The Case Against the Sexual Revolution | Louise Perry | EP 331

young men and women are turning in all ever greater numbers to a very casual pornography especially with regards to the boys to the abandonment of any relationships whatsoever and then interestingly enough it seems to much less sexual activity in general what's happening paradoxically is that by removing all the principles from sexual interaction not the inhibitions but the principles we're actually dooming the sexual Enterprise rather than facilitating it even for the hedonists I think what's happening generally is people are having probably more casual sex but but they're having sex less frequently so when they are having sex it's more likely to be casual but they're not forming these long long-standing relationships on the one hand we have this astounding availability of sexual stimuli at the click of a button at any moment anything that you can imagine is available on the internet immediately and that seems to be demotivating people to actually seek out meaningful sexual relationships which in the long term are vastly better for us in every possible way but we have a culture enabled by technology which is very very short term in every way so people are channeled towards that kind of immediate relief [Music] thank you [Music] hello everyone I'm happy today to be able to talk to Louise Perry um we'll have an interesting conversation about sexual Dynamics and the relative role of women and men Louise Perry my guest today is UK based journalist author and columnist writing on the topics of sexual freedom and the current state of feminism and The Feminine her recent book is the case against the sexual Revolution published in 2022 so a new book it notes the emergence of a widespread disillusionment with sex particularly among the young male and female alike and discusses the long-term psychological and social error of a life of hedonistic urges in the midst of the upheaval of traditional marital Concepts Louise is also the director of the other half a new non-partisan feminist think tank and the host of Maiden mother matriarch a developmental progression a podcast about sexual politics hello Louise thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today you wrote a rather controversial book recently let's talk about the book I'm just going to walk through the chapters and give everybody a preview of where we're heading so chapter one sex must be taken seriously that doesn't sound like much fun number two men and women are different well that'll get you in trouble that's for sure too so some desires are bad Loveless sex is not empowering consent is not enough and people are not products well if you were trying to pick a fight in today's society particularly with those on the left I would say you couldn't have picked six more contentious titles for chapters with the possible exception of people are not products I suppose most people on the left even the radicals would agree with that statement but the rest of it pretty much runs cult counter to I would say the juvenile delusions of our present culture I was interested today I was re going through your book again and uh I noticed once again that you started with the story of Marilyn Monroe and Hugh Hefner and now I was just talking to my wife about that the other day I think it was brought in a conversation motivated by the fact that this podcast was coming up and we talked about the emergence of pornography during our lifetime you know and when where's both of us are around 60 and when we were young the standard pornographic recourse you might say was Playboy but that soon multiplied like a Hydra and first of all there was Playboy and it had some pretensions to something like culture and there was a certain style associated with it and uh a certain what would you call it veneer of sophistication you know it was all Jazz and penthouses and and and New York and freedom and youth and you know sexual activity between consenting adults all free of other entanglements but completely conscious of what they were doing and there were high brow interviews and you know sort of in jokes and so Playboy was quite effective at uh generating a kind of late Rat Pack cool around itself but then the next iteration of the pornographic Ascent was Penthouse and it was it was the harder core version of Playboy it got a lot more gynecological let's say and then Hustler hit after that and everybody knew at that point no matter what their attitude was toward Playboy that we'd stepped into a new sort of swamp of monstrosity and then of course it wasn't long after that 15 years maybe something like that that porn hit the internet and then away we went so let's start talking about Marilyn Monroe and her I mean she she she uh embodied this feminine archetype of the sex kit and I guess the Femme Fatale tube but she's more on the sex kitten end of things and she's still an icon and she's an icon that even gave rise to figures such as Madonna I would say because Madonna played with uh Marilyn Monroe image a lot and with a fair bit of success but it's not like Maryland exactly had a good time with it so she died very young by her own hand oh Lord why don't you tell a little bit more of her story yeah she had a fairly miserable life from start to finish um one of the reasons I I decided to open the book by talking about uh Marilyn Monroe and Hugh Hefner partly because just through through good luck from Ice which was a writer they were they were born in the exactly the same year um even though of course yeah Monroe died young and Hefner lived well into his 90s um and they were both these incredible icons of the sexual Revolution uh Marilyn for her beauty and Hefner for his success for Playboy magazine but they lived extraordinarily different lives and they experienced sexual Liberation so-called in completely different ways you know Marilyn Monroe was grew up in foster homes was victims of victim of child sexual abuse and of domestic violence as an adult and as you say die by her own hands long-standing substance abuse issues ETC Heavenly didn't suffer in that way I I mean I do think that actually by the time Hefner grew old he had lost the glamor that he had as a younger man I think that he is evidence of the fact that even the most successful Playboy has a shelf life not as shorter shelf life as as the sexually liberated woman does I mean really in reality with a modern Western lifespan you're talking maybe a quarter of that you might be really sexually desirable which is why I think it's risky to place all of your self-esteem on that value or indeed to um base your career best your life around being sexually desirable because it's really not very long well you know that that's that that's a good it's a good place to to take a slight detour you know a lot your book makes a moral case and moral cases aren't particularly popular now but there are some interesting ways of discussing morality technically that I think might be worth delving into so one of the things that people who are watching and listening might be interested knowing is that people pursue different mating strategies so to speak that's that's how evolutionary psychologists or biologists describe it and you can make the same case in Animal Kingdom to some degree and uh there are short-term mating strategies and that would be associated with an ethos of the glorification let's say or the practice of casual sex so sex without relationship and uh one of the questions that you might ask is are there pronounced differences between people who tend to pursue short-term mating strategies versus long-term mating strategies now long-term mating strategy would be accompanied by the formulation of a relationship of mutual support that's what makes it sustainable and the answer is well yeah there are Mark differences uh one of the Hallmarks of anti-social personality and so that's the personality characteristic set that is associated with criminality is a proclivity towards short-term mating strategies and that is associated with early onset of sexual activity and multiple sexual partners and then in its more pathological form a predatory or parasitical uh uh lifestyle in relationship to sex and so that has been elaborated more recently into the analysis of so-called dark tetrad personality characteristics that's an emerging model of the malevolent and pathological personality and that involves machiavellianism which is manipulative um narcissistic which is virtue free attention seeking it's a good way of thinking about it psychopathy which is predatory parasitism and sadism which is positive Delight in harm to other people and those all of those delightful characteristics are associated with a striking proclivity for short-term mating and that brings up the Stark realization that it's a form of exploitation that's a good way of thinking about it and it's fundamentally the exploitation of women because here's a good way of defining women since we don't know how to do that in our society anymore we might as well start with Basics and throughout the animal kingdom and this is true all the way from sperm and egg up to fully embodied being the female is almost inevitably the sex that pours more resources into reproduction so that means that women have a higher they're a higher cost for sexual reproduction in case anyone's still too stupid to actually understand that might as well make it explicit and what that also means is that um if there's exploitation going on in a sexual relationship it's most often although not always the male who has less at stake exploiting the female who has far more at stake and it's enticing for young women to believe I suppose if they want to pursue hedonic pleasure that they can escape from that reality but it's very difficult to so that's one element then the next element with regard to morality is if you're playing a game that only works in the short term for others but also for yourself then that's not a very good game and you know the point you were making was that Maryland was playing a particularly short game and even you who had less to lose and arguably on some Dimensions more to gay gain he was still pretty damn pathetic by the time he hit I would say what mid 50s I watched one of his late TV shows where he was touring Europe with his three blonde bimbos who were not the world's they weren't the sharpest knives in the drawer let's put it that way and it was Hugh in his three blonde clones traipsing painfully from faux glamorous restaurant to faux glamorous restaurant through Europe engaging in conversation so pure all and painful that anyone with any sense would have run away from the table screaming after five minutes so he turned into his own parody and that was quite clear I mean anybody with any sense at all no matter how much they might have been enamored by his young and hypothetically glamorous self if you had looked at that with a cold eye a few decades later it was looking it was looking pretty oldest boy at the Frat party uh it had that whole stench about it I would say so all right so back to Maryland you said that she had a pretty brutal upbringing and was exploited pretty early on you might as well tell the story about her uh the famous photographs that launched Playboy uh yes they say Marilyn was the both the first cover star and also the the first naked centerfold in the first issue of Playboy but the naked photos required without her consent she'd taken them well she'd had them taken many years before when she was much younger for very little money just because she was desperate she'd sign the release with a false name but somehow Hefner got a hold of them and paid the photographer rather than her in order to publish them in Playboy and she wasn't even set a free copy and was apparently very upset about it Hefner ended up buying the Crypt next to hers at the um the cemetery in Los Angeles where they're both buried obviously buried many decades after she was but they never actually met in real life so this whole kind of relationship between the two of them was very much initiated by him and I mean this this is the point that I want to make with them talk about Marilyn Monroe she is very typical of female sex icons in having this kind of tragic backstory multiple forms of exploitation by lots of people most of the men and and yet she is held up as this um this iconic figure of the of the sexual Revolution which we're supposed to believe was a good thing right and my argument in the book it is of course the case against the such Revolution my argument is not that it was entirely bad I don't think you can paint any huge historical event that's entirely bad or entirely good but I think that it has been falsely presented mostly by progressives through Rose tinted spectacles and this is my attempt to counter that yeah well there's no doubt she was an iconic figure and still is and part of the reason it's hard to say exactly why I mean there's something obviously hyper attractive about her and I heard her interviewed once in a radio station where she said she could walk down the street I believe her her genuine name was Norma Ray is that right Norma Ray and she said she could walk down the street as Norma Ray and no one would look at her or she could walk down the street as Maryland and then people would just be attracted to her like mad and so I want to run a hypothesis by you you know given that uh that back story for female sexual icons and this is often the case for girls who get dragged or who agreed to participate in the pornography industry that you know they're often abandoned girls who have a history of fractured relationships and abuse now so here's here's a hypothesis you know that girls without fathers hit puberty one year earlier eh that's a real biological mystery but here's a hypothesis so imagine that you're bereft of male companionship and productivity and protection and maybe that's because you're culture doesn't have enough man sometimes that happens after Wars for example or maybe you're just in an economic Niche or social Niche where you're unfortunate you know so now why would you develop a year early from a puberty perspective well an answer is well one of the ways that women can attract male attention obviously and therefore in principle companionship protection productivity all of that that that might come along with a real relationship is by being sexually attractive and available and so if there's a dearth of males in the local environment then early puberty could easily be a way of uh increasing the probability of catching a mate early enough so you don't starve to death let's say okay so then imagine that there's a psychological equivalent to that and this is where that wave flight Femme Fatale archetype might kick in and so if you're appealingly vulnerably beautiful and available and then you have that that magic that goes that can go along with that when it's transformed into something truly archetypal which Marilyn did extraordinarily well you know there's a bit of a little girl about her she had a very girly voice and that's how she's saying and she had a kind of innocent naive provocativeness that was Amplified paradoxically by her overt sexuality and so she had some of the appeal of a helpless child in some of the appeal of a truly mature woman and that's a pretty that can be a very deadly combination and I think the fact that it's a deadly combination is also a kind of adaptation so you can imagine that girls who are abused might turn to that that pattern of seductive uh Behavior because it's they if they turn on the charm Full Throttle in that manner it increases the probability that even in their desperate economic Straits they might be able to attract a male and of course with Maryland that was elevated right to the point where she became literally the poster girl for that approach you know and then I mentioned Madonna a little earlier and when Madonna first came on the scene I thought she's kind of interesting she seems to be taking this maryland-like archetype but toying with it consciously you know she was a businesswoman pretty canny she seemed to be in charge of her own image you know and I thought maybe she had a grip on the archetype but it isn't obvious to me at all that she did you know Madonna's life has been characterized by a continual pattern of sexual attention seeking and she's also I would say turned into her own parody even in her I think she's in her late 60s now if I remember correctly she's still doing essentially she's still doing photo shoots that are leveraging pornographic attractiveness and that I mean that requires a lot of maintenance and makeup by the time you're at her stage of life but it doesn't really look to me like it's aged particularly well and that's the problem with short-term mating strategy is that it's not a good iterating game you can't play it with other people continually you have to have multiple partners and it's not a good pattern for your whole life course that's partly what makes it both immoral and unwise is it just doesn't work across the decades that you're going to be alive so yes all right so back to back to America and Hughes so on that on that point I decided to call my podcast made in mother matriarch because it's my hypothesis that one of the features of late 20th early 21st century culture is that the normal life progression that women are supposed to pass through from Maiden to mother to matriarch has been um interrupted and we now have a very widespread problem of women desperate to remain in Maiden mode permanently and Madonna is a beautiful example of that she can't she can't she can't find it within herself to accept progressing from from Maiden tomato shark and I think that's a lot of I think the key cause of that is the fact that we don't attach status to maidens and to mothers into Matrix in the way that that we once did I think that all of the status is loaded onto the maiden roll but it's necessarily as you say a role that you can't spend your entire life in and I think that explains a lot of the psychological psychological dysfunction that women suffer from yeah yeah yeah well I think I think that's I think that's right so what we have is the domination you talk you basically laid out a three-part archetype and it's it's a archetype of transformation you know and I've talked to some pretty bright women on my podcast and a number of them have commented that as they progress along their careers and their as they accrue productive status so let's say as mothers and matriarchs they don't necessarily attain a commensurate status particularly among young women interestingly enough and maybe that's because the women are competing you know I suppose woman can be attractive as a mother and a matriarch so the maidens might take exception to that because it it's a form of competition but I do think too that our culture hyper values the maiden image especially when that's allied with uh it's not virginal Maiden that's exactly exactly uh held up as an icon you know even though people like Madonna will play with the idea of virginity as something attractive it's only there as a sexual magnet and it's only their tongue-in-cheek in some real sense and then our culture because it's a consumer culture and also because you know it concentrates on teenagers a lot because they have they have disposable income and it's really the case that our culture became consumerist oriented when teenagers started to develop disposable income it's not surprising at all that that consumer Market tilts towards the maiden archetype because that's where there's spare money to be vacuumed up so that's sort of a perfect storm in some sense and so but yeah so our our developing hypothesis here in the podcast and obviously you've thought this through to a great degree is that part of the reason that the sexual Revolution claiming absolute sexual freedom is pathological is because well it enables the male exploiters but and that's not good at all but it also isn't a good medium to long-term game well I would say either for women or men I mean if if you develop a long-term partner in a woman and you're a man you might want a woman who has enough sense to move from Maiden to mother to matriarch and to do that in a manner that facilitates the uh you know the development of the relationship across time and maybe I wonder too if a woman who does that really well is as she progresses across that three-part track also to some degree integrates the previous stages as she moves forward you know because it might be the case that if you're a successful matriarch maybe that's at the point where you become a grandmother something like that that you've also integrated mother and even maiden and are still capable of playing those roles when that's appropriate but are no longer only limited to them and I'm not saying that's an easy thing to pull off because you know it's not that hard to be it's not that easy to be you know outstandingly sexually attractive male or female by the time you're in your 60s let's say it gets to be you know old age is fighting against that pretty hard but that doesn't mean that that can't be held forward as uh you know an unattainable ideal to which we mole might strive or at least hope might make itself manifest and I think that's actually I think that's actually a possibility you know that you can you can move towards something like a full integration like Russian dolls I think is the perfect image for it you know the Russian doll contains the the younger the smaller um counterparts in the whole that's what that's the aspiration I mean I think part of the reason that we're so focused on the maiden role is partly as you say because it's a very consumerist kind of product it's I mean there's strange Paradox we're on the one hand I'd say Western Society is increasingly um gerontocratic in the power and assets primarily are are disproportionately held by the old but it's also still a very very youth orientated culture in terms of politics in terms of you know Fashion Beauty all of this kind of stuff you have that kind of strange tension where young people are simultaneously incredibly culturally powerful but not actually very economically powerful which probably actually exacerbates the feelings of of tension there um I think another reason for it as well is I think that I think that women's lives tend to be more clearly augmented by reproductive stage in a way that maybe men's are less so I think that men's lives change a bit less when they become fathers when they become grandfathers and I think that part of the resistance to this natural progression comes among women comes from the fact that so much of feminism of the second wave has been about trying to be more masculine in every way in a way that I think is ultimately detrimental to women that's why I called chapter two men and women are different because I think we have to just start from the premise that men and women are fundamentally different there is the sexual asymmetry that is never going away there are psychological average psychological but you know nevertheless at the population level they matter there are these differences between men and women and actually I think that any kind of productive form of feminism has to start from that recognition that those fundamental differences aren't going anywhere whether you're selling footballs or fine art Shopify simplifies selling online and in person so that you can focus on growing your business Shopify covers every sales channel from an in-person POS system to an all-in-one e-commerce platform it even helps you sell across social media marketplaces like Tick Tock Facebook and Instagram you don't need to be a designer to know how to code shopify's industry leading tools give you complete control over your business and your brand 24 7 support and an extensive Business course Library are available to support you every step of the way Shopify is the e-commerce platform revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide if you're ready to get serious about selling try Shopify today sign up for a one dollar per month trial period at shopify.com jbp all lowercase go to shopify.com jbp to take your business to the next level today that's shopify.com jbp yeah okay so so let's let's uh let's focus on that now so now we're off to chapter two um I'm gonna make a counter case for a minute and then let's hash that out all right so uh we mentioned at the beginning of this podcast that the fundamental biological differentiator or one of them because there's a number is that what makes a creature female rather than male is uh disproportionate contribution to reproduction and so you even see that with the sperm and the egg the egg is way way bigger in vert across the biological Universe than the sperm and that means the egg has more resources than the sperm and that is echoed at every stage of sexual interaction in animals and human beings there's a few exceptions in in some regards like I think male seahorses care for the young for example they basically have a something approximating a pregnancy but that's enough of an exception so that you know most people who are biologically informed know about it it's extraordinarily rare for a male for the male to take on that role and so women are the half of the human race that bears disproportionate responsibility for for uh sexual reproduction pays a higher cost for it and that seems to shape everything including mating strategies but but but here's the here's the Killer and so we could also say that's been true for the entire course of reproductive history after the emergence of sex which emerged a very long time ago biologically speaking but the pill hit you know 50 years ago and was was made widespread very rapidly and what that did in principle and to some degree in reality was give females voluntary control of their reproductive function really for the first time in biological history and so that opened up a new question and this is a question if a woman has full voluntary control over her reproductive function why isn't she now just a man that's one question or what exactly distinguishes her from a man because one thing that distinguished her was her differential role in reproductive burden and now that's been ameliorated arguably to some degree and then also if reproductive function is now a matter of voluntary Choice why can't sex just be fun and free and I would say we've been wrestling with those two questions for 50 years and longer than that insofar as there's been some form of reliable contraception but it wasn't very damn reliable till the birth control pill kicked in and so I think it is an open question to what degree can sex just be you know fun and fancy free and also it's an open question to what degree aren't women just now the same as men and so well I any comments on that whole line of inquiry are more than welcome well that's the promise right to the sexual Revolution that we that by introducing this new technology shock we do erase the differences between the Sexes and I think that to some extent if you live a very modern life you know it's not just the pill obviously that's changed in the last 60 years we also have very different ways of of working people are much less likely to do manual work at least in the west than they used to be we live much more uh mixed lives there's much less homosexuality than they used to be and so people are interacting in the workplace or whatever in basically an egalitarian fashion between men and women if you live that kind of life where you're not really using your sex to body for anything you're just you know living the life of the Mind really you could believe that those differences are trivial and I think that's where we've we've had some very strange political ideas around for instance um uh having biological males competing in women's sports you know is is seen to be a completely logical thing from people who do essentially those Lives who probably haven't actually competed in sports I mean you'll notice that female athletes tend to be opposed to this because they tend to be completely aware of the fact that there are huge differences in performance between male and female athletes but for people you can usually mob them into silence though yeah some of them are brave enough to say so many of them yeah as you say but many people who who don't really use do Sports who don't like live very physical lives may be genuinely quite oblivious to this fact because that seems to be the promise of technology that it erases these difference I don't think that it does I mean not only because we don't yet have artificial wounds we still reproduce the old-fashioned way and I think are likely to for the foreseeable I don't think artificial worms are just around the corner I think actually they're a spectacularly difficult technology to develop and also because we still have the same brains essentially that our Stone Age ancestors did we spent 95 of our species history as hunter-gatherers is Humanity's first and most successful adaptation and I think that we can't no matter how you know intelligent we are no matter how desperately we try I think it's very very hard to erase those differences at the psychological level and they responds interestingly that I've had to this book since it was published is obviously he's a controversial title the whole premise is usually controversial but interestingly I haven't had nearly as much criticism as I thought I would and I've actually had positive reviews even from left leaning outlets and so on I got a amazing review in The Observer you know I think it's because actually an enormous number of women across the political Spectrum who have been offered This Promise of you can live just like a man you can have sex just like a man they're profoundly miserable and they do recognize that actually deep down that promise is an empty one and I think there's the the emotion that I've had most often from readers is just a sense of relief that someone is saying it and that it seems as if there's now permission to say it because I I think that the effort of trying to pretend that men and women are the same is ultimately ruinous to both sexes yeah well you see this weird phenomenon emerging on the left in particular and I think it's particularly Rife in University campuses where you get a combination of compassion and low conscientiousness and high openness driving a particular political mindset and so the compassion means well we're going to accept everyone in the low conscientiousness means well we're not bound by anything approximating Duty and the high openness means you know we're CR we're creative and curious about every form of potential self-expression and then that produces this idea that all sexual drive you have a chapter in your book called uh not something like not all desire is good and so we'll we'll talk about that a little bit we have this there's this absolute clamoring insistence that every form of sexual desire and behavior is to be valued celebrated and promoted and that if you dare oppose that you are there's something immoral about the opposition so that's merely a consequence let's say of your bigotry but and so you know and it you you pointed out your book that you often get artistic types like Andre GID let's say and left-wing intellectuals pushing for full sexual freedom and some of that's high openness and some of that's low conscientiousness that's for sure but then there's a kickback that's really interesting to me because it's the same radicals possessed by exactly the same set of ideas who make a very radical counter claim and the counter claim is something like well every form of sexual behavior is must be celebrated and is nothing but a testament to the you know ever blossoming range of human freedom but every form of sexual interaction between particularly a young man and a young woman is so dangerous right to its core that there's nothing more for important than full consent and that consent has to be documented verbally and maybe even Beyond verbally formally for even interactions as that were once as casual let's say as dancing and so at Princeton University for example there was a a push to make men ensure that even when they're dancing with a girl who agreed to dance that it was incumbent upon them multiple times during the dance to ask verbally to ensure that that once established consent was still continuing now you know if you weren't being cynical about that you might say well that's a stumbling attempt to something approximating awake politeness because if you have any sense when you're dancing with someone one of the things you actually want to know is do they really want to be doing it but it's very peculiar to me and Illuminating that this insistence on negotiated contract for every step of a potentially sexual interaction is being insisted upon not by Christian apologists for traditional morality but by the same radicals who are out there dancing three-quarters naked in the street in their dog costumes and insisting that you know every bit of sexual expression is to be lauded my suspicion with what's going on there with this rise of sort of um um sorry a bureaucratic attitude to sex shall we say this idea of um asking for consent at every stage and so on I mean the funniest example which I mentioned briefly in the book is it is an idea cooked up Western University students that you would have a sign a contract before you had casual sex and you'd take a photo of of the pair of you with your contracts and so on and and the joke obviously is why not get dressed up in a big white dress why not invite all your friends you know it's just it's this sort of reinvention of marriage I think right I think that that's basically what is going we're married for the day I think what's going on with this reintroduction of these new rules post me too is that um complete sexual freedom is not actually a sustainable system and what we've had for um many centuries Millennia up until the 1960s really is a very complicated tapestry of laws and Norms which regulate sexuality and which particularly regulate heterosexuality because what you're dealing with when it comes to heterosexuality is great imbalance as a physical strength the fundamental imbalance of reproductive roles and also personality differences and you know all of this which make it very it's just inherently very very difficult to to deal with mating smoothly there is a lot of Heartache there is a lot of risk and what we have in most societies is this complex dance of marriage customs and you know thinking more recently in the west chaperones and asking of the father's hand and all of these things which which are supposed to basically um control sexuality I mean the the the the progressive account of this is that they repress people's sexuality to which they say yes they do but they but they do that because they have to because that is it completely untraveled sexual freedom is not possible because of what you can't run a society like that and because you will inevitably have people coming into conflict with one another if that's permitted so you need people to be men and women to be repressed I think that's what marriage does but in a good way you know and as a necessary step towards having productive relationships and I think there's an attempt to kind of reinvent that with this new bureaucracy but it's not nearly as good companies aren't just selling products anymore they're selling you we're talking about how these tech companies enrich themselves by taking your personal data they grab your web history email metadata in video searches to create a detailed profile on you and then sell that off to the highest bidder when you go online without a VPN internet service providers or isps can see every single website you visit they can legally sell this information without your consent to add companies and Tech Giants who then use it to Target you when you use expressvpn your identity is anonymized by a secure VPN server so isps cannot see your online activity your data is also encrypted for maximum protection expressvpn is incredibly easy to use just fire up the app and click one button plus it works on all devices so you can stay secure on the go secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com Jordan that's e-x-p-r-e-s-s-vpn.com Jordan and get three extra months free expressvpn.com Jordan [Music] yeah yeah well okay so here's the rule is that responsibility abdicated is vacuumed up by tyrants and so if young men and young women aren't regulating their own sexual behavior then tyrannical bureaucrats will definitely step in to have fun on that front so but um you brought up two points that we could pursue and one is an analysis of what actually constitutes consent and then we could start with that and then the other one was let me see if I've exactly got this oh yes inhibition and oppression let's say of sexual desire see this this is something that has to be handled conceptually very carefully so there's different models of socialization that permeate the let's say the psychological community and one of them is an ethos of something like inhibition and repression and so the freudians sort of fall into that camp that the superego inhibits the ID and and squashes it down I'd say and that part of what makes you a social being is your ability to suppress and inhibit desires like aggression and sex and I don't think that's true I only think that's true when it's gone wrong so here's an alternative Viewpoint this is the Viewpoint of people like Jean Piaget whose great developmental psychologist he thought of the developmental process is one of integration now you know you already put forth a three-stage model of female development and you could think about that as a continuing model of complex integration and so the reason that sex becomes regulated isn't because it's now being inhibited it's being regulated because it's being integrated into higher order games and so it's being integrated for example and and maybe can even be celebrated within this confined area of or regulated area of integration it's becoming integrated with the more mature realization that sex outside of an iterated relationship is actually a net negative even for the parties involved even if they're primarily motivated by their own Hedonism and then hypothetically their own will and so it isn't inhibition that's regulating sex and it isn't top-down social control it's the necessity of integrating sex which can be just a unimentional desire into a much more sophisticated Symphony of social interactions now when that fails inhibition is necessary right so if you have someone who's acting in an anti-social manner parading their sexuality insisting upon short-term gratification at their own expense and not of others then compulsion might have to be brought to bear but that indicates a failure of the proper developmental pathway rather than a manifestation of a necessarily oppressive patriarchy and that's a much more positive vision of the regulation of sexual behavior it's more like ordered Freedom rather than inhibition and that also opens up the other another positive idea which is that I know we've thought toyed with the idea that the birth control pill meant that impulsive Hedonism could now Rule and that that would be the highest form of sexual expression and the idiot artists who jumped on that bandwagon were certainly of that mind but what we're seeing instead is that young men and women are turning in all ever greater numbers to a very casual pornography especially with regards to the boys to the abandonment of any relationships whatsoever and then interestingly enough it seems to much less sexual activity in general I think it's 30 percent now of Japanese I think it's 30 percent of Japanese young people under 30 are still virgins 30 percent and similar figures in South Korea and you can see the same proclivity emerging in the west so what's happening paradoxically is that by removing all the principles from sexual interaction not the inhibitions but the principles we're actually dooming the sexual Enterprise rather than facilitating it even for the hedonists so anyways it's very useful to know that there's an integration model rather than an inhibition model right because it also stops those who might oppose the sexual Revolution from just being finger wagging conservative moralists because you can say no no you're going to have a way better sex life in every possible way if you actually like fall in love with someone and have a long-term relationship and I think the psychological the statistical data on that are pretty clear too most single people don't have a lot of sex the phrase that I use in the book to describe this exact phenomenon where you on the one hand have hyper hypersexual public life you can walk down any Street and see women in lingerie on posters or watch TV and there's very explicit sex scenes Etc so on the one hand we've had this amazing ramping up of sexuality and public life but on the other hand exactly as you say we have what's comes sometimes called the sex recession the fact that people are having sex later less frequently I think what's happening generally is people are having probably more casual sex but but they're having sex less frequently so when they are having sex it's more likely to be casual but they're not forming these long long-standing relationships and the term that I use in the book is um cultural death grip syndrome taken from the Quasi medical term death grip syndrome which is used by compulsive porn users to describe the physical experience of impotence when you use too much porn you get to the point where you actually can't be aroused either physically or psychologically in real life because you so much porn and I think cultural death grip syndrome is is the council part to that where on the one hand we have this astounding availability of sexual stimuli at the click of a button at any moment anything that you can imagine is available on the internet immediately and that seems to be demotivating people to actually seek out meaningful sexual relationships which in the long term are vastly better for us in every possible way but we have a culture enabled by technology which is a very very short term in every way so people are channeled towards that kind of immediate relief that um the disincentivizes proper yeah it's I think the rule is something like unearned surfite turns into revulsion um right right it's it's too too much of a good thing means that it's no longer a good thing and that you know and that goes along with an idea too that there's something like Optimal deprivation right I mean look let's say you've just had a big banquet and someone sits you down and says well now you have to eat five pounds of dessert it's like the first of all that's not going to be a very attractive proposition and second of all it might actually make you ill is that everything has to be in proper proportion and one of the things we really haven't contended with at all in our society is how much desperation is necessary on the sexual front to drive young men and young women together and the answer is not zero and the problem with pornography one of many problems is that drives desperation on the male front down to zero now I know perfectly well from my clinical experience that the standard state of most young men especially under 20 let's say is pretty much Terror in the face of a woman who they're very attracted to and the reason for that is that oh there's all sorts of reasons but the primary reason is the probability that any given male even one who's very attractive let's say in multiple ways is going to be rejected by Any Given female especially a high value female who has a lot of people attracted to her is extremely high so they're classic psychological experiments showing this you know if you if you send attractive undergraduates out to talk to other undergraduates to offer sexual access say well you know would you be willing to have coffee with me would you be willing to give me your phone number would you be willing to come back to my apartment if the girls offer that then whoever they're offering that to on the mail front will take them up on their offer but if the boys offer that even when they're attractive the probability that their advances will be rejected is extremely high and so young men face the uncomfortable situation where even if they're competent and will turn eventually into useful men which isn't the status of most very young men the probability that they'll be rejected is extremely high and then it's also the case that there's little that's more psychologically impactful than such rejection especially if it's undertaken by someone to whom there's a genuine attraction so that means that boys are paralyzed into Terror I think that's not too exaggerated a term by the mere fact of attractive women and so you know they Slough that off and they make derogating jokes and so forth try to get over that but doesn't change the basic reality that also means that a certain percentage of males and it's not low really it could easily be like 30 percent are just paralyzed into utter stasis by the possibility of rejection especially because they have been fortified against it with their dependency inducing upbringing unless they're driven forward by a certain amount of desperation some of which needs to be sexual there's actually they're never going to go they're never going to break through that barrier and so then they can satisfy themselves momentarily with pornography and then that turns into that host of problems you already described this now they're training themselves maybe right from puberty to be impotent cuckold voyeurs essentially so that's not good training then they're training themselves to view women as targets of short-term gratification so that's like training in psychopathy and then they're also interfering with their ability to establish a relationship and also to perform sexually in a real environment so all that seems like you know like a five-dimensional catastrophe and that's going to get a lot worse in the next year by the way because we haven't seen anything on the pornography front compared to what's going to be coming down with the Advent of AI because now what's going to happen real soon is that this is already underway so imagine a sign up service where you can talk to a very attractive young woman so and she's a AI right so she can be as attractive as you want her to be and tuned exactly to your preferences okay so now there's already a service offering this by the way so now you have a friend and that friend can keep track of your conversations and especially if you're Lonesome and isolated that might be the best friend you've ever had and certainly the most attractive person you've ever talked to now it's not real but you know men are pretty damn visual so it's gone a long ways towards real and then you know for your subscription fee you can talk to the woman nude and then the whole Avenue of sexual display is open to you and so God only knows what that's going to do yes as sex robots are the next step where you have a yeah yeah well and then the integration of those two things yeah yeah that'll be and that that'll be fine you end up in a situation where men young men can feel as if they are winning at life right with their sex robot who's giving them all the cues that suggest Fitness but in fact you know they don't need to wash they don't need to have a job they don't need to do anything productive with their lives because the sex robot doesn't care only fans I think is a step along this path because what only fans offer yeah definitely it's not just pornography it offers a parasocial relationship it gives the impression to customers that this woman cares about them remembers his birthday remembers his children's names all of this stuff and but it's all obviously a mirage and it's one that's purchased and it it can be it's completely the wrong instructions right well and that that's narcissistic exploitation on the part of the females with anti-social personality traits and often what would you say aided and embedded by quasi-psychopathic pimps electronic pimps and you know those only fan women that you made a very good point there those are actually Androids right because they're not women now you might say what the hell are you talking about Dr Peterson obviously they're women it's like no they're not they're machine women hybrids and the Machine is the technology that can broadcast their image to millions of people so you're not a woman anymore if you're in a million men's bedrooms at the same time you're a woman machine hybrid now it's virtualized obviously because it's two-dimensional and it's not embodied in the form of a robot but the idea that that's not an Android means that you're an idiot that's what it means it's obviously an Android and there there is definitely that form of parasitism on the female part you know these women have embodied Capital that's a good way of thinking about it so they're young they don't have economic resources but they're young and beautiful and that's an economic resource make no mistake about it in fact it's the most well it's the highest possible form of wealth this is another thing that the Marxist types get real wrong with their economic analysis because if you took let's say a hyper-rich 80 year old woman and you said well you give away 99 of your fortune and now you inhabit the body that you had when you were 20. and then we could add to that the possibility of being stellarly beautiful the probability that that woman would trade everything she has for that opportunity you know assuming she hasn't become disenamered of life is extraordinarily high and so that also means that on the female side and this is happening continually female exploitation can take place with regard to men just like male exploitation takes place with regard to women and those women are not doing other women a favor either by monopolizing the marketplace let's say no I think that one of the ways in which women are hurt by the pretense that is widely practiced that men and women are psychologically the same and that male and female sexuality is the same is that it's very easy for a young beautiful woman to mistake male sexual desire for high regard and to I think that really there are two parallel tracks when it comes to male sexual desire for women there is the short term and the long term and they are not at all the same and that being very highly desired on the short term track does not necessarily translate into being very high highly desired on the long-term track in fact sometimes quite the opposite and I think that the main error that women are making with thinking that only fans is a is a quick Buck not only is the fact that only fans is enormously unequal and actually there are very few people on it who are making any real money and generally the ones for making lots of money were already famous before they join the platform and so on it's also the fact that there is the internet is forever and these images are out there and it damages your long-term mating prospects to have been on only fans and actually I mean it is clearly the case that female beauty is incredibly valuable resource but I I think maybe the way in which it needs to be understood distinctly from economic power is it is to some extent vicarious you can acquire enormous power as a beautiful woman through access to typically male political and economic power but it doesn't last forever if you're able to secure a very high status husband for instance and he commits to you for life you've translated your beauty into real and Lasting power if you're not able to do that then you will very quickly you know age 35 age 40 age out of having any access to that kind of power and then you will potentially be paying the cost later down the line so there are some women who become very wealthy on only fans but in general I would say that it's very very poor strategy and you know as ever it is presented as a kind of short-term boon yeah well and it's It suffers from the same Pareto distribution problem as any productive Enterprise creative Enterprise which is a small minority of people will rake in all the money like a tiny tiny proportion it'll be a tenth of one percent they'll make a spectacular amount of money and everyone else will strive away in the dirt scrobbling away for virtually nothing and then as you said even those women who have managed to make that successful are uh dooming themselves in all likelihood to remaining only attractive to Psychopathic and exploitative males because the rest of them won't be particularly happy with that background so yeah it's not a good iterating medium to long-term strategy let's talk about consent a little bit because that's a tricky issue and it ties back to this notion we were discussing earlier about the proclivity of the radical left to ensure to insist upon something approximating a contract which I do think is very comical that you know that's the same as well maybe consent means getting married and and actually I think you can make a case for that so you know when you see that happening on campuses very frequently and we should delve into the details of this is that a young man and a young woman will sleep together which usually at a party and it's usually a drunken party and so one of the things that people don't know maybe because they don't want to is that almost all criminal behavior that involves coercion is facilitated by alcohol so half of people who are murdered are drunk half of the murderers are drunk there would be almost no domestic abuse violent abuse without alcohol it's an unbelievable facilitation this is why the temperance movement was in many ways a feminist movement I would argue that's not how it was normally expressed but the conference movement was very much about domestic violence right right well and on campuses date rape Etc and unwanted social uh sexual advance and alcohol go hand in hand but of course you have The Libertine culture on campuses sexually and also behaviorally and so many campuses are simultaneously hotbeds of you know sexual investigation and trouble and drunken dionysian partying and you know I think there's a time and a place for that and that's probably when you're young and you know hopefully you managed to wend your way through it but as a basis for a stable Society it falls uh short but here's here's one of the problems it really brings up so now you have women and hypothetically they have control of the reproductive function and uh they can go out and drink and then they can find themselves waking up in the morning and not even remembering because alcohol really interferes with memory consolidation not even at relatively minor doses not even really remembering how the hell they got there now especially if there are women who've been mistreated in the past and that's not uncommon there is a real question that emerges about whether or not they consented and it's very complicated because it's certainly one of the strategies that desperate young men use to entice uh foolish young women into their beds is to get them drunk and anybody who doesn't know that is a blind fool and so now and so if you have a party and you're a college student and you're male and you invite some women over including the ones that you might be attracted to and you serve copious amounts of alcohol and you know perfectly well that if you get a young woman drunk you're more likely to get her into bed are you manipulating her or is she an autonomous entity fully capable of making her own Sovereign decisions who knows the ground rules of the game when she enters the door and is their response for responsible for her own actions and the answer is a little a column A and A little column B and that makes the whole issue of consent extraordinarily comp Plex you know if you consent well drunk and you regret it the next day is that true consent and of course that's being thought out in legal minefields all across North America and I think the reason it's being thought out thought out is because it's actually a complicated question what does it mean to give consent how old do you have to be like if you have three drinks can you give informed consent or maybe you couldn't for a medical procedure could you if you had one drink well I studied the effects of alcohol for years on cognitive ability and function and it's a highly disinhibiting drug which is why people like it because it it removes the regulatory constraint from hedonic Behavior including aggressive behavior slots are fun and it it amplifies sociability for many people it's got an opiate effect that's pain killing and a stimulant effect it's like cocaine and it's an anxiety reducer so it's a killer party drug and so he adds alcohol into the mix and you think well did the young woman give consent and the answer to that is well what the hell is consent and then one answer is well you have to have a legal document and then you think well you might as well just get married then because that's the whole point and but here here's an open question like I really wonder I really think this might be true marriage is consent that's what marriage means marriage is full informed consent and it's the only form of full informed consent all things being equal given how dangerous sex is in the most fundamental sense given how socially destabilizing it is given how difficult it is to integrate into a full personality across time given how much is at risk for children and women in particular that the the issue of consent is so important that it basically devolves into something approximating marriage by necessity I I agree the only Proviso I would place on that is that one of the I would say one of the really profound successes is 20th century feminism was in reconceptualizing rape which in most traditional legal systems is understood as a crime against a woman's male kin reconceptualizing it as a crime against the woman herself which therefore makes it marital rape um uh explicable in a way that it isn't in the old model it clearly is the case that it is possible to be to be raped within marriage I think it's also absolutely the case that any we are forced to draw bright lines when it comes to the law we're forced to say that you know the age of consent is 16 that X the amount of alcohol in the bloodstream constitutes you know about the legal driving limit Etc we're forced to draw bright lines we have to also recognize and we all know intuitively that those bright lines are fallible and that there is a huge amount of gray space between what is legally permissible and what is good and I think that the problem with basing any kind of system of sexual ethics on consent as a bare minimum is it it becomes impossible to talk about that Grace base and what you often find actually is women particularly during me too women who would talk about distressing sexual experiences which actually normally didn't meet the legal threshold for being criminal but which they nevertheless experienced as upsetting as as disturbing as whatever often involving alcohol as you say briefly on that point one of the things a lot of people don't know is that there's a cognitive bias in men where they tend to overestimate a woman's sexual interest in them and that it and it's not the other way around and that bias is exaggerated by alcohol so you have men who are very drunk and who really do read signs of sexual interest from women who are in fact not sexually interested in them and who are incapacitated by alcohol and it all ends up being and a rough you know we're talking about teenagers who have raised on porn and have like you know it's a complete disaster like the whole cauldron mix is basically perfectly designed to produce these scenarios and often you have women who are coming out of these scenarios feeling really distressed but they cut they don't have the moral language to talk about us because they don't want to talk about they don't want to use terms like chivalrous they don't want to talk about gentlemen they don't want to talk even about morality and good and bad what they have in their vocabulary toolkit is consent and so you will say that that XYZ encounter wasn't consensual whereas actually that's not the best way of describing what went wrong and trying to just further embed the consent model which often just what consent workshops are really it's just they're sort of their attempts at ideological interventions the idea is that we you know we sit kids down and we told them in words of one syllable don't rape each other but of course we know that's not how social interactions work that's not actually a kind of intervention that's really going to make a difference because there will be rapists aren't listening for one thing and also because that's you know the complexity of sexual relationships is just so so too difficult to sum up in that kind of simple message but that's all we've got and so and so this emphasis is just on reiterating and reiterating [Music] the start of the New Year upon us what better time than now to start building a habit of Prayer just like physical exercise daily spiritual exercise is critical to your well-being especially in a world where attacks on faith and religion are happening all around us every day hallow the number one Christian Prayer app in the U.S and the number one Catholic app in the world helps you maintain a daily prayer routine it's filled with studies meditations and Reflections including the number one Christian podcast the Bible in a year download the app for free at hallow.com Jordan you can set prayer reminders invite others to pray with you and track your progress along the way make this year your year for spiritual growth and peace get an exclusive three-month free trial at hallow.com Jordan that's hallow.com Jordan if you start talking about unwanted sexual Advance as a failure of something like chivalry you sound like a transplant from the 13th century but it's it's definitely the case it's also definitely the case that unsophisticated males are not very good at reading what would you say anything but explicit signals of no right sophisticated people can tell by a polite glance let's say whether or not interest is being manifested and then they play a very slow incremental game which is Romance by the way checking each other out for consent at every stage and you cannot replace that with a rule-governed system the attempt to do that is first of all going to be intrusive and tyrannical and awkward and second it's putting the cart before the horse the the unsophisticated people aren't going to be able to use that system anyways and then you have like three people you have a crowd in the bedroom you have the young man and you have the young woman and you have the whole idiot Phalanx of Dei bureaucrats they're trying to mediate the social relationship and that's just not going to work at all and here's another thing I've been thinking about I talked to my wife who I know you talked to on her podcast about this quite a bit so here's an interesting idea so uh males compete for status and the essential dimension of competition that differentiates them from women I would say is something like productive economic generosity it's something like that now it's not like women aren't productive and it's not like they're not generous but the ground rules are different women are looking to equalize the economic disparity that's attendant upon differential uh uh cost for reproduction and so men are evaluated on the basis of their potential for economic reciproc reciprocity and generosity and that gives them status males and so women peel from the top of that hierarchy basically they let males competed out on the economic front and then women select from the top down and the higher the status a woman has the higher the met the status of the mate that she can obtain now that brings up a question which is what gives women status and that's a really hard question because first of all we know that economic viability is not one of those things so male economic viability and sexual success are correlated insanely highly it's like 0.6.7 crazily High one of the most powerful single variable relationships that you can find in all of the social sciences far higher than the relationship between intelligence and life success for example but the correlation between female economic viability and sexual attractiveness is lower than zero so it's actually slightly negative so it's a massive sexual dimorphism so then you ask well what gives female status and well one of the answers is obviously uh associated with Beauty and reproductive capacity and and sexual attractiveness those things all tangled together extraordinarily tightly but that's not the only thing I don't think and so this I think is really worth thinking about so imagine that you have an attractive girl and a variety of relatively High status men are chasing her now you might ask well how do they evaluate her status and I think they evaluate her status by her ability to say no so imagine you know a high status person offers himself or herself to you and of you if you're of lower status you're going to say yes right away but one marker of higher status is well no I don't need what you're selling yeah but what I'm selling is great yeah but I have so many offers that I'm not inclined to take your offer because I have options and it's no on the part of women that signal I really believe this is the case it's voluntary no on the part of women that signals their status and so I don't think young women know this at all because they want to know how to compete with men let's say in the power game and uh that's a tough question because women are smaller and they're not as physically powerful and economic uh prowess isn't as attractive to them and it doesn't make them more viable on the marketing on the mating market so the whole game that women are playing is way different than the game men is playing so you might say well how do women equalize the battle and I think a huge part of that is by reserving to themselves the right to say no and you see this people are stumbling towards this realization even on the radical leftist front because they keep saying no means no and it's like well yeah I wish it was that clear but at a drunken frat party what constitutes no is not self-evident but a clear no on the part of a woman and I also think that there's every reason to think and plenty of evidence that that's also one of the things that makes men desirable in the face of that makes women desirable in the eyes of men especially if the men might be enticed into pursuing a long-term mating strategy you know they'll push on women and see but will you say yes right away and if the answer is yes especially true for high status men if the answer is immediately yes then the guy assumes well you're not your status really isn't that high you can't say no to me but if the woman says no even to you the guy thinks oh well you know look at that oh you can imagine there's some narcissism in that even though I have everything to offer that I have to offer she's just not falling over you know maybe there's something there that requires further exploration you know when you even see this in female pornography it's so interesting because the classic female pornographic story is uh you know there's this extremely attractive highly productive man who's got a real capacity for aggression he's a pirate or a surgeon or a werewolf or a vampire or a billionaire those are the fundamental female pornographic tropes and he has women at his disposal but this woman is shielded off from him and they dance around each other for a long time which essentially means that she's saying no and he's finally enticed into a relationship with her where he sacrifices all you know his access to all other women and then they have hot steamy sex and so you know most of female pornography is extended foreplay and that's this romantic dance of no followed by you know a a very spectacular consummation and that certainly mirrors the well it mirrors the optimal female reproductive pathway obviously because otherwise it wouldn't be the hottest pornographic fantasy but it's based in I really think it's based in reality and so I don't know how it is that you communicate to young women that especially if they are of high female status but even if they're not that the most potent art tool they have in their armament with regard to status with regard to being taken seriously is their ability and willingness to say no a question um that I've had a lot since the book was published is um is there a sexual counter-revolution underway my answer to that is a guarded yes a bit I think what's happened is that we've ended up in this very historically unusual situation where female virginity is not prized basically every society hugely Praises female virginity in female sexual um restraint the ability to say no for obvious reasons because um illegitimate child is a disaster not only for the woman but for her family for the community there's you know there's a need to be um to gatekeeping young women the pill does away the pill the pill does away with that and the pill also occurs at exactly the same time as this huge political shift and technological shift and and we we now have attempted to um reconceptualize women as being sort of like slightly smaller men who basically have the same sexual drives and preferences and so on we know that this isn't true but we've given a good go and many of the young women who um who've read my book have been raised with this expectation and have attempted to have sex like men and have invariably found that it actually makes them miserable but we also get trapped in this painful strategic impasse where when the expectation is that you will have sex very early on in a relationship and that withholding sex is not socially permissible it's a it's a it's a weird sign it's a sign that you're unusual that you're not playing whether normal rules it puts you at a disadvantage you know if you are a young woman who doesn't want to be putting out on a first second third date you're already just a voltage in the dating Market or at least up until recently but one of the things that I've noticed going and giving um talks all over the country is I often had women come up to me afterwards and say that they they like my message they agree that they are that they have implementing this in their own lives that they are not having casual sex or they are not giving into this social pressure and one of the things I've noticed about these women is they tend to be very beautiful and I think that that's not coincidental I think it's because they are the women who have the greatest power within their system and are therefore the ones who can most easily opt out of the current set of expectations and can say no without suffering a penalty for it so I think those women many of them are already are already doing that because they've gotten onto the fact that this is actually a miserable system which causes them harm and my hope is that that will accelerate as other women imitate them we'll be back in one moment first we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan's new series Exodus so the Hebrews created history as we know it you don't get away with anything and so you might think you can bend the fabric of reality and that you can treat people instrumentally and that you can bow to the Tyrant and violate your conscience without cost you will pay the piper it's going to call you out of that slavery into Freedom even if that pulls you into the desert see that there's something else going on here that is far more Cosmic and deeper than what you can imagine the highest ethical Spirit to which we're beholden is presented precisely as that spirit that allies itself with the cause of Freedom against tyranny I want villains to get punished but do you want the villains to learn before they have to pay the ultimate price that's such a Christian question well you know if if it's the beautiful high status women who begin that Trend the rest of the women will follow because Trends always start in the aristocracy and Trend downwards now okay so here's another thought um and this has to do with the built-in antagonism let's say and hopefully eventual cooperation of the Sexes on the sexual front so women are checking out men all the time and women have all sorts of tricks for doing that they might be provocative for example because they want to test a man to see if he can control his temper and no one likes to talk about that but any smart woman is going to do that because she wants to find out if her partner she wants someone who has the capacity for aggression but she wants someone who can control it because a man will be provoked by children and if he can't control his temper then he's going to be aggressive and so she has to check that out and you don't check that out by having a formal conversation you check that out the same way children check out their parents which is by harassing them and seeing what happens and so and then men check women out so maybe one of the things a man wants to do if he's going to commit to a long-term relationship is he wants to find out well does this woman have what it takes to actually commit to a long-term relationship and what that means in part is that he has to know that she's capable of controlling her impulsive desires right because otherwise she's going to stray and that's actually a worse problem for men than it is for women and and we should return to this idea that rape is a violation of male property rights in a moment because I want to explore that a bit so you can tell a woman has control over her impulses if she can say no right I mean it's a way of testing so imagine that you're you're a young guy with plenty to offer and you're a hot young woman and you meet and you're pretty attracted to each other now both of you are going to fall under the sway of short-term Temptation obviously now the question is are both of you are either of you capable of being mature in your regard for your iterated future self and the potential of a long-term relationship and the way the man checks that out is by seeing if the girl will say no and maybe he checks out even harder because he does everything he can to seduce her and she still says no you know and it works and he knows she's interested and she still says no well then he can conclude that she's capable of keeping her pants on let's say and that's actually something that you need to conclude if you're going to commit to a long-term partnership obviously on the mail front because you want to be assured of paternity and so you know these are very intense games that men and women play with each other and they're No Holds Barred games because everything's at stake but again it devolves down to this issue of being able to say no even under intense Temptation and provocation so I don't know how it is that we start teaching young women or we can just stop start by not lying to them about absolutely everything which is what we do now but I don't know how it is that young women can be taught that the most potent weapon they have is their ability to say no you know and that that's actually a a weapon of formidable force and that it does nothing but confer status upon them you know and the fact that you said already that what you see is that it's the obviously High status High desirable women who are figuring this out first is an indication of that because obviously they're the ones that that are going to be able to wield that power in the most effective possible manner but that doesn't mean that it's not useful for women farther down the hierarchy and you know you also said something about women are enjoying to believe they have to be sexually accessible to make themselves successful on The Dating Market but I don't believe that's true at all I think I think that's a myth I think that you know if you have nothing else to offer at all but immediate sexual access that might be your only game but if you have anything at all to offer and that is what you offer you're actually going to be thrown out of The Mating Game really quickly because the guys will just be they'll just be turned off and they won't call you back you'll get what do they call that ghosted I can no time flat you know and the girls might ask well you know I gave the guy what he wanted why didn't he call me and the answer is no you gave his impulsive libido what it wanted and that's what you established a relationship with but you completely sacrificed any possibility at all of being attracted of you being attractive to his more mature and potentially you know long-term productive and sophisticated self you make yourself attractive to that by saying not on your life Joker you know I'm taking myself too seriously for that and my future and my future children and even our future relationship and all that signaled by no then it's it's complicated to a because you get the prude problem a nature observed century and a half ago that a lot of what passed for Morality was nothing but cowardice you know people are afraid to do something afraid to be aggressive afraid to be sexual and they passed Their Fear off as morality and prudes are sort of like that is they they don't have anything to do with sex but it's not because they've made a moral decision or because they have strength of character it's just because they're afraid and because that's true it's easy to parody women who say no or men for that matter uh as prudes you know as old-fashioned conservative prudes who are just terrified of sex and you know sometimes that is true but but you can be sophisticated as hell insta and say no and I don't think there's anything more attractive to a man than a sophisticated woman who knows how to say no like that's that's top of the stack as far as men are concerned and they'll do any they'll do everything to test the the what would you call the thickness of that boundary so I don't know how you tell that to young women I don't even think men can probably is because the pill disrupts it all right because the pill it doesn't reduce to zero but it does massively reduce the risks associated with sex the physical risks not the psychological risks and so with those physical risks removed I mean I have a fascinating quote from a woman who was who was um in her 20s in 1960s when the pillar out and she said that the the Advent of the pill meant that it suddenly became so much more difficult to say no to men because what you used to be able to say was no no we can't because of because I might get pregnant with that no longer available and what we're dealing with here of course is the agreeability gap between men and women women find it difficult to be assertive and if they can't call on that kind of very clear risk as an as an appeal then what are they left with no I just don't want to have sex with you and so and that's a really painful thing to say that it wouldn't hurt feelings there's also I think an element of women being slightly physically frightened right well it boils down the personal rejection then hey yeah yeah which is which is a painful thing that's the only excuse you have left yeah absolutely well here is something else that's that's worth pondering you know you talk about one of the advantages of the sexual Revolution was the transformation of the idea that rape was a property crime let's say into a crime against the woman herself and I would say look I have plenty of Sympathy For That perspective and I think it's fundamentally true but but I'm going to push back because you know all this is all very complicated you know it isn't obvious to me that that offers women enough defense you know and so the counter argument might be if untrammeled sexual access to a young woman is a crime in order for that to be recognized as a crime properly it has to be viewed as something that will bring the males on her side to her defense in principle now maybe not right because you could say well maybe we could set up a society where merely quote transgressing the rights of a woman to say no is sufficient but it's not obvious to me that that's sufficient like maybe sufficient means not only do you violate the Integrity of the woman in a fundamental sense but you enrage all of her male protectors and then that's enough of a barrier because God only knows how much barrier we need and obviously well you just laid out a bunch of problems especially now that the pill introduces and we should stress that the problem that women have in saying no once they're on the pill is that it's instantly personal and that means the woman has to deliver a pretty hard blow and that's especially problematic if she's somewhat potentially interested in the guy right how do I say no without hurting his feelings alienating him making him into an enemy looking like a prude and I mean when you're 16 how you don't know the answer to any of those questions like you're not sophisticated enough to and I saw this in my clinical practice all the time you know I had lots of women in my clinical practice who were abused serially and you know they were generally stunningly unsophisticated in their conduct and I'm not trying to blame the victim I'm just saying that sophisticated women and those are often those who've been they've had a lot of good relationships with men brothers and fathers in particular sophisticated women signal to men who are getting a little pushy in no uncertain terms very early in the pushing game that no is the answer right and they do that if you do that really early on in the investigation you don't have to use much force but unsophisticated women they can't do that at all they don't know how and then what happens is they they run into an unsophisticated guy he's too dumb to pick up any clues and then by the time she really wants to say no she's already on the bed I'll give you an example of this you know I had one client who uh was coerced in her account into a sexual encounter by a door-to-door Salesman you know typical pornographic fantasy setup so this young guy is going around door to door selling whatever he's selling so he's not one of the world's high status males let's put it that way and uh you know and I suppose he's probably got all sorts of fantasies running through his pornography pornography adult brain and so he comes to the door and she's in the house and she's a reasonably attractive young woman and he's friendly and well the first thing she does is invite him in now that's stupid she's alone she doesn't know who he is at all and she invites him in well he thinks oh my God what is Shia you know maybe she really likes me and you already said that men and this is especially true if they're narcissistic and immature radically overestimate the degree to which a woman's attention is signaling sexual availability for obvious reasons and so he's thinking oh my god this is my big chance and so then he starts to press her and she has no tools at her disposal at all because she has no idea how to signal no and let's say she's agreeable and neurotic with a bit of a history of abuse and the next thing she knows she finds herself on the couch you know three-quarters undressed and then the question is well is that rape and well then that's the question that's when the police come in and the lawyers come in and you know you spend the next three years trying to figure out whether or not that's rape but it's a so so my point with all that is that it's an open question how much protection women need from the males around them and then it's an open question exactly how to construe the crime of irresponsible access to young women woman from a psychological and legal and social perspective like maybe it's not just maybe it's not just a crime against the woman you know maybe it's a crime against the broader community and I don't like I it's not like I'm saying I know how to adjudicate that because I don't but it's hard to get all the necessary barriers in place and if that wasn't true we wouldn't have this huge debate about consent on campuses um I have a slightly um unusual view of the relationship between Christianity and feminism in general um feminists modern feminists set themselves up in opposition to Christianity particularly on the issue of abortion the handmaid's tale kind of Neo Puritan outfit being the the uniform now of of American feminists and so on I am off the view though that actually feminism is an outgrowth of Christianity and that the fundamental idea in Christianity which is so different from other religious Traditions that weakness is strength that the first shall be last that there is something valuable about being small and vulnerable rather than something um Despicable about it I think that feminism completely relies on that idea which is by no means shared by all cultures and certainly wasn't shared by the ancient Roman culture that that from which Christianity is sprung and so if you're operating in say an ancient Roman culture which which doesn't see women as inherently vulnerable which actually sees female um vulnerability as uh something to be despised potentially and which sees prostituted slave women as entirely available for male sexual consumption that cannot really conceptualize the idea of a slave woman having been able to be sexually violated you know it's just not kind of within the moral system it's not it's not understandable into that comes the Christian idea of sexual equality at least at the spiritual level and the idea therefore that actually even a woman who doesn't have male kin available to defend her against sexual violation which of course A Slave doesn't she she is nevertheless worthy of that protection it kind of socializes maybe the wrong word but it shares that duty of protection among the community and among women I think that's basically what feminism is and says that actually we should we should be bestowing on these friendless women the same protection that a woman with high connected male kin has it's a very difficult system to enforce to some extent we we try and use police Criminal Justice System whatever to do that job it's a hard job to do but that is basically the modern project and I think it is born out of Christian morality right right well yeah yeah I mean I think I think that's right is that what what you're attempting to do is to replicate the protection that a very well constituted family and Community system would have for a woman who's highly functioning you're trying to replicate that in abstraction in the entire social structure and so that's why you have a legal structure that says well women have the right to bodily Integrity you're really trying to replace that protective structure with the force of law yeah and I think that's an entirely laudable exercise the question that we have to wrestle with is the question that you brought up at the end of that which is that if a woman is unfortunate enough not to have you know let's say close male Associates brothers friends fathers um available to her to what degree is it even possible for the more abstract State and the body of law is to replace that might be a goal but it's very difficult to realize in Practical terms is there anything else that that's groddling around in the back of your mind that you think might be worth making a case for at the moment I suppose that the um if there's one unifying idea within the book it's probably summed up in the um in the epilogue which I called listen to your mother I didn't crucially call it obey your mother I call it listen to your mother I he you know give your mother the opportunity to present her her view of things because I think that basically everything that's in the book actually is incredibly obvious and ought to be incredibly obvious and it only isn't because we we live in a very strange time which has constructed some very strange ideas about sexual politics and actually in order to I think to navigate these Waters effectively simply listening to women who've lived it already and who have your best interests at heart if there's anyone in the world who's likely to have your best interests at heart it is probably your mother simply listening to that woman is really the only piece of advice that ought to be needed um because all of this is really just about rediscovering some of the I would say Eternal truths about men and women which we've yeah well I'm kind of I'm kind of hoping that um the women that you describe as post-maidens so let's say mothers and matriarchs could seize the Reigns on the social media front and start educating young women who are both motherless and fatherless in the most fundamental sense about some of these truths you know my wife is being Tammy has been starting to do that with her podcast inquiring into the nature of the divine feminine let's say and speaking to people like Janice fiamengo who's a real scholar of bitter and resentful feminism let's say but also trying to have an intelligent discussion among older women who have a bit of wisdom often hard one about what a viable long-term life path might look like like you sketched it out a bit you know this transition in terms of narrative role let's say from Maiden to mother to matriarch but that's you know that's a very vague this is not a criticism but a three-word description is very vague and it isn't obvious at all that our culture is good at providing an image of like what does it mean to be a mother in the highest sense and it's really complicated you know because one of the problems a lot of my female clients had was they were very productive economically and very brilliant and it's clearly the case that cultures get much richer and children are much more well educated if women have access to educational resources and if Society can tap into their broad economic productivity that seems like a net good right but then it puts women in the uncomfortable situation of well how do you devote enough attention to your husband and your children probably in the reverse order and how do you handle your career and that needs a lot of discussion the answer seems to be that most of the women that I've seen who've had viable lives is that they don't make career advancement their number one goal and one of the things you see emerging as a consequence of that is that women are pretty likely to start small businesses but they generally do them part-time and they're generally not as hyper successful as a minority of men but the reason they're doing that is because they're trying to balance marriage and children with economic productivity and that's that's challenging and presents lots of opportunity but it's not straightforward to conceptualize and women have only been able to do that in some real sense for about 60 years right since we had reliable birth control so it's not surprising that there has to be a discussion and then so that's on the motherfront and then on the matriarch front well I think the problem's even worse is like well what's it like to be a grandmother who's had a life you know a family a relationship a career who's being productive at that who's now entering into the you know final third of life let's say what does that look like if it's rich and fulfilling in terms of social role and and personal relationship and sexual behavior and like there's an absolute dearth of conversation on those fronts and you know you're obviously spearheading uh what the rectification of that in some real sense but it would be lovely to see a lot more of that anyways people who are listening Louise Perry's book is the case against the sexual Revolution uh very you know Punchy title and one of the things Louise said today that was interesting is that her books actually uh been met with a lot of positive responses you know and so that's pretty interesting you know I feel the tide is turning in many ways this might be a a cardinal pivoting year 2023 because a lot of these things you say your books about the painfully obvious in some sense it's like well you know Society is pretty unstable when the painfully obvious is now both debatable and even objected to but your book is definitely shot in the opposite direction so thank you very much for talking to me today thank you so much and to all of you bet you bet and uh hopefully we can meet when I come to the UK that would be good and uh to all those who are listening and watching thank you very much for your time and attention to the Daily wire plus crew for facilitating this and the camera people who are here in Austin Texas is where I am today thank you for helping us do this and uh and well we'll we'll continue this conversation on The Daily wire plus platform thanks again Louise hello everyone I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 1,441,743

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, existentialism, maps of meaning, free speech, freedom of speech, personality lectures, personality and transformations, Jordan perterson, Dr Peterson

Id: rGsZ_HI_q1M

Length: 105min 13sec (6313 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 13 2023