it is a factor it is that has become more expensive particularly in big Urban centers like London New York San Francisco Tokyo wherever to own property and raise children and and there are all sorts of costs associated with children that have become greater and greater as time has gone by so that is true that's not the only Factor though because if that were the only Factor then you wouldn't be seeing this extraordinarily Global phenomenon of falling fertility absolutely everywhere regardless of house prices um it does seem to be just something about modernity mm-hmm discourages family formation well there's a few things from all angles right so it's not just the economic which I do happen to agree with that that we think we want to do things in a certain order and house prices are ridiculous that still doesn't quite answer the question is it do we need children is it bad is it bad yeah like is that not you know in an age where we're pummeled every day and being told there's a climate apocalypse coming yeah when the people are a problem is it not a good thing that there there are there are fewer people so I think that um crushing birth rates is not going to solve the climate crisis for a few reasons one is that it takes too long right if the problem is that we currently have close to 8 billion people who are living in such a way that you deplete natural resources as time goes by which I think is true um having you know 1.5 replacement rate or something like that below below the 2.1 necessary for replacement is not going to you know if Extinction rebellion and Co a right that we're talking about apocalypse within a century that's not quick enough right to actually reduce the burden on the planet so that kind of gentle decline in population is nowhere near enough to avert catastrophe if that's the only tool that you're employing so there's that um the other thing is that birth rates are not declining evenly this is something that people don't always bear in mind right in thinking about this so one example that um a very bad actually from her this week is North and South Korea so North Korea have just below replacement level birth rates which means that their population is likely to dwindle a little bit but not very much in the next half century whereas South Korea boasts the lowest birth rates in the world not 0.78 I think it is now whereas you need 2.1 to for replacement which means that at the moment South Korea has twice as many people as North Korea but in by 2 2100 so how do you say it 2100 whatever yeah that will have reversed so North Korea will have twice as many people as South Korea and they're a very very obvious geopolitical consequences to that in that it's predicted that in maybe 10 20 years South Korea will no longer be able to repel a land Invasion from North Korea because they won't have a big enough military so that's the sort of thing that we're thinking about you know I think what the the fantasy of some environmentalists is that things will basically remain exactly the same geopolitically Etc but people will just have slightly fewer children and eventually everything will just kind of gradually shrink no what happens is that some cultures are more resistant to whatever it is about modernity that causes fertility to climb than our others and what we should expect to happen as time goes by is that those modernity resistant cultures are going to become more dominant and super modern secular Urban Etc cultures like South Korean are going to decline which is bad news if you if your allegiances as most environmentalists are if your allegiances are with that kind of super modern secular Urban culture which is on which is on its way out which is committing suicide effectively because people do tend to obviously there is some um there are exceptions but people in general do tend to adopt the um religiosity and politics of their parents because these things are partly heritable religiosity is a moderately heritable traits um and one of the best predictors at the moment for fertilities how religious you are worldwide that's true religious people just have lots more kids this also applies I think to something like your interest in environmentalism you know if you're if you have this sort of personality the sort of uh um intelligence and temperament or whatever that disposes you towards being a climate activist there's a fairly good chance your children will as well and also these are the people if we so if we accept my argument that actually declining population is nowhere near enough of an intervention to actually delay the climate crisis or or prevent the climate crisis I think the only way out at this point we're almost seven billion people on the planet almost 8 billion rather is technology it's better means of of of energy creation yeah it's the only way that isn't there isn't another way there's have you ever had this distinction between light greens bright greens and dark greens among environmentalists so the light greens are the people who just think you should like I'm I'm straw Manning a bit but just think you should turn the tap off while you brush your teeth and just sort of like whistle around the edges in terms of slightly reducing your consumption and that's sort of fine so they're they're the least radical of everyone the dark greens of the extinction Rebellion types who say capitalism needs to be overthrown a whole way of life is disastrous you know who want to completely upend everything and then the bright greens are the people who say what we need is technology and Innovation to get us out of this so Elon Musk is a bright green right so more people means more chance of innovation yes particularly the type of you know if you if you're if you're the type of Highly Educated person who really cares about the environment and is going around saying I'm not going to have kids because of the planet you are exactly the sort of person who's likely to have children who are going to develop you know the next the next form of energy that we need you know so I I think that's probably the worst thing you can do actually is to refuse to procreate and I and I also honestly think that actually most people who say that they don't want to have children because the climate they don't that's not actually the reason what do you think that's not the whole reason well because there tends to be a kind of bundle of things which feed into all of the things which decrease fertility you know things like being um being a religious being a graduate living in a city being left-wing those things also all tend to go along with being very interested in environmentalism so there's a kind of cluster effect where the it might be uh sort of political expedient to explain your reluctance to start family as a result of of number five the environmentalism but it's quite likely that actually all all five are feeding into each other um even if it's not quite as um not quite as appealing an explanation for other people or for yourself what do you think for women on a on an individual one you know each individual woman the consequences of them not having a child I'll give the example of uh recently American comedian Chelsea Handler doing these videos of her living her best life on on uh just Instagram and showing herself sort of skiing and freeing and living this luxury Jet Set lifestyle and seemingly or claiming to be very happy so that there is and and she has a lot of support for that certainly from Progressive circles do you think that that uh that that suggests that actually it's great not to be a mother do you think that's correct or what are the flaws in that line of thinking I mean I think it's really good fun to be Child free when you're in your 30s and I don't think it's very good fun to be Child free when you're in your 80s so so people are not wrong to recognize that going on holiday when you have small children is a nightmare I can personally attest I have an almost two year old we're basically just given up traveling with him because it's a it's a complete nightmare but it's like it's fine just don't do that for it's not very long it's not a very long period for your life when you can't go on holiday because you have small children um but it is just it is straightforwardly true that they are expensive and um my friend Alex says that the um the only thing that will limit your freedom more than having a newborn is going to prison which is true it's just true right but also you you front load a lot of exhaustion and expense with enormous payoff you know at the time babies are joyful but also further down the track there's an enormous payoff on an individual level so and so the the flip side of that if you're if you're without child later what's what are the downsides for women specifically like what how do they and you know it's I get I get the joke if you're atheist and you have no children it's sad but can you explain that to people who maybe don't understand that um it is very common for women in particular and men to to regret not having children later it is very common there are exceptions to that but I think in general it is probably a good policy when mapping at your life to basically behave as other people behave because the chances of you being an outlier are quite low most people most people will not derive great meaning in their lives from their careers most people will derive great meaning from their children that's just true there are exceptions but that's just true for most people and it is fun to have the freedom that comes with not having children when you're younger but when you're older and you are more likely to be lonely when you're dependent on other people for support you know you can't depend if when you're in your 80s you can't depend on other 80 year old friends to look to look after you in the way that adult children can and also you probably aren't going to be able to depend on the state either because that's the other story in relation to falling fertility the welfare state is a Ponzi scheme it always was right like when when the odd age of pension was introduced when the NHS was introduced we had a much younger population on average we had we had much higher birth rates and no one ever expected these things to become I think six and six percent and seven percent respectively of GDP which they are now no one ever expected that but it's already clear that State pensions and the NHS and the whole the whole welfare state is not sustainable that's only going to get worse with the child uh decrease it's only going to get worse yeah so I think the chances of me I'm now 31 the chances of me getting to claim my state pension when I'm 68 which I suppose you will be able to do are non-existent pretty much I think it would be gone by then you you touched on one of the first slides of feminism and that answer is that a career sorry yeah well I think this is you can challenge me if you disagree but the career is more meaningful than having children and something I've noticed in my generation is is for women it's they've been told to pursue a career to go to University to go and seek work and and um but you claim or you're arguing that no that's actually not it's not good for women I think that's probably true for men too I think the vast majority of people have jobs not careers and that's actually as it should be it's it's it's it's it's it's weird intellectual types like me yeah you know who Define themselves by their careers it's um that's not typical and I don't think it ever should be um most people derive most meaning from their families and their friends in their local communities and you know there's so much data supporting this this view that the things that make people actually happy are basically meaningful connections with other people not abstract things like intellectual success or Career Success um yes but that that has been um a very dominant view in feminism for some time that women ought to be prioritizing the life of the mind or the um success according to traditionally masculine criteria ought to be the goal um I think that partly comes from the fact that sort of inevitably the women who have the greatest power in setting the cultural agenda and the political agenda are women who have chosen that route and for whom that route may be a better fit for them you know there are there really are outliers in a resurrection there will be some women who have absolutely no interest in having children to whom it probably wouldn't be good to have children because it's not you know they wouldn't make good Mothers they're not they're not orientated in that direction and that's okay um and who are very driven in their careers and are just temperamentally kind of more masculine right those women are so much more likely to be at the top of the tree when it comes to um powerful institutions like female politicians for instance are so much more likely than than the average woman to not have children enormously so inevitably those women are going to be just a bit less interested in the alternative route and in promoting the interests and the viewpoints of women who've chosen to stay at home I mean stay at home mothers are probably the least represented demographic in the whole of the country in political terms right because by definition they're not in the corridors of power do you think it's that within feminist different feminist movements as well though there's been a tendency to try and strive for women to live equal lives to men rather than embracing the great things about Womanhood because it's not necessarily just the women who are in top in certain careers who are as you say outspoken and vocal have have the opportunity to speak but the whole various feminist movements it seems to be trying to level the playing fields in a way that is against female nature I mean in in your your book you I think you you write feminism needs to ReDiscover the mother I'm not entirely convinced to ever embrace the mother do you think that's do you think that's fair um yes I mean so they have a feminism historically very complicated political movement and there are lots of different warring factions um there have been strains of so-called maternal feminism or difference feminism or whatever which I'm to some extent drawing on but in terms of the the most dominant feminist ideas yeah yeah there's a there's a there's an antipathy to Motherhood and that I think is kind of built in to the ideology because um liberalism is really hard to to reconcile with motherhood and so to the extent that feminism is derived from liberalism as the sort of grounds of political movement if if your priorities the freedom of the individual and if your unit of analysis is the individual how on Earth do you deal with motherhood because babies aren't really individuals right because they can't they can't survive proven an hour without the devoted care of at least one adult and mothers aren't really certainly mothers when they have newborns aren't really individuals either I've heard from so many women who've had newborns that going out of the house for the first time without your baby feels like missing a limb that's the phrase I've heard so many times and that's how I felt as well and it eases over time you have this kind of gradual process of feeling more um separate from your baby but certainly in the early days mother and baby are a unit and if you and if your understanding of society is as is of individuals sort of like atoms just occasionally bumping into one another but basically operating solo would you do about the mother baby diode it just doesn't really make sense and so your options are basically to to be antenatalist to just say well it's better for women if they don't have children and some feminists are very explicit in saying that um not realizing I guess or not thinking about the fact that that's a Surefire way to to for your your movement to commit suicide right if you're if the people drawn to your movement end up not reproducing then you rely on converting other people's children to the ideology but that's quite hard you know you will you will eventually run out of other people's children to convert so is that the other option that's been chosen by some feminists is to um rely as much as possible on the states and to say that we should be um we should be trying to disrupt that intense link between mother and baby and using State services to that end so Universal daycare from birth sort of thing um and uh rather than having women supported by spouses having women supported by the state that's the kind of socialist feminist route um as a way of dealing with this problem of Freedom how do we maximize women's freedom um which do you support neither what's your solution I think it has to be the family I think it's I think it's a picture poison situation I do because I do recognize that there are downsides to um having women be reliant on the family Network for support during the vulnerable periods of pregnancy and and baby Hood but I also think that there isn't a better alternative because I don't think that the state makes a better replacement family I don't I think it's worth saying that I don't think that the nuclear family should be the only source of support I think that historically the norm for humans has been to be embedded within extended family networks and to have say lots of female kin flock around that it used to be a practice in the UK um I did um I I did a degree in women's history and my dissertation topic was on um the history of obstetrics in this country and um I don't know that word what is it obstetrics childbearing oh sorry okay yeah and there used to be um all sorts of practices we've completely forgotten about which are completely standard like for instance the lying in period if you ever heard a lying period no where women would basically spend I can't remember exactly the period it's something like 30 or 40 days they after birth they would spend being looked after by other people in their homes basically so this is obviously pre-hospitals and um and then you at the end of that period you were churched you go to your local Parish church and there is a there's a um a service and then you're sort of released from your lying period And this is occasionally being interpreted by some feminist as this sort of almost like putting women in perder like a women are sort of shut away because they're dirty or whatever that's not the purpose of a lying in Period the purpose of the lying in period is to protect you and the baby from infection because you're not going out and about and risking disease and also to allow you to recover from this you know horrible experience of of completely unanisitized child path um and what's really interesting about um that practice is is pretty much all cultures have something like that and it's all for about the same period of time as well if you look at the um whatever they call it lying in Period of different cultures it's all like 30 40 days ish and the way that it's done is that you have your female kin or sometimes your female friends or servants if you can afford them will come and look after you during that period and we'll do everything for you that seems to be among most cultures the solution that is arrived at in terms of how do you support mother and baby doing that really vulnerable period particularly of course in periods of high infant mortality um and we don't do that I was kicked out of hospital after less than 24 hours after having a cesarean and in hospital I basically no support from anyone and in fact I mean I to be fair I had babies during lockdown but I wasn't I wasn't allowed even to have my any of my relatives with me in hospital like we've completely done away with that and I think no wonder women get such bad postnatal depression because we've basically we've just done away with the with the village that exists for precisely this purpose so this is from the Industrial Revolution basis yeah yeah and that's where the big change so the the fix for that is cultural then it's not really political what can the state really do to encourage that change in uh in in looking after mothers there there are some things that the state probably can do I don't think that um what the state currently encourages is for people to be as mobile as possible in terms of internal and also international migration in order to maximize GDP and also for um the state doesn't really recognize the extended family it's just blind to it in general how could it recognize it one example I like to give is I have a friend who had a baby when she was in medical school single mom and she somehow managed to finish her degree miraculously and then she was getting to the stage of applying for her placements as a junior doctor and she really really wanted to be located near where her mum lives because she wanted to live with her mum and rely on her mum for Chaka particularly overnight because overnight Nursery closed what are you supposed to do if you're doing a night shift as a doctor and the NHS bureaucracy just couldn't compute this idea they were like okay so if you have if you have a child in primary school they respect that as a sort of geographic limitation and if you have a spouse they'll they'll recognize that but they did this idea of like a grandmother or what it's just sort of there's no drop down menu option for that because that's just doesn't sort of figure in policy making in general um I think it should I think that we should be thinking about trying to strengthen the extended family in all policy making um and currently it's off the radar so yeah it's not as if the state can just wave a magic wand and return us to um the medieval village arrangement but I think at the moment it does things that further undermine the family when it didn't like like that but how else so one example it sounds niche the fastest growing type of households in this country is the multi-generational households are three generations living in the same house so for economic reasons because of the housing crisis or yeah so it's partly to do is it's partly to do with young people not being able to afford to buy their own property so they're staying at home for longer it's also partly to do with older people just living for such such a long time that it can be the best option for a family to have you know to have a granny flat or whatever and to have an elderly person move in um it's also quite a good arrangement when it comes to child care potentially if you've got um an older relative living with you who can help sort of around the edges in terms of um child care then that's can be quite a good arrangement for people um part of the reason that it's growing as a household type in this country is because of South Asian communities are much more likely to adopt that practice and not not necessarily because poverty it's not like there's no direct correlation between choosing that option and being poor is actually because it's culturally considered normal to have your elderly parents live with you rather than have them in institutions um there are all sorts of really dumb barriers to multi-generational households right things like just getting planning permission to build a granny Annex or whatever or it's difficult to get a mortgage because there aren't bespoke mortgage products available at most High Street Banks when you've got you know so you've got one generation you have a lot of equity but basically no capacity to raise a mortgage and then you've got another generation who might not have as much Equity but can pay off the mortgage over a longer period like that's just the sort of thing that High Street Banks struggle with they needn't there's nothing inherently Difficult about that it just needs um potentially some some quite small policy tweaks um but until now I don't think government's really been used to thinking in those terms about how to actually knit families together rather than just encourage people to maximize their their earnings at all times one of the brilliant features in your book which which I think is one of the contentious issues of today in feminism is is the idea and I think you use the term uh equal above the head so um have you have you had I imagine you've had pushback from that particular point because that seems to be something that people disagree with and um but it seems obvious to me that that biologically we are different and that hormones would have had different effects have different effects on men as they do to women and and um what do you think why do you think that's such a contentious uh issue and why is that so problematic for feminists the word that I've some that I've heard quite a few times is that I'm being defeatist in thinking that there are ways in which men and women on average psychologically different different from one another and that those differences aren't going to go away um that is seen as kind of giving up just accepting crucially accepting male violence you know just saying that well men in every time and place that we know of have always been more aggressive and physically aggressive than women um so it's actually not really about women it's about it's sort of an apology of that men behave badly if you accept that it's not really to do with yes I think it's also seen to be feeding into I mean you know there are historically instances of um scientific sexism shall we say you know what is it like um there was I can't remember the exact number now but um women's Brains on average are smaller than men's Brains because women are on average smaller than men and um there was some Victorian scientists who got very preoccupied with the idea of I think it's the missing five ounces so yeah so trying to explain women's kind of cognitive inferiority on the basis of just brain size um I mean we now know that actually average male and female IQ is the same yeah exactly um so that was that was dodgy science yeah but that clearly they clearly have been examples of of scientific sexism being put to that end and so some feminists here me going around saying that men and women have important psychological differences and they that's that's the fear that that's where that heads um towards just legitimizing the mistreatment of women how do we overcome that fear I think the problem is that it's true what's true that there are differences between men and women psychologically it's just true and it sort of doesn't matter whether or not you think that that truth might be misused by Bad actors it is just true and I think that I don't think we solve anything by trying to pretend otherwise and I think also that when you withdraw from a discipline like say evolutionary psychology which most feminists are very suspicious of what you end up doing is having no ability to contribute to that discipline you know if anyone with a kind of feminist inclination rushes out of discipline you sort of Leave It to the you leave it to the Bad actors right you're likely to actually produce more dodgy anti-feminist science because you've just you've just you've given up I mean that's defeatist arguably right yeah I think we should say the science is morally neutral if it's true it's true what we decide to do with that truth is up to us we can put it to whatever political ends we want to and and I think that actually there are ways in which you can use say evolutionary psychology to ends that um promote the interest of women which is what I'm trying to do so what would be an example of that so on the sexuality issue for instance which I write about at length um there's copious evidence to suggest that male and female sexuality on average is nearly different and men are for instance more likely to be interested in casual sex than women social sexuality sociosexuality yeah so that's your your innate tendency should always be interested in sexual variety men are hiring that trade than women there's lots of overlap you know it's something that um often really clever people are bad at understanding is the idea of overlapping bell curves and the idea that you can be you can have at the population level you can have a difference but there can still be individuals for whom to whom that doesn't apply really smart people can completely lose their senses when confronted by this but that's that's what we're talking about in when it comes to sociosexuality and indeed much else um I don't think it says women's interests to pretend as I think we have done for half century now that the only reason that women don't like casual sex as much as men is because they've been repressed and that if only women could be freed from that repression that's the other great lie of feminism it seems yeah and that they could have sex like men and that this is what women really truly want underneath all of the sort of pedrock or nonsense um I don't think that's true an evolutionary psychology would support that view it should be very obvious intuitively why the sex who who risk much more from any section encounter in terms of pregnancy in particular why they would be the picky SX and why they would be less Keen to jump into bed with someone they don't know um and if if you if you can accept that premise then the distress that is widely reported by young women in particular as a consequence of hookup culture can be understood not as the sort of vestiges of patriarchal sexual repression still playing out when women are shamed you can see it instead as a completely good and natural response from women who are actually being put under pressure to have sex they don't really want to have and I think actually if we're really interested in protecting those women's well-being I think continuing to try and make them behave more like men is not going to do that and actually you argue for the for marriage as the as a trying to be very controversi yeah yes so the feminist case for marriage yeah which is which I've written for the for the spectator as well um which is that if you're going to have children particularly the the data suggests and history suggests that the only stable institution that has proven itself to actually protect the interests of women and children is marriage monogamous marriage and basically all cultures basically your culture is either opt for monogamous marriage or polygamous marriage so one man multiple wives one fact from your book that I found really surprising was that historically only 15 of of cultures have um monogamous uh relationship as the norm have mandated monogamous so what quite a lot of cultures do is they permit polygamy which is not to say that every marriage is polygamous but they permit it um Christian cultures for instance don't and that is the unusual that's the unusual one okay sorry but I interrupted you so uh well and polygamy is bad news for women in general um there are loads of domestic violence is higher in polygamous cultures for instance um child abuse is is more common um there's higher crime rates because you've got all these um unmarried angry men who are more likely to commit opportunistic crimes um monogamous marriage has a whole bunch of downsides but at the societal level we haven't yet found a better structure and various experiments you know by um utopians having sort of I mean one of the things that Jermaine Greer for instance imagined in the female eunuch um published in the 70s I think 1970 was um having women living in sort of communes with one another and then men might visit occasionally you know all of these kind of experimental setups um they've never lasted people have tried them at various points in history not just post sexual Revolution and um they don't seem to work they don't actually seem to accommodate human nature in the way that you need them to well so as well as what I think we have a mother motherhood crisis we also have a marriage crisis and I think it's something like the now the the average age for a woman to be married for the first time is in I think it's 32 and for a man it's 34. and in your book you go into uh detail about that really from the 1969 divorce act and how drastically things have changed since then I think you you go into if I remember correctly and correct me where I'm wrong it's uh back 1968 eight percent of children were born out of wedlock and now it's 50 of children are born out of wedlock so that's about right sounds about right yeah so marriage is completely as an institution been worn away and and how how can we change that culture if indeed uh polygamy is worse for us as you've argued how do we change it and make and make marriage cool again [Music] um well in general the way you make things cool again is when high status people adopt them it's true for basically everything so I guess if you wanted to make marriage cool again you'd have rich men and hot women adopting it simple as that okay I mean that's just true those are the those are the quickest route to status among human beings um I don't know how we do that of Designing designing that particular policy I I guess I will leave okay so then how do you how do you win that argument with the with let's say in feminist circles or how in in the in this in the discourse how do we persuade marriage as the the worth redeeming well I mean one of the things that's worth noting is that um the which you are the more likely you are to get married and stay married really yeah and so the poorer why so if you're poor you're less likely to yeah why is that I don't know they're different there are different views on it the if you come across Rob Henderson's idea of luxury of beliefs no so Rob Henderson is um uh psychologist writer very interesting very interesting person and he um is best known probably for his idea of luxury beliefs so this is he defines it as um a belief that confers status on the upper classes while the costs are born by the lower classes and he Compares it to a um a sort of an ideological Revlon good so verblin good is um a good that is more desirable because it is expensive so like a Rolls-Royce identifying the normal laws of supply and demand a Rolls-Royce is desirable because it's expensive because everyone knows it's expensive you can only access it if you're very rich right um Rob thinks that this also applies to political ideas so if you can hold to an idea that is actually very very costly for you know not for you but for someone less privileged than you it actually is a way of boosting your own status and advertising your own your own status so an example he gives for instance is um uh uh drugs if you go around saying that you want drugs to be completely legalized you don't understand all the stigma about drugs whatever um if you live in a nice expensive part of town and you can afford to go to very expensive rehab that doesn't cost you anything but it does cost someone who lives in a very poor part of town and is likely to have you know the house broken into by junkies and to have needles in the child's playground and whatever it costs them a great deal so it's a luxury belief in the sense that it is a way of boasting about your own status without suffering any costs and I think marriage may be an example of what sorry opposition to marriage maybe an example of that oh it's just thinking of Chelsea Handler is a perfect example of that but mostly my privilege without showing any of the costs yeah because the people disproportionately who suffer from family disintegration are poor people particularly poor women and children um yeah I think it was um I can't remember who said this not me I'm stealing from someone but I can't credit them because I've gone he said um the real leaders from the sexual Revolution weren't men weren't women they were children um I think that's true there's so much evidence to suggest that divorce is a complete disaster for children yeah on mass um like it's worse for your parents to get divorced and for one of your parents to die in terms of the impact on yeah yeah wow um uh so uh then what does the uh future look for feminism what do you how are you now Mary Harrington's just put out her book feminism against progress and she cites you at length which I imagine is very flattering is there a sort of comeback uh for traditional or conservative feminism so the term Mary has coined is um not conservative feminism but reactionary feminism which is partly a joke um because it's funny and because you know you're preempting what people are going to say about you um sort of reclaiming the word reactionary which is funny um but it's also it I think it does also describe quite a serious political idea the problem with describing this program as conservative feminism is it suggests a slightly different relationship with the recent past it suggests that what you're trying to do is cling on to the status quo whereas actually as you know in relation to marriage for instance um what is Edge cling on to he's already dead you know the idea that we're going to sort of just stand to thought history yelling stop and that's enough you know that what we're actually thinking about here is a is almost a reconstruction process and I think I mean reactionary feminism is is basically just a funny meme that became a a serious political idea but I think I think I think part of what we're actually feminism describes and what I see as being part of what I'm trying to do is recognizing that there are lots of ways in which our current cultural moment is very very strange there are all sorts of things that we do which are very odd and are largely result of our material circumstances the fact that technological processes progress has been so rapid people haven't really kept pace with it in terms of our social institutions and this kind of liquefying effect the technological progress has on communities and traditions whatever what what I think the reactionary feminist says to this is okay we don't say well let's recreate the 1950s then you know let's let's look to the fairly recent past and say she almost goes back to the medieval right yeah yeah yeah so really exactly super trade yeah so Mary so Mary for instance would argue and did argue in a great ass issue years ago from which famous against progress is partly derived um Trad wives aren't tried enough yeah because actually yes it's she very Condes that actually women um were probably better off in pre-industrial Revolution on some metrics on some metrics yeah no not at all but definitely this idea of progress being a straight line it's nonsense um I think what the reaction with feminist project is is to look across time and place you know ambitiously not just look back to 1950s and say okay what are the common themes here what are the what are the Norms institutions ideas whatever that seem to best promote human flourishing what do all cultures end up settling on we just spoke about the lying in period you know if everyone's doing this except us is that because we are uniquely enlightened or is that because actually we're the ones who've gone astray should we be should we be returning to the lying in Period should we be trying to actually sort of reconstruct from from the past ways of structuring human life which actually promote women's interests promote everyone's interests better than what we do right now that's I think what reactionary feminism is people seem to be quite into it I I uh do you take issue with any of uh Mary's thoughts on it where do you think you divide from are you split from her um I joke but it is also true that I'm Mary's gateway drug you know she's a she's a more she's a more radical thinker than I am in certain ways but then I think that's so valuable because she she follows some of these ideas through to their most over some window pushing conclusions like no sexual marriage so Mary for instance has a whole chapter where she argues against the pill which I didn't quite do in my book I I present some of the arguments against the well I I present some of the ways in which the pill has caused some social destruction and I push for some degree of kind of restraints but Mary goes the whole way so you're still quite in favor of the of of that of contraception in that in that sense it's not she you think there's there's Stills plus sides but whereas Mary's kind of get married first and you know it's basically strict Christianity it seems like yeah Orthodox Christianity without the Christianity without Christ yeah sort of reconstructed from first principles yeah um yeah I mean I don't I use contraception within marriage but like I don't I actually I don't want to go to the pill it's really useful it's basically my view while simultaneously recognizing that there have been destruction pretty much the whole chapter yeah massive consequences of the pill yeah so some people would say I'm a hypocrite maybe they're right great well on that note Louise Perry thank you so much for speaking me today thank you foreign [Music] foreign

Channel: The Spectator

Views: 46,985

Keywords: The Spectator, Spectator, SpectatorTV, Spectator TV, SpecTV, The Week in 60 Minutes, TWI60

Id: Xd5l1mZfSZM

Length: 51min 24sec (3084 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 18 2023