Louise Perry on The Case Against the Sexual Revolution - Interview with Glen Scrivener

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

Channel: Speak Life

Views: 57,341

Keywords: glen scrivener, speaklife, uk, God, Reaching out

Id: zg7oysCEQ28

Length: 49min 8sec (2948 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 25 2022