The Paradox of #MeToo | Louise Perry

I'd be interested in hearing your views as I've watched the debate in Australia over recent years particularly in the context of me too in the context of inappropriate behavior and the public space in Australia and the Uproar including legal over some things that happened in the Australian Parliament amongst staffers and the public for raw that's followed it struck me that it's hard to think of anything that can be so powerful a forceful good in terms of deep human engagement with others expression of Love of commitment of Joy at the other end that can be so utterly destructive so demeaning so degrading and so cruel the way in which we conduct our sexuality in an age when people demand complete Freedom has often been carried forth without anybody thinking about the potential for good the potential for bad yeah uh yeah I think that's true I don't think there's there may be no other fussed of Life which the extremes are so extreme yeah um I mean one of the um one of the mistakes I think of the um the ideology of the 1960s which we're all now the um descendants is that because it was rooted so much in a reaction against traditionalism of all kinds and in particular reaction against Christianity and of course Christianity and indeed all other religious traditions hold sex to have a very important status to have a sacred status within marriage and so on um when you have a an intellectual movement which is all about reaction against Christianity and a rejection of everything that's come before which to some extent is you know is maybe not it's maybe not a surprise that that would have come out of the second world war that kind of enormous reaction against everything that had come before a sort of complete loss of faith in tradition and culture to date um that does include a reaction against the idea of sex having a sacred status or sex even having a special status a unique status of any kind so I I describe this in my book as um sexual disenchantment so so feeding off of Max baber's idea of just of disenchantment as a process of um as a component of the Enlightenment where previously people felt that that natural world had a kind of special sacred um almost conscious status and that's all Stripped Away as part of the Scientific Revolution and people come to believe that it's a nerd and just subject to um rational forces and so on I think sexual disenchantment is the same sort of process that people used to believe that sex was was sacred was special and what the new ideology post-sexual Revolution tells us is oh no it's just a social interaction you know you can buy it you can sell it you can treat it as meaningless you know if you want to attach special status to it then like find whatever you know people can still get married people can still um choose to behave in traditional ways but the fundamental idea is that actually sex is is not really any different from shaking someone's hand playing tennis making a coffee for someone you know that that it has a completely neutral status people of course don't actually act as if that's true I was going to say yeah no one actually so it's not special and yet yeah we're a sex obsessed Society in some ways yeah yeah so the theory is from the sort of hyper hyper Progressive position is that um you know sex can be commodified uh porn is just another kind of entertainment all this kind of stuff but then no one actually behaves as if that's true like people people care if their spouse cheats on them people care if their boss is sexually inappropriate to them you know it's this funny component of me too but on the one hand you have uh enormous distress at sexually inappropriateness in in various circumstances including particularly in the workplace so you know I as a journalist this is obviously something that's that's been a big deal in journalism I know a lot of female journalists who on the one hand will be enormously upset at say inappropriate touching or being asked out on a date by a senior colleague all this kind of stuff which is felt to be completely inappropriate because sex should be outside of the professional realm you know but then on the one hand support the decriminalization of the sex industry and would say that sex works so called I don't use that phrase but would say that sex work is just the same as any other kind of work and that we shouldn't be stigmatizing pornography or whatever and I'm like come on SO sexual touching in your workplace that's that's beyond the pale but actually having a whole industry which is entirely based on sex which is you know whether buying and selling sex is the point of the industry you know I think what what does what on Earth does sexual harassment look like in a brothel how can you have these and I think what's going on there is people are trying to hold to the idea of sexual disenchantment in an intellectual way but actually it's not true you know people feel very strongly instinctively that sex does have a special status even if they try and deny it to themselves and I think that that whole this whole effort to try and pretend otherwise has been an enormous mistake [Music]

Channel: John Anderson Media

Views: 65,818

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

Id: mn7_zJvHk9g

Length: 6min 12sec (372 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 04 2023