The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: Louise Perry (Transcript)

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.

One of the things that people who are watching and listening might be interested in knowing is that people pursue different mating strategies, so to speak. That’s how evolutionary psychologists or biologists describe it. You can make the same case in Animal Kingdom to some degree. And 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 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 a 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 marked differences. One of the hallmarks of antisocial 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 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, narcissistic, which is virtue-free attention-seeking, which is a good way of thinking about it, psychopathy, which is predatory parasitism, and sadism, which is positive delight in harm to other people.

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 bear 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 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 regards 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 Marilyn was playing a particularly short game. And even Hugh, who had less to lose, and arguably on some dimensions more to 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 and his three blonde clones traipsing painfully from full glamorous restaurant to full glamorous restaurant through Europe, engaging in conversations so pure oil 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 pretty oldest boy at the frat party. Had that whole stench about it, I would say so.

Alright, so back to Marilyn, you said that she had a pretty brutal upbringing and was exploited pretty early on. You might as well tell the story about her, the famous photographs that launched Playboy.

LOUISE PERRY: Yes, so Marilyn was both the first cover star and also the first naked centerfold in the first issue of Playboy. But the naked photos required, without her consent, she’d taken them, or she’d had them taken many years before when she was much younger for very little money just because she was desperate. She’d signed the release with a false name, but somehow Hefner got hold of them and paid the photographer rather than her in order to publish them in Playboy. And she wasn’t even sent a free copy and was apparently very upset about it. Hefner ended up buying the crypt next to hers at 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 is the point that I want to make with 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 yet she is held up as this iconic figure of the sexual revolution, which we’re supposed to believe was a good thing. And my argument in the book, it is of course the case against the sexual revolution. My argument is not that it was entirely bad. I don’t think you can paint any huge historical event as 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.

FATHERLESSNESS, EARLY PUBERTY, A DEADLY COMBINATION

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: 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 genuine name was Norma Rae. Is that right, Norma Rae? And she said she could walk down the street as Norma Rae and no one would look at her. Or she could walk down the street as Marilyn and then people would just be attracted to her like mad.

And so I want to run a hypothesis by you, given that backstory for female sexual icons, and this is often the case for girls who get dragged or who agree to participate in the pornography industry, that they’re often abandoned girls who have a history of fractured relationships and abuse.

Now, so 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 your culture doesn’t have enough men. 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.

Now, why would you develop a year early from a puberty perspective? Well, the answer is, one of the ways that women can attract male attention, obviously, and therefore, in principle companionship, protection, productivity, all of 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 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 and 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 behaviour because it’s – 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 Marilyn, that was elevated right to the point where she became literally the poster girl for that approach.

MADONNA: BECOMING YOUR OWN PARODY

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 Marilyn 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 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. It just doesn’t work across the decades that you’re going to be alive. All right. So back to back to Marilyn and Hugh.

MAIDEN, MOTHER, MATRIARCH

LOUISE PERRY: On that point, I decided to call my podcast Maiden, Mother, Matriarch, because it’s my hypothesis that one of the features of late 20^th, 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 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 maiden to matriarch. 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 add to mothers and to matriarchs in a way that we once did. I think that all of the status is loaded onto the maiden role. 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 dysfunction that women suffer from.

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, 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 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 as they accrue productive status. So let’s say as mothers and matriarch. 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 a woman can be attractive as a mother and a matriarch. And 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 — It’s not virginal maiden, that’s exactly 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 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 the 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 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 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 development of the relationship across time. Now, 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, someone else.

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 outstandingly sexually attractive male or female by the time you’re in your 60s, let’s say, gets to be old ages fighting against that pretty hard. But that doesn’t mean that that can’t be held forward as, you know, an unattainable ideal to which we all 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 move towards something like a full integration.

ARE MEN AND WOMEN DIFFERENT?

LOUISE PERRY: Like Russian Dolls, I think is the perfect image for it, you know, the Russian Dolls contains the younger, the smaller 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, a strange paradox, where on the one hand, I’d say Western society is increasingly gerontocratic in that power and assets primarily are just fortunately held by the old. But it’s also still a very, very youth oriented culture in terms of politics in terms of 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 tension there.

I think another reason for it as well is I think that I think that women’s lives tend to be more clearly segmented 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 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 call 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 a 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.

THE PILL, VOLUNTARY REPRODUCTIVE CONTROL

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Yeah. Okay, so let’s focus on that. Now. So now we’re off to chapter two. I’m going to make a counter case for a minute. And then let’s hash that out.

Alright, so 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 a 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 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 sexual reproduction, pays a higher cost for it, 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 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, any comments on that whole line of inquiry are more than welcome.

TRIVIALIZING THE BODY, LIVING FOR THE MIND

LOUISE PERRY: Well, that’s a promise, right, of the sexual revolution that we, that by introducing this new technology shock, we do raise 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, it’s changed in the last 60 years, we also have very different ways 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 mixed lives, there’s much less homosexuality than there used to be. And so people are interacting in the workplace, 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 had some very strange political ideas around, for instance, having biological males competing in women’s sports, you know, it’s 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 —

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: You can usually mob them into silence, though.

LOUISE PERRY: Yeah, some of them are brave enough to say so many of them. Yeah, as you say, but many people who don’t really use 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 raises these difference. I don’t think that it does. I mean, not only because we don’t yet have artificial wombs, we still reproduce the old fashioned way. And I think are likely to the foreseeable. I don’t think artificial wombs are just around the corner. I think actually, they’re 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 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 the response, interestingly, that I’ve had to this book since it was published is obviously hugely controversial title, the whole process 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 when I got an 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 that 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 think that the effort of trying to pretend that men and women are the same is ultimately ruinous to their sexes.

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: 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 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 something like not all desire is good. And so 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 you pointed out in your book that you often get artistic types like Andre Geith, let’s say, and left wing intellectuals pushing for full sexual freedom. And some of that’s high openness, and some of that 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 counterclaim. And the counterclaim is something like, well, every form of sexual behavior is, must be celebrated. And it’s 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 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 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.

A REINVENTION OF MARRIAGE

LOUISE PERRY: My suspicion with what’s going on there, with this rise of sort of a very bureaucratic attitude to sex, shall we say, this idea of asking for consent at every stage, and so I mean, the funniest example, which I mentioned briefly in the book, is that is an idea cooked up Western University students that you would have a sign a contract before you had casual sex, and you take a photo of the pair of you with your contract and so on. 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 sort of reinvention of marriage.

I think that’s basically what is going on — I think what’s going on with this reintroduction of these new rules post me too, is that complete sexual freedom is not actually a sustainable system. And what we’ve had for 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 imbalances of physical strengths, 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 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 the father’s hand and all of these things, which is supposed to basically control sexuality. I mean, the progressive account of this is that they repress people’s sexuality, to which I say, yes, they do. But they do that because they have to because that is, it completely untrammeled 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 committed to 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, 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.

REMOVING THE PRINCIPLES OF SEX

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Yeah well, here is rule, is that responsibility abdicated is vacuumed up by tyrants. And so young men and young women aren’t regulating their own sexual behaviour, then tyrannical bureaucrats will definitely step in to have fun on that front. But 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.

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 it 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, who’s great developmental psychologist. He thought of the developmental process as one of integration. Now, you know, you already put forth a three stage model of female development. And you can 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 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 uni-ventional 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 antisocial manner, parading their sexuality, insisting upon the short term gratification at their own expense, and that 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, you 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% now of Japanese, I think it’s 30% of Japanese young people under 30 are still virgins, 30% 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.

DEATH GRIP SYNDROME, IMPOTENCE

LOUISE PERRY: The phrase that I use in the book to describe this exact phenomenon where you on the one hand have hyper sexual 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 in public life. But on the other hand, exactly, as you say, we have what’s 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 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 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 use so much porn. And I think cultural death grip syndrome is the counterpart 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 that 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 that disincentivizes proper. Yeah.

DESPERATION REDUCTION AND DETRIMENTAL SELF-TRAINING

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: It’s, I think the rule is something like unearned surfeit turns into revulsion. Right, right. It’s 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 to 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. Like, the first of all, that’s not gonna 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 there are 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 there are classic psychological experiments showing this, you know, 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 male 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% are just paralyzed into utter stasis by the possibility of rejection, especially because they haven’t 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.

AI, ROBOTICS, AND THE MONETIZATION OF DECAY

And so then they can satisfy themselves momentarily with pornography. And then that turns into that host of problems you already described is 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. 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 signup 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.

LOUISE PERRY: Yes, sex robots are the next step. Where you have a —

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Yeah, yeah. Well, the integration of those two things.

LOUISE PERRY: And then you get us 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. Onlyfans, I think, is a step along this path. Because what Onlyfans offer is 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 completely — the role of sexual destruction for everyone.

ONLYFANS: WOMEN CEASE TO BE WOMEN

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Right. Well, and that that’s narcissistic exploitation on the part of the females with antisocial personality traits. And often, what would you say aided and abetted by quasi psychopathic pimps, electronic pimps. And, you know, those Onlyfan 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 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 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 disenamored of life is extraordinarily high.

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.

SHORT-TERM AND LONG-TERM FEMALE ATTRACTIVENESS

LOUISE PERRY: No, I think that one of the ways in which women are hurt by the pretense 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 young beautiful women to mistake male sexual desire for high regard. And 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 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 OnlyFans is a quick buck, not only is the fact that OnlyFans is enormously unequal, and actually there are very few people on it who are making any real money and generally the ones who are making lots of money were already famous before they joined the platform and so on. It’s also the fact that the internet is forever, and these images are out there, and it damages your long term mating prospects to have been on OnlyFans.

And actually, it is clearly the case that female beauty is an incredibly valuable resource, but I think maybe the way in which it needs to be understood distinctly from economic power is just 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 costs down the line. So there are some women who become very wealthy on OnlyFans. But in general, I would say that it’s very, very poor strategy. And, you know, however, it is presented as a kind of short term boon.

TEMPERANCE: ALCOHOL FUELS SEXUAL AND DOMESTIC ABUSE

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Yeah, well, 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 10th of 1%. They’ll make a spectacular amount of money, and everyone else will strive away in the dirt, scrabbling away for virtually nothing. And then as you said, even those women who have managed to make that successful are dooming themselves in all likelihood to remaining only attractive to psychopathic and exploitive 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 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, but 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 facilitator.

LOUISE PERRY: It’s why the temperance movement was in many ways a feminist movement, I would argue. That’s not how it was normally expressed. The temperance movement was very much about domestic violence.

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Right, right, right. Well, I know on campuses, date rape, etc. and unwanted social, 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 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 manage to wend your way through it.

IS MARRIAGE CONSENT? GRAY AREAS AND #METOO

But as a basis for a stable society, it falls 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 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 they’re 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 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 there a response for responsible for her own actions?

And the answer is a little of column A and a little of column B. And that makes the whole issue of consent extraordinarily complex. You know, if you consent well drunk, and you regret it the next day, is that true consent? And of course, that’s being fought out in legal minefields all across North America. And I think the reason it’s being fought 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 removes the regulatory constraint from hedonic behavior, including aggressive behavior, slots of 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 you add some 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 dead, 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 issue of consent is so important that it basically devolves into something approximating marriage by necessity.

THE PLIGHT OF THE UNSOPHISTICATED MALE

LOUISE PERRY: I agree. The only provider I was placed on that is that one of the – I would say one of the very profound successes of 20^th century feminism was in reconceptualizing right 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, 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 above the legal driving limit, etc, 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 becomes impossible to talk about that gray space. 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 disturbing as whatever, often involving alcohol as you say.

Briefly on that point, one of the things that 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, 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 we’re talking about teenagers who are raised on porn, it’s a complete disaster. 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 don’t have the moral language to talk about it, because they don’t want to talk about, they don’t want to use terms like chivalrous, they don’t want to talk about gentleman, 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 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 sort of their attempt at ideological interventions.

The idea is that we sit kids down and we tell 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 the would-be rapists aren’t listening, for one thing. And also because 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 this emphasis is just on reiterating and reiterating.

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: 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 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. 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 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 flanks of DEI bureaucrats. They’re trying to mediate the social relationship. And that’s just not going to work at all.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MALE AND FEMALE STATUS

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 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 cost for reproduction.

And so men are evaluated on the basis of their potential for economic reciprocity and generosity. And that gives them status males. And so women peel from the top of that hierarchy. Basically, they let males compete it out on the economic front, and then women select from the top down. And the higher the status a woman has, the higher 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 point six, point seven, 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 one of the answers is obviously associated with beauty and reproductive capacity and sexual attractiveness. Those things all tangled together extraordinarily tightly. 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 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 that’s a tough question, because women are smaller, and they’re not as physically powerful. And economic 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 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, well, 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. You can imagine there’s some narcissism 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, 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 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 tool they have in their armament, with regard to status, with regard to being taken, seriously, is their ability and willingness to say no.

THE INCOMING SEXUAL COUNTER-REVOLUTION

LOUISE PERRY: A question that I’ve had a lot since the book was published is, 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 historic, unusual situation where female virginity is not prized. Basically, every society hugely praises female virginity and female sexual restraint, the ability to say no, for obvious reasons, because illegitimate child is a disaster, not only for the woman, but for her family, for the community. There’s a need to be gatekeeping young women.

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 we now have attempted to 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 it a good go.

And many of the young women who have 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 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 weird sign. It’s a sign that you’re unusual, that you’re not playing by the normal rules. It puts you at a disadvantage. If you are a young woman who doesn’t want to be putting out on a first, second, third date, you’re already disadvantaged in the dating market, or at least up until recently.

But one of the things that I’ve noticed going and giving talks all over the country is I’ve often had women come up to me afterwards and say that they like my message, they agree that they are implementing this in their own lives, that they are not having casual sex, that they are not giving in to 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 this 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 doing that because they’ve gotten on to the fact that this is actually a miserable system, which causes some harm. And my hope is that that will accelerate as other women imitate them.

WOMEN TEST MEN FOR AGGRESSION

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Well, you know, if it’s the beautiful high status women who begin that trend, the rest of the women will fall, because trends always start in the aristocracy and trend downwards.

Now, okay, so here’s another thought. 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.

MEN TEST WOMEN FOR IMPULSIVITY

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 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 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 or 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 that 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 male 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. Well, we can just 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 weapon of formidable force, and that it does nothing but confer status upon them.

You know, in 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. 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 gain.

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, like a 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 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.

NIETZSCHE: PRUDISHNESS IS A GUISE FOR COWARDICE

Then it’s complicated to a because you get the prude problem. And Nietzsche 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 pass their fear off as morality. And prudes are sort of like that is they don’t want to 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, 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 instead 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 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 be as effective as men.

THE PILL REMOVED THE EASE OF ASSERTIVENESS FOR WOMEN

LOUISE PERRY: It’s 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 in her 20s in the 90s when the pill arrived. And she said that 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, 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 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 would hurt feelings. There’s also I think, an element of women being slightly physically frightened.

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Well, it boils down to personal rejection, then –

LOUISE PERRY: Yeah, yeah. Which is a painful thing.

IS RAPE A PROPERTY CRIME?

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: That’s the only excuse you have left.

Well, here’s something else that’s worth pondering. You know, you talked 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 I’m going to push back because, you know, 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 can set up a society where merely, 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, while 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 and making them into an enemy, looking like a prude? And I mean, when you’re 16, 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 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 was coerced in her account into a sexual encounter by a door to door salesman, you know, it’s 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, you know, and I suppose he’s probably got all sorts of fantasies running through his pornography, pornography addled 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 she? 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 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 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 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.

CHRISTIANITY AND FEMINISM

LOUISE PERRY: And I have a slightly unusual view of the relationship between Christianity and feminism. In general, feminists — modern feminists set themselves up in opposition to Christianity, particularly the issue of abortion, the Handmaid’s Tale kind of neo puritan outfit being the uniform now of American feminists and so on. I’m of 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 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 from which Christianity is from. And so if you’re operating in say, an ancient Roman culture, which doesn’t see women as inherently vulnerable, which actually sees female vulnerability as something to be despised, potentially, and which sees constituted 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 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 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 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 try and use police, criminal justice and 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.

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Right, right. Well, yeah, yeah, I mean, I think that’s right, is that 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 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, available to her, to what degree is it even possible for the more abstract state and the body of laws to replace that might be a goal, but it’s very difficult to realize in practical terms. Is there anything else that that’s rattling around in the back of your mind that you think might be worth making a case for at the moment?

LISTEN TO YOUR MOTHER

LOUISE PERRY: I suppose that if there’s one unifying idea within the book, it’s probably summed up in the epilogue, which I called Listen to Your Mother. I didn’t crucially call it Obey Your Mother, I called it Listen to Your Mother. I give your mother the opportunity to present 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 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. Because all of this is really just about rediscovering some of the, I would say, eternal truths about men and women, which we’ve –

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Yeah, well, I’m kind of hoping that the women that you described as post maidens, so let’s say mothers and matriarchs, could seize the reins 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 has been — 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 won 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 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 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 mother front. And then on the matriarch front, well, I think the problems 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 been productive at that, who’s now entering into the 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 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. Very, you know, punchy title. And one of the things Louise said today that was interesting is that her book’s actually 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 cardinal pivoting year 2023. Because a lot of these things you say your book is 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.

LOUISE PERRY: Thank you so much.

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: You bet, you bet. And hopefully we can meet when I come to the UK. That would be good. And 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, we’ll continue this conversation on the Daily Wire Plus platform. Thanks again, Louise.

For Further Reading:

At a Crossroads: Jordan B. Peterson 2022 Commencement Address (Transcript)

How to Educate Your Children: Jeff Sandefer (Transcript)

Marriage, Family and Parenting: Paul Washer (Transcript)

The Epidemic That Dare Not Speak Its Name: Stephen J Shaw (Transcript)

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