00:00:00
The feminism movement didn't unite women. It split women. I feel totally listen. 50% of young women don't want to
00:00:06
have children. They're really preoccupied with making money and materialism. But we're still looking at
00:00:12
a society that is increasingly telling women where they could be better. But sometimes feminism expects women to be
00:00:18
prioritized and both sexes want the privileges without the responsibilities. Can I just add we are producing women
00:00:24
and men who are and I'll tell you what I mean by that. It'll be an interesting discussion. We're joined by three
00:00:30
leading and outspoken voices in female societal issues with very different opinions to unpack the choices and
00:00:35
consequences women face in modern society. The sexual revolution gave women freedom. But things like the
00:00:41
washing machine, women entering the labor force, the pill had enormous social changes. For instance, it gave
00:00:46
the illusion that sex was consequencefree. But the second wave of the feminist movement was every woman
00:00:52
should want free sex. And yet 82% of young women are depressed and anxious after casual sexual encounters or every
00:01:00
woman should want to go out to work and leave their children in daycare. But we are doing terrible damage to our
00:01:06
children by putting them in daycare. This strain of feminism has basically aspired as much as possible to make
00:01:11
women like men. And now gender roles are changing. And we've gone so far. So we have women dominating men. How are we
00:01:17
dominating men? Oh my goodness. 60% of college students are women. dominating. No, let me finish. Young men are afraid of women and the power they have over them. Oh god. To blame
00:01:29
feminism for those things. I mean, it's insane. But there are solutions. I'm just going to jump in there and talk about a report that came out in 2025,
00:01:35
and this was really shocking. What are your thoughts about this? Okay, so first of all,
00:01:43
this has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to the show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the
00:01:49
show. So, could I ask you for a favor before we start? If you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us, the free simple way
00:01:55
that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment to you is if you do that, then I'll do
00:02:00
everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback. We'll find the guests
00:02:07
that you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much.
00:02:14
Let's start with some introductions. Louise, what is your professional background and what do I need to
00:02:19
understand and know about your experiences that feed into your perspective on this subject? So, my
00:02:25
professional background, I'm a journalist. Um, I write about ideas for a living. I don't have like a political
00:02:32
agenda. I'm just I just write and say things that I think are true. In terms of how I arrived at some of my views on
00:02:39
what we're going to talk about today, sexual revolution, I think I was raised with a lot of the assumptions around
00:02:46
the sexual revolution, which are sort of like the water that we swim in now culturally. And it wasn't until I got to
00:02:52
university that I started gradually unpicking them. After I was I left university, I worked
00:02:59
in a rape crisis center which was quite formative for me in that I saw some of the ways in which some of the feminist theory that I had learned at university didn't quite map onto reality.
00:03:11
And then I after leaving that job I became a journalist. Again I kept thinking about these things and I guess
00:03:17
I've reached a point where I take a very mixed view of this history. I think there are good things. I think there are bad things that have come out of the sexual revolution. Louise, can you define for me what you
00:03:30
mean by sexual revolution for anybody that doesn't know because it's going to be quite an important term today. Right. So I think that there are two things
00:03:37
really the ideological event really of the 1960s and 1970s. So this was a a period of not just in relation to sexual relationships, but all sorts of things. A period of really questioning and
00:03:51
challenging traditional ideas and particularly traditional Christian ideas about how what sexual relationships
00:03:57
ought to look like. I think actually the the the point that we've reached in terms of progressive culture is the
00:04:03
assumption that those traditional ideas are necessarily questionable, are necessarily
00:04:09
fit to be challenged. I think that's the ideological thing that we're talking about. But there's this other thing that happens at the same time which is
00:04:15
partially connected which is a material change. So you have the introduction of the pill, the advent of safe abortion.
00:04:23
Remember historically abortion is not safe. So you have the advent of safe abortion and of course it's decriminalization. You have things like
00:04:30
the washing machine and central heating and all sorts of other domestic appliances, domestic technologies which actually have been enormously important in changing such relationships because
00:04:41
all of a sudden it means that that basically takes less time to run a home and so it becomes more possible for
00:04:46
women to enter the workforce. So then you see this wave of not only changing marriage rates and birth rates but also
00:04:54
women entering the labor force on mass and really some enormous social changes like so enormous that it can be a little bit hard in 2025
00:05:05
to realize how enormous they were because we've become used to them. We'll talk about all of that today going clockwise then Erica same question to
00:05:12
you about your background and h the work that's fed into the perspective you have. I'm a psychoanalyst in private
00:05:18
practice. I'm an author. I write books about parenting. And the book I'm probably most well known for is my book,
00:05:25
Being There. And it's basically about the neuroscience of attachment or the importance of mothers in the first three
00:05:32
years of a child's life to create emotional security, which lays down the foundation for mental health in the
00:05:38
future. And so from my perspective, I guess the conversation we're going to have, I should say right off the bat,
00:05:45
um, I consider myself a feminist. Um, but I consider myself a term that I like better and that my community uses, the people that I work with, and which is I consider myself a maternal feminist.
00:05:58
Basically, there was a a school of thought called maternal feminism, which really elevated women in their work as
00:06:04
mothers and really talked about it as very important work. Um, and so I'm not an anti-feminist and I'm certainly for women to have choice. So, it's uh it'll
00:06:14
be an interesting discussion. I guess you could say I'm more of a centrist on this topic. As Louise said, um, there
00:06:20
are parts of feminism that I think really helped women and there are parts that really did a lot of harm to
00:06:25
children. And lastly, Deborah. Yes. Same question to you. So, I am best known as
00:06:32
the host of the Guilty Feminist podcast, and I started that podcast to learn about feminism, and I have since researched a lot. I wrote a book called The Guilty Feminist.
00:06:44
I've just written a book called six conversations we're scared to have, which does also challenge some of the directions that we've gone, but more in
00:06:52
in about how combative we've become as progressive people to each other and how difficult it is to talk to people on the
00:06:58
right now and how we need to get back in rooms and we need to be having difficult discussions like this. So, it's
00:07:04
interesting what Louise says about being raised in a progressive household but then being disillusioned and thinking
00:07:12
that there was there's some ways in which life was better before the sexual revolution. Um, because I'm effectively
00:07:18
a time traveler. I did live before the sexual revolution because when I was 14, just coming into my puberty, my family joined a religious cult.
00:07:31
I didn't have any normal sexual development and I didn't get out. I didn't escape that patriarchal cult till
00:07:38
I was in my mid 20s. So I know what it is and I do not believe women want it. I know what it is to not have autonomy, to
00:07:51
not have agency, and to not have emotional freedom. And those are the three big things that I think the sexual
00:07:57
revolution gave women. First of all, agency. I think it's just agency is so important. So agency is just the ability to go around and choose
00:08:07
what you do moment to moment. And autonomy is can I can I decide what my life looks like, the shape of my life, what what choices do I have? And
00:08:21
emotional freedom is the third one. And I don't think the sexual revolution did did give us emotional freedom because I
00:08:27
think we're still sitting in a lot of guilt as women as to like if I'm at work, I should be at home with my
00:08:33
children. If I'm at home with my children, I'm am I providing for them financially well enough or am I am I going to have a career when I go back to
00:08:40
work? Um if I'm doing both of those things very well, am I a good enough daughter, friend? Am I running a half
00:08:46
marathon for charity? Like we are in a stage of such guilt. That's why my show and my one of my books is called the
00:08:51
guilty feminist because I felt that feminism had become another thing to feel guilty about. And so anything to me
00:08:58
that engenders more shame in women or more guilt in women or takes their autonomy away even emotionally. For me, I would like to
00:09:10
move far away from that because in my life, every year I've been away from that cult and I have had more autonomy
00:09:19
and more emotional freedom. I have felt more spaciousness and I have become a better person, a better partner. I have maternal roles in
00:09:30
my life. It makes me so much better in those roles if I'm filled up, if I'm creatively fulfilled. And it also makes me a better person in
00:09:41
my community in every way. So that's for me what feminism is. So autonomy, emotional freedom, and agency. I also want to touch on the word guilt as well because I remember that being pertinent to our conversation. But if if I reflect
00:09:54
on those three words, Louise, autonomy, emotional freedom, and agency as the the byproduct of the sexual revolution.
00:10:00
Would you agree with that? Yes and no. So I think that can I give an example that is like quite dark but I think throws us immediately
00:10:12
into like some of these really difficult questions about freedom and who's freedom right there's this line from Matthew Arnold that I really like
00:10:18
freedom is a really good horse to ride but to ride somewhere like freedom is ought to have a purpose right and so an
00:10:26
example from my professional life which I think highlights some of the issues about sexual revolution promoting
00:10:31
freedom the law around BDSM. I won't go into the details because it's boring, but there's
00:10:38
like complicated law around BDSM basically like so so this is um bondage, domination, soda massarchism. So people
00:10:44
basically doing um consensually violent or abusive things in sex. So stuff that would be illegal if there weren't consent pretty much. And the law around it is complicated. The law
00:10:57
basically says that you can consent up to a certain level of harm and then above that level of harm, you're
00:11:02
criminally liable and if something goes wrong, like you're done for it. And there's been ongoing campaigns by
00:11:08
proponents of sexual freedom to loosen these laws and to make it so that you can consent to more than what you
00:11:14
legally can at the moment. So consent to like serious body modifications as a sex
00:11:20
thing or consent to quite serious violence as a sex thing. like if something goes wrong at the moment, you
00:11:25
might be criminally liable. So me and a bunch of other feminists set up a group called we can't consent to this. The reason we did this is because there were an increasing number of cases in the UK. This isn't unique to the UK
00:11:37
of women who had died during sex and their partners claimed that they had consented to the violence that killed them. So this was normally strangulation, but there were other like horrible ways in which these women died.
00:11:49
And these men were getting away with this in the sense that they were successfully claiming, no, no, no, this
00:11:54
was all just a sex game. And they were successfully avoiding a murder prosecution and sometimes getting very
00:12:01
light sentences for manslaughter. And I think this is a really really good example of freedom for who and freedom
00:12:07
for what because you can completely see why some campaigners would want the law in
00:12:14
BDSM to be much more liberal. And they would say and they do say, you know, I'm a consenting adult. Who are you to tell me that I can't do XY Z in the bedroom?
00:12:24
Who are you to tell me that the law ought to step in and try and criminalize what adults do in the privacy of their own homes?
00:12:31
and you can see their argument. But then I say, okay, but the problem is we're all connected to one another and your
00:12:38
freedoms impact on mine and this all, you know, a society is greater than the sum of its parts. And if you're going to
00:12:45
say that sexual freedom is the preeminent value, then I don't know what we do in these
00:12:52
cases, these concrete cases where it seems to me that a terrible wrong has been done to this woman. And if we don't have
00:13:02
illiberal laws, at least partially illiberal laws, then men who make this defense are going to get away with it.
00:13:09
And I I I'm sorry this is a dark example to like kick off the conversation with, but I just think it's a pertinent example of how freedom is difficult and
00:13:16
agency is difficult and choice is difficult and we can say that these things are are good generally. I think
00:13:23
they are good generally, but they are virtues that need to be balanced against other virtues. And that's the challenge.
00:13:29
Freedom is a wonderful thing. No one would want to take freedom away from human beings. But excessive freedom
00:13:35
without structure is not good for human beings. So I'll just I'll use the example because I talk about children a
00:13:42
lot. If you raise your children with respect for their will, that is a good thing, right? You don't want to raise, you don't want to quash their will. You want to
00:13:55
support their individuality and support their choices and and even when raising children, you're going to give them
00:14:01
choices. Do you want eggs or waffles for breakfast? Do you want to wear your green pants or your blue pants? No more
00:14:06
than that with small children. But if you don't provide any structure for them, they don't feel loved. They don't feel secure. They don't feel stable. And
00:14:17
so what I'm afraid of is that we went too far. It's not that freedom isn't a good thing. It's that excessive freedom, without any structure at all, can also
00:14:28
make us feel untethered, unbound, without connections to the people that we're most intimate with. And that's my concern. So, it's not that sexual
00:14:40
freedom isn't a good thing. It's that in my mind, it may have gone too far. Just just add to that before you jump in there. Um despite the general decline in
00:14:53
sex, especially amongst younger people, societal acceptance of casual sex has grown quite rapidly. In the UK, approval
00:15:00
of casual sex rose from just 10% in 1999 to 42% in 200. The hookup culture. Yeah.
00:15:08
So when you say rules and structure, Erica, I'm really interested in that turn of phrase because of course
00:15:15
children need rules and structure, but women aren't children. Well, we're all children. Men are children, too. From a
00:15:22
psychoanalyst perspective, there's a child in everyone, of course. But I think when we're talking about rules and grown women, we are really, really in
00:15:33
dangerous water because we are looking at a society that is increasingly closing down on women and telling women where they could do
00:15:47
better, be better. If we're looking at an extreme example, we're looking at Iran in 1970s and women in parliament
00:15:55
and women walking around part of the sexual revolution in miniskirts and having a wonderful time. And then you're
00:16:00
looking at women in Iran now. You're walk looking at women in Afghanistan now. Women in Afghanistan now have rules
00:16:07
and they have structure. They can't stand near a window. They can't leave the house without a man.
00:16:14
They can't uh raise they can't use their voice in public. They can't sing. Like anything that says rules to me, I'm immediately like firstly our society has plenty of structure. We have a lot of
00:16:26
structure. We all have to work to make a living. We are all encouraged into monogous relationships and there's a feel that you're successful if you find the one and get married and have 2.4
00:16:39
children. There's so much structure in our lives. there's very little time for relaxation or even considering what we
00:16:47
really might want to do. I would be very intrigued to know what you mean by women should have rules.
00:16:54
Yeah. What what do you mean? So, first of all, I don't agree with you if I can just uh say that I don't agree that we
00:17:00
are encouraging monogamy. I think we're encouraging polygamy. Um and I don't mean marriage polygamy. I mean multiple
00:17:07
partners, young people are hooking up. Um, I wrote an article for the Institute for Family Studies on why the statistics on the hookup culture and what it's doing to young people in terms of their
00:17:18
mental health. It's causing them to feel um more depressed, more anxious, more embarrassed, having more regrets, self-esteem issues. It's got some major
00:17:30
implications. And we're talking the statistics say 72 to 82% 72% of young men and 82% of women uh young women are feeling depressed and anxious after
00:17:42
these casual sexual encounters. Tinder has an ad that says meet the love of your night. Um it it what it does is it takes something so sacred and intimate
00:17:55
and it turns it into something um not just casual but it turns it into something irrelevant, unimportant and dangerous if
00:18:06
you ask me. Um emotionally dangerous and it can be physically dangerous. If you're having casual sex, you could get
00:18:12
a sexually transmitted disease. AIDS is still around. I think in a way what we've taught our kids and what I encourage the young people that I work with is that um experiment with sex,
00:18:27
care about the people that you're experimenting with, find people who care about you and who you care about. So
00:18:34
that structure. Can I just counter about this sort of idyllic option of monogamy
00:18:41
in the United Kingdom? The police receive a domestic abuse related call every 30 seconds. Yet it's estimated
00:18:47
that less that less than 24% of domestic abuse crime is reported to the police. One in four women in England and Wales will experience domestic abuse in her lifetime.
00:19:01
On average, nearly two women are killed a week in this country. And I know that America has a similar story, but
00:19:06
probably worse because there's guns. That is, this is around the world. It's the same in Australia.
00:19:12
It is not an eitheror. It's not that women were so happy and fulfilled in the 1950s because their husbands would go to
00:19:20
work and I mean watch Madmen which is a you know it's a sort of researched idea of how things often were for women then and men and how you know Don Draper
00:19:32
would go off into the city. He would have a fulfilling career. Then he would sleep with any number of women and come
00:19:37
home to his wife who knew he was having affairs, who could sense it, who could vibe it, who could smell the perfume,
00:19:43
and had to just put up with it until she couldn't any longer. And she was at risk
00:19:48
of of STDs because he was going out and doing whatever he wanted. The idea that a sort of monogamy is this utopia. And since we've gone into a more
00:20:02
hookup culture, I still think there's a hell of a lot of pressure for people to find the right one. Yes, people hook up
00:20:07
before they find the right one, but there is pressure to have the romcom ending. Most people, if they're hooking
00:20:14
up, are hooking up to have sexual satisfaction while they are looking for a longerterm
00:20:21
relationship or they're not and they're really happy single and they're finding fulfillment. And that is the
00:20:26
spaciousness and the freedom and the autonomy to do that. I love that women can choose that now. I love that women
00:20:35
can say, "I'm really happy single. This settling for someone who's not good enough for me or it doesn't suit me or it doesn't fit me doesn't have to happen for me anymore. I can live my full self
00:20:48
and maybe my career is more important to me or fulfilling or my friendships or my desire for travel." I love that we have
00:20:55
options. I want the women watching this to appreciate all the options that they have.
00:21:06
All the options that they have. If they want to be single and they want to hook up, if they're looking but in the meantime having that that that sexual
00:21:12
freedom, I want them to have it all. But if the what they want is this monogamy that you're talking about to find the
00:21:18
love of their life and settle down and have two children or whatever they want, I want them to have that too. Deborah,
00:21:24
can I ask? Do do you think that there is a cost to hookup culture and casual sex in regards to the implications it has on
00:21:31
women as Erica was implying psychologically? And is that more adverse in women than men? I think human
00:21:37
beings can suffer from too much choice. Like we know that if you put 800 varieties of
00:21:44
jam out on a supermarket shelf, people will buy less jam than if you put out eight because they get confused and they
00:21:50
just think, "Oh god, I I don't know none of it then." And they walk away. I think
00:21:56
the fact that we have young people sitting in a bar on a on a hinge date and while the that person goes to the bar, they're like, "What else is out there?" I think that's bad for human
00:22:08
beings. I think that is bad for women, for men, for non-binary people. That's bad for everybody. But the sort of sacredness, Erica was alluding to a sacredness of
00:22:18
sex itself. Yes, I think that is not a thing that we are somehow finding women find sex more sacred than men. I But I didn't say that women find it. I
00:22:31
think it's sacred for men and women. But yeah, you were speaking to sort of sacredness to it. And I know Louise, in your work, you've you've talked about how there's different implications for men and women as it relates to casual
00:22:43
sex. So I think that hookup culture basically is better suited to the average preferences of men than of
00:22:49
women. So the a preferences of men are more likely to be uh towards the having lots of partners, jumping into bed really quickly into the spectrum basically. And this is what um
00:23:00
psychologists call um socioexuality. So men are generally more unrestricted in their socioexuality than are women. And
00:23:07
hookup culture favors the highly socioexual. And actually you can see this if you look at campus dating
00:23:14
cultures and sexual cultures which are interesting because in a way university campuses are almost a closed environment. You've got all these young
00:23:20
horny people hanging out, not very much to do and like interacting with one another. And on campuses which have more
00:23:29
men than women. So the women are the scarcer resource basically assuming everyone's heterosexual, right? Um they
00:23:36
tend to have more uh more conservative sexual cultures, so more monogamy, less hooking up, people wait longer to have sex, etc. On campuses where there are
00:23:47
fewer men and more women, which increasingly is true of all universities actually because exactly, you have the
00:23:54
opposite. you have more hookup culture because basically the men are the scarce resource and they can set the terms and men prefer more hookup culture. There
00:24:01
are obviously exceptions. You know, this is all true, but at the population level, I think that's really good evidence that actually women on mass
00:24:09
don't like hookup culture and are actually engaging with it because they sort of have to. What you're talking
00:24:15
about there is very young women who have just left home. It's their first exploration into sex. Now, if you ask a 32-year-old woman in London who knows
00:24:28
her body, who knows her preferences, who knows what kind of man turns her on, who can talk about these things and
00:24:34
communicate, and you ask her, "Do you regret that hookup?" She'll be like, "No, I was look, you know, I worked
00:24:40
really hard this week. I was literally looking forward to it, and it was wonderful." If you ask that same woman,
00:24:46
"Do you regret any of the hookups you had when you were a fresher?" She'll be like, "Oh my god, I didn't know myself.
00:24:51
I didn't know how to ask what I wanted. The boys were terrible at it because they didn't know themselves." I don't
00:24:57
think universities are a great place to get this information because that is when you are literally just exploring
00:25:02
and going, "Is this anything?" And we're all too embarrassed to say what we want or to say how that we like. So, you've
00:25:11
got to put into that mix. Boys are told you got to get laid. you got to get laid as as you're not cool. Women, young women are told you don't want too high a body count. You you're
00:25:24
going to get [ __ ] shamed. Um so you're talking about 18 year olds don't know themselves yet. And you're saying when
00:25:31
there's when the men are scarce a resource, it's one way, women another way. That is exactly what I expect to
00:25:36
see. You're talking about 18-year-olds that don't know themselves yet. what we are currently experiencing in
00:25:43
our sexual culture where yes there's some structure yes there are some rules but we are much much more sexual
00:25:50
sexually not just liberal but even libertine than say the the sexual culture of our grandparents or whatever
00:25:56
I think everyone everyone ought to be able to agree on that there clearly is a change now in the sexual culture from previous generations and it and it's
00:26:02
mostly to do with the pill as I argue but um the expectation is kind of as You say that you just have to figure it out. Like there isn't a
00:26:13
very clear template. Yes, maybe there isn't. I think that I think that Deborah, you are actually right that most people do in the end aspire to
00:26:19
monogamy and having children and everything, but there's also an expectation that you're supposed to um
00:26:25
experiment a bit in the meantime and it's kind of actually weird to be a virgin on your wedding night. And I think that yes, I mean girls have to
00:26:32
tread this really difficult tight route where on the one hand they are at risk of [ __ ] shaming, but they're also at risk of being called frigid if they're I
00:26:37
mean they they are much much more at risk actually of being called frigid than in previous generations and they
00:26:43
just I mean the idea that we can escape from social judgment around our sexual choices is probably not realistic. I
00:26:49
think that basically that's what humans are like. We do just tend to be judgmental about this. But anyway, I
00:26:55
don't think it's very wise to subject girls to this experience is how I would put it to say that you have to
00:27:06
go through the hookup culture. They're opting out. I know young people who are absolutely opting out. They're not at all. I'm going to agree with her and say freedom has become a pressure.
00:27:18
There's become a societal pressure to be free. So I know many young people who are opting out of the apps. I'm a I'm a
00:27:24
therapist and I see so many young people and I give lectures and people come up to me. So I can say and I write books
00:27:31
about adolescence. And I'm going to say that mostly the term hookup culture is used between 15 and 30. So you're
00:27:37
correct in saying a 32 year old woman should have the right to have sex with whoever the hell she wants to have sex with. And I'm right there with you. She
00:27:43
should have choice whatever. But young women, young men who are developing emotionally, mentally should not have the right. No. No. That's No, no. Let me
00:27:55
Can I finish? Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry. So, you interrupted so I didn't get to finish. Sorry. Okay. So, they're more
00:28:01
vulnerable. They are more vulnerable emotionally to what the hookup culture does to them. There's a lot of research
00:28:07
to say that it causes loneliness, depression, anxiety, tons of regret, embarrassment, shame, self-esteem issues. Um, and so, of course, we want
00:28:21
freedom. In fact, I'm probably more in agreement with you on most things than you think. But in this, I say that
00:28:28
freedom can become its own prison. So if you think about the early feminists, the really early feminists, Mary Wallstonecraft, uh Mary Shelley, those women were
00:28:42
fighting patriarchy. They were fighting a system that said they had to be a certain way. So of course I don't accept what Iran does to women. I mean that you know but what's happened is if the
00:28:56
pendulum swings too far you have a different kind of patriarchy on the other side you know we say the extreme left and the extreme right actually meet in the middle and so have we just not we
00:29:10
never want to take choice away the idea of taking choice away from women to have sex with whoever they want to have sex
00:29:16
with that's not the point of this it's have we created a society which pressures young women in its own way to be promiscuous to have lots of
00:29:28
experiences. It's not all glorious freedom there. It is glorious, but it's also not all glorious. And it can be a it can be a pressure on young people to
00:29:39
get rid of their virginity, to have lots of sexual experiences, and it's not all it's cracked up to be
00:29:46
for them. It really isn't. In terms of their mental health, again they are more um we say 9 to 25, early 27 in young men
00:29:55
is the second critical period of brain development where they are very susceptible to their relational
00:30:01
experiences and their environment. And so in that period of development, which is mostly what we use the the term
00:30:08
hookup culture for, it's in that very young developmental period. Uh it's not just in college, it's throughout their
00:30:14
20s, you know, until that woman becomes 32. Uh that's a very vulnerable brain. And so we have created a culture that confuses that brain that offers too many
00:30:26
choices that pressures them into having multiple partners and many experiences and leaves them feeling empty and
00:30:33
lonely. Can I just say though again to the time traveler piece I did not you recommend
00:30:42
Louise because I I heard you talking on this podcast before that people don't have sex till they're engaged. But if
00:30:48
you're engaged, the next step is marriage. So presumably you're going to marry that person. I.e. you're going to sleep with the first
00:30:55
person you sleep with if you take that advice is your partner. So you're going to have one sexual partner for life.
00:31:03
I do not recommend that ideally because I came from a religion where that was the only option. And because I didn't
00:31:15
meet anybody, I atrophied. I had no intimacy. I felt so lonely. Now, you're saying sometimes people have a hookup and they feel lonely afterwards. Totally. Of
00:31:28
course. That's happened to everyone who's ever had casual sex in any quantity where you feel a bit like, oh,
00:31:34
that didn't fill me up. It's like, you know, when they say you go and have a Chinese meal and you feel hungry half an hour later and you were wanting more.
00:31:40
There is no utopia here. There's only options. And what happened to me? Because I had no option. I had no autonomy.
00:31:50
I became more and more atrified, more and more lonely, more and more empty, more and more disconnected from myself.
00:31:56
To this day, I struggle with that. I struggle with intimacy with a with with because we were in such a culture of you
00:32:03
can't have sex before you get married that you didn't really make eye contact with people. You know, normal teenagers will sit on each other's laps and just
00:32:09
experiment a little bit or they might have a little kiss or whatever. If you don't have anything like that, you can't
00:32:15
really look at people properly because you know, oh, it might lead to something.
00:32:20
It took me so long to heal, guys. And however old you think I was when I lost my virginity, I was older
00:32:28
and it was tough because if you're losing your virginity very late, the person you're losing it with has had a more regular healthy, in my opinion,
00:32:40
sexual development. They've had their first girlfriend or boyfriend. They've they've experienced a few things.
00:32:48
It's still hard for me to say what I want. So, I don't recommend the other thing either, which is don't have sex with anyone until you're ready to prepared at
00:32:59
least to marry them. I've got a graph here that somewhat dovetales into this conversation about when you should have
00:33:06
sex and also marriage as a subject. And it shows that from the 197 in 1970s roughly women would get married at about 21 years old. And now this graph will be
00:33:17
on the screen. It's about 30. Men used to get married at around 23 years old and now it's just over 30, which is a pretty crazy climb. So it feels to me if
00:33:28
the sexual revolution took place in around this era where we see this rapid climb, maybe the two are somewhat interlin, i.e. the age in which we'd be
00:33:36
getting married or having sex under Louis's, you know, potential advice that it's worth kiss.
00:33:42
That's why that happened. It's because it used to be that if you were having sex with someone, you were risking
00:33:48
pregnancy. And now that's not I mean it is still true because actually all contraception fails and something like
00:33:54
half of women in this country get pregnant. didn't mean to or whatever. So, the the idea that it's foolproof is
00:33:59
not true. But what the pill did when it arrived on the scene in the late '60s was it gave the illusion that sex was consequencefree. And it isn't on a physical level. Not
00:34:12
really. It's less it's less consequential than it was because of the pill, but the physical the physical
00:34:17
consequences are still there. But I think just as importantly, it became no less emotionally consequential. Just
00:34:24
because you're on the pill or using condoms or whatever, your mind, I'm thinking particularly of women who, as we talked about, bond more quickly, your mind still thinks that this person could
00:34:35
well become the father of my child. you are still experiencing sex as in the way that all of our ancestors did for all of human history up until 5 minutes ago until we invented this new
00:34:48
technology. And I think that's why it has to I the reason that women have evolved to be picky about who they have
00:34:55
sex with is because getting pregnant is an extraordinarily consequential thing for women. It's dangerous. It's difficult. It's a huge, you know, investment of their time and
00:35:08
of their life. And you don't want to get pregnant by some bozo, right? That's why
00:35:14
women tend to be very selective about who they're willing to have sex with and feel really bad. And I mean, I've got to say, I'm leaving aside words like sacred
00:35:22
because they're obviously difficult because the religious implications. I think that we should as feminists
00:35:28
describe sex as at least special, like having some kind of special status. It's not like other kinds of socializing.
00:35:35
It's not like having a conversation with someone or playing tennis with someone. And we can tell that it's been doing it
00:35:41
wrong. Well, but we can tell. Well, it's we could call it one of the most intimate experiences you can have as a
00:35:47
human being. And that's why rape is so bad, right? That's why feminists bastardizes the most intimate experience
00:35:55
by making it into by turning it into violence. Rape is worse than theft, for instance. or race rape is worse than
00:36:02
assault like nonsexual assault and law and the law recognizes that and we all socially recognize that because there is
00:36:08
something uniquely intimate and therefore uniquely violating about having sex without consent. And I think
00:36:14
that it's really hard actually to hold those two things simultaneously in mind and say sex is unimportant. It's
00:36:21
basically just like a skill set that you can practice on other people that it's a leisure activity. All this kind of
00:36:27
trivializes, right? and then also say, "Ah, but consensus is extraordinarily important." Like, why do do you not see
00:36:33
the contradiction there? Autonomy. If I want it, if I want somebody, especially penetrative sex, you're talking about rape, you're talking about penetrative sex, there's nothing worse than somebody
00:36:46
inside your body violating your actual insides. Nothing worse than that. That does not mean that women do not have sexual urges that
00:37:01
are exciting. I know I'm finished sentence. That was that women don't have sexual urges that are just about attraction and a moment and fun and
00:37:11
play. Play is so important to human beings. When I left that cult, it took me a long
00:37:20
time and a number of different sexual experiences to find out what kind of sexuality I even had. You can't necessarily find it with the first person you meet. They may not be
00:37:31
sexually compatible with you. And you may not know how to communicate well with them and end up having a life of
00:37:37
very boring missionary position sex. If you encourage young people just to have sex with the first person they meet and
00:37:44
stay with that person, which I'm not saying you're saying, but I am saying if you don't have sex before you're engaged, well, engagement leads to marriage, you may end up with very
00:37:56
little sexual fulfillment compared to what you could have had. You might not. You might get lucky. The first person
00:38:02
you meet might just be amazing in bed with you and you find your space together and it might be wonderful. But
00:38:07
I would say that is unlikely. And I would say that the reason that the pill changed how much sex women had and with with what variety of partners is because
00:38:18
it gave them autonomy. It gave them agency. Suddenly I can. And guess what? When I can, I choose to try. When you give women the choice, which the pill
00:38:30
did, to have some experience, we see that most women want some experience, want to find themselves sexually, want to feel, oh, this or not that or yeah, or oh, oh my god, this
00:38:42
one, this is amazing. I could be with this guy forever. We hit it off. He's great in bed. We're, you know, we're
00:38:48
we're working together. Oh, we've got a little problem now, but we'll work through it together because we love each other. Most people do some version of
00:38:56
that. and maybe they hit a point in that monogamy where this relationship isn't working anymore or something terrible
00:39:01
happens and they have another go at that. That's that's a a large pattern. Now, how much of that is because that's
00:39:07
what society expects, I don't know, but that is what most people tend to do. So for me saying that because one night at a music festival I had a really passionate
00:39:20
exciting encounter with somebody who I never saw again that I am somehow minimizing rape is very disturbing. Can
00:39:29
I just interject and just say that um you're you're right in turning to me and saying I didn't mean that you have to
00:39:36
marry your first partner. Um, but there's something very important about the emotional connection and that's coming from maybe me being a therapist and knowing and seeing the
00:39:48
pain that the young people who come to me are in when there's no emotional connection and they give their bodies
00:39:54
over. By the way, young men, too. I think young men I think it's shifting actually. It's interesting what I'm seeing in my practice. Young men are more vulnerable than women now. Women
00:40:06
have taken on the role that young men used to have emotionally. And so, you know, women have all these choices and now they're leaving young men in the dust. And the young men are feeling
00:40:17
lonely and, you know, they they have sex with a girl and they want to date her and she says, "No, I'm dating. I'm
00:40:24
sleeping with five guys at the same time." And these are kids in their 20s. But sex is better with emotional
00:40:32
connection. That doesn't mean you have to marry the first guy that you have sex with. I also want to say that there is
00:40:37
something called neurotic repetition. A lot of the early feminists had a lot of trauma. You had trauma. A lot of people have had trauma. And what happens
00:40:49
with trauma is it tends to be like PTSD. if we have disconnection early on or abuse or violence against us, um, attachment disorders as I've talked
00:41:04
about in your other podcasts when you're very young, it gets reenacted and repeated throughout your life over and
00:41:11
over and over and over again. So, interestingly, the early feminists were mostly traumatized women. If you look at
00:41:18
the histories of them, they had physically abusive fathers, alcoholic fathers, they had um uncles who raped
00:41:25
them. They had I mean terrible even their mothers too. I mean just really abusive parents, but mostly the men in
00:41:30
their life were horrible. And so a lot of this whole experience depends on where you come from and what you had. If you've had good models, I mean it's why I sort of talk about I'm writing a book
00:41:42
about divorce. Why am I writing a book about divorce if I believe in relationships? Because divorce is going to happen and
00:41:49
we need to help parents to know how to raise healthy children in spite of it. But relationships matter. They matter in the raising of children. So when we have
00:42:00
a disconnected society where we say relationships don't matter, just sex matters. Sex, sex, sex. Of course sex matters. But what I say to young people is sex is a very small part of a
00:42:12
relationship. It really is because in the beginning it's hot, hot, hot. And then as you get to know each other and
00:42:18
you have the daily comeings and goings of life, it's the friendship, it's the connection, it's the companionship, it's
00:42:25
the relationship. But if you've had a lot of trauma, then you are not going to turn towards relationships. And you are
00:42:32
not going to turn towards men. If men traumatized you and you saw a man abuse your mother, of course you're not going
00:42:38
to want men in your life. So a lot of it I think I think the feminist movement does something which it it's first of all I'm going to say it's done a lot of good. I wouldn't be here. None of us
00:42:51
would be here without it. Those women that took the risks we have to be grateful toward. But I mean what it also
00:42:59
did is it it distorted a lot of the importance of relationships and how important male and female relationships are. I'll stop there because I've talked
00:43:12
too much. But can I say something about agency because this word came up earlier
00:43:17
and I've been thinking about a lot about it recently and I just find it interesting as a subject. So I I think
00:43:23
that actually a better way of thinking about agency than is this binary thing that you know humans have agency etc is um is it's kind of more of a personality
00:43:34
trait. I think that some people are very agentic. Some people are able to set their minds on doing something and they just make it happen. Those people are very well suited to making their own
00:43:47
decisions. Those people hate the idea of any kind of limits on their freedom. But they are unusual people. Most people
00:43:59
actually they go with the flow. They kind of do what other people around them are doing. They drift a little bit.
00:44:04
They're a little bit passive. They kind of make decisions based on what seems normal. They follow the template as it
00:44:11
appears to them in their moment. You know, that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that those people are more vulnerable to
00:44:18
bad scripts. The problem with the sexual liberation narrative is it assumes that
00:44:24
everyone is highly agentic. It assumes that everyone is capable of being faced with all these various
00:44:31
choices and saying, "I'm going to choose this one and that one and making it happen rather than what I think is more realistic and particularly when you're
00:44:37
talking about young people." And I think even more talking about young women, I think young women are particularly mimemetic and particularly I mean there
00:44:44
are studies showing this that women for instance more likely to like imitate other people's body language. They're more likely to they pick up slang more
00:44:50
quickly than men do. Like young women are very uh socially attuned like more than any other group. They're very uh alive towards high status and low status and like keen to imitate it. You also
00:45:02
see this with fashion, all sorts of things, right? I think to just say to those young women, good news, you can
00:45:08
choose anything you want. You can do anything you want. Obviously, if you are highly agentic, I think you mentioned
00:45:14
Deborah, young people who are just like, no, I'm not into this off the apps, not doing it. They're highly agentic. That's
00:45:20
very impressive, but it's rare. Like most people actually are basically going to do what their peers do. And so that's
00:45:25
why I think just saying everyone give everyone choice and kind of close close the lid and say good luck. I think that
00:45:32
doesn't work. I think that actually we need to be a bit more prescriptive. Women were less agentic before the sexual revolution. Overall, as a
00:45:43
population, we are more agentic now. We have more agency and we flex that agency
00:45:48
more frequently. If you are worried that young women seem to you to be mimemetic, i.e. in
00:45:56
influenced by their peer group, then we need education for what what's happening in that peer group. I don't disagree
00:46:03
with you that thinking about intimacy, thinking about do I really want to do this with my body, do I want to let this boy touch me here or there or this girl,
00:46:10
you know, do this or that with me or whatever. Of course, but that's education so they can have agency and
00:46:17
that's the discussion that the parents have ideally the schools are having. We desperately need that. That's what we're
00:46:23
doing here, right? We're trying to Yeah. But rather than saying they need rules,
00:46:29
I would say they need to be further attuned to their own desires, their own body, their own environments,
00:46:36
relationships. You know, how long does it feel right to me? Listening to my own body, listening to my own mind, having
00:46:44
confidants that they can talk to who are older and more responsible if they don't feel comfortable talking to their
00:46:50
parents cuz some kids, of course, teenagers don't necessarily go, "Mom, I had this urge." Do you provide other people in their community who they might
00:46:56
have that conversation with? There are all sorts of ways that we can make sure our girls and our boys have agency and listen to themselves. But when I hear rules, when I hear it's just better for
00:47:10
them not to until they're engaged and then just stick with that person for life ideally, I fear that is going taking us back generations. And women
00:47:23
100% were not happier then. They put us put up with more. I I do want to separate um young people from what you
00:47:31
were talking about adult women. I I want to separate them because they're not the same species. Um there's so much
00:47:37
development going on in adolescence. And adolescence, as I said, goes on till 25. So by the time you're an adult woman,
00:47:43
you are for the most part developed. by the time you get to 32, you know, there's going to be stuff going on, but the major part of your personality and character development is is pretty much
00:47:54
set. And so that developing period is really more my concern. It's not that I'm not concerned about my older patients who come to me and talk about how free sex and, you know, multiple
00:48:07
partners makes them feel good. I would say great, it's your choice. You know, if that makes you feel good, wonderful.
00:48:12
But in young people where they're developing, I agree with you that we need more education. Um I I'm all for
00:48:20
more education, but I'm for education right now in schools. Too much sex education if you ask me. Um it uh we're
00:48:31
teaching 9-year-olds about anal sex. We're teaching them about genital warts. That's not something a nine-year-old
00:48:37
needs to know, you know, in school. So, but I think we're not teaching them about emotional connection, about
00:48:44
relationships, about family, about about the arc of a life that if you want to be
00:48:49
single and you want to have multiple partners and you want to be free, that's your choice. I have no problem with
00:48:55
that. But we're not teaching about the importance of connection and emotional connection and building families. And so, what do we have? We have a bunch of young people out there who are having
00:49:08
sex but feeling empty and lonely and depressed and anxious and and not knowing why because we are teaching sex but we're not teaching about connection.
00:49:19
Can I also say and I don't know that it's true that in the UK that we're teaching nine-year-olds about anal by
00:49:24
the way but the thing that's lacking in sex education often here is pleasure. They do not talk about how how pleasurable how pleasurable it can be or
00:49:38
that girls should be when they have their first sexual experience ideally as young women that not girls of course they should be young women they should be of age
00:49:49
that their pleasure matters there's so many young women who at the first just go I guess I have to do this and he has to find pleasure in it But
00:50:00
learning what makes your own body feel pleasure is a wonderful wonderful thing. Knowing that it it it can give you great intimacy and it can be a
00:50:11
lifelong relationship partner and all. So that's a 1950s idea. The 1950s were a time I mean nobody wants to go back to
00:50:18
the 1950s. You know when I the books that I write people come up to me and they say you want women to go back to
00:50:24
being pregnant and barefoot in the kitchen. I'm like what? No, we don't want to go back to the 50s because women
00:50:29
didn't have choice and women didn't know about orgasm and they didn't know about, you know, that sex could be pleasurable
00:50:34
and um so we don't want to go back. We want to move forward. We want to take the best of the highlights of the past
00:50:43
and not leave all of the good parts of the past behind and, you know, take the good parts of the feminist movement, too. But there's a lot of it that's not so good. And I'm going to a agree with
00:50:54
Louise that there are so many young women and older women, but let's just say young women. Don't point at me and say older women. No, no, no. I'm old, too. Older. I over 32. I'll admit to
00:51:06
over 32, Erica, and that's all I can say. But that's all we're doing. That's all we're doing. You're older than 25.
00:51:12
There are so many young women who um are looking to understand the secret sauce.
00:51:20
what what is going to make them the happiest? You know, I don't love the word happy, but I think our young people
00:51:26
are so very unhappy. They have never been so unhappy. The statistics on mental illness and unhappiness and loneliness are we have all this sexual freedom. We have all of these feminist
00:51:40
ideals and yet young women are so very unhappy. I think we've got a causation correlation problem there. I think the world is not well. We are we are really
00:51:53
looking down the barrel of climate change, land wars, cost of living is out of control. Young people will never own
00:52:00
a home unless their parents give them an enormous amount of money. There are so many factors feeding into the unhappiness of people of all ages. And young people look at this long future
00:52:12
and go, "What is this going to be for me?" I think to blame feminism for that uh is misguided. It's a piece of the puzzle. And remember that my lens is a
00:52:24
lens of seeing patients who come to me for relational issues. So therefore, you're you've got a biased set of
00:52:31
information. The people that are unhappy with their relationships come to you. Yes, everything's a piece of the puzzle.
00:52:36
But if it wasn't this, it would be that. And what that was was, you know, oh, I'm
00:52:42
stuck with this person now that I'm we're not having sex and it's a miserable time and he doesn't talk to me
00:52:47
and I don't talk to him, but I can't really get out of it. Human beings find ways to be dissatisfied with their lot
00:52:53
in life. Somebody who we look at and go, "My god, they're so fortunate. They've got everything they want." Is probably
00:52:59
one of the unhappiest people, you know, because they're going, "Is this all there is?" You know, that's why often you'll see like a a rock star or a movie
00:53:07
star get absolutely everything they want and they have to go up a mountain to talk to a guru because they're like,
00:53:12
"Well, I was hoping that I'd be super successful and wealthy and, you know, have all this choice and now I've got
00:53:19
that and I'm still not happy." And the idea that we can look at unhappiness with what is here and then say if this wasn't here but that was here those same
00:53:31
people would be blissfully happy is doesn't bear out with history. So I actually think what does bear out is that human beings universally from birth
00:53:42
crave security. We know that they crave safety and security and stability from birth. And we don't teach that. We say just be impulsive, be in the moment. And
00:53:55
I think that's a lot of what's causing the unhappiness is that we don't help educate and strategize what a good life
00:54:02
means to you. Now, maybe for you, a good life is just being free and, you know, having a great career. And I have no
00:54:08
problem with that. I'm I'm the first one to say the women's movement gave women choice to have the life they want to have. Absolutely. I think there's a lot
00:54:19
of women who feel bullied by this narrative of freedom. They feel bullied by it. And I listen I I hear it in my practice. I see it online on my uh you know uh my Instagram following and
00:54:32
people writing and you're right I have a particular lens. So people may come to me because of that. But what I will say is that there is it the feminist movement at least the
00:54:44
second wave of the feminist movement was a little bit of a cabal in a sense that
00:54:49
it was a small group of women saying every woman should feel this way. Every woman should want to go out to work and
00:54:56
leave their children in daycare. Every woman should want free sex. And the bottom line is a lot of women don't. A
00:55:03
lot of women want the choice to be respected, to have intimate and loving and marital relationships and monogamy,
00:55:10
and they want to be able to stay home with their children and have society say, "You are amazing." and admire them
00:55:16
for it. And and what I know is that there's a lot of young women and adult women who are feeling um pressured to
00:55:26
live a life that isn't making them happy, that is without relationships, that's without having one intimate
00:55:31
partner, that is um you know freedom without any limits. If women feel bullied by freedom, I feel like they should try the alternative. I
00:55:42
I I still feel the predominant narrative is the romcom one. The predominant narrative is you should be married by 30 with a white dress. Everyone should
00:55:54
stand around and say you've done it now. You should have babies. That to me is still the predominant narrative that you
00:56:01
are successful if you have achieved these things. Now it is true that um many women feel also they should have
00:56:07
some kind of career. That is very true. But I feel like a the main thing that women are asked to aspire to, if you really look around, it is still find the
00:56:19
one, have the romcom ending. And I do not see this idea that women are told the whole time we should be out on the town sleeping with everyone in town. Far from it. And I I know this isn't true
00:56:32
because I I went to a school that's a very very good girl school. It's a state school but a very very high-end one in London in 2018 when we were all out marching in the street the women's march
00:56:43
recently I went back and all those girls are talking about being a high value woman which is from the manosphere and
00:56:49
not too high having having not too high a body count these are obviously different girls the ones 2018 went off
00:56:54
to university that's in seven years they were saying you know in 20 in 2018 2019 around that time they were saying no [ __ ] shaming
00:57:06
listen to your body. They weren't saying run around and have sex with everybody or I've got to have a lot of lovers. They were saying I I I make my own
00:57:14
decisions. I don't, you know, listen to patriarchal ideas about how I need to live my life. I am going to go to
00:57:21
university. I'm going to meet people and make meaningful relationships and some of those will be friendships. They are
00:57:26
now talking manosphere talk. I made the biggest investment I've ever made in a company because of my girlfriend. I came
00:57:34
home one night and my lovely girlfriend was up at 1:00 a.m. in the morning pulling her hair out as she tried to
00:57:40
piece together her own online store for her business. And in that moment, I remembered an email I'd had from a guy called John, the founder of Stanto, our new sponsor and a company I've invested
00:57:52
incredibly heavily in. And Stanto helps creators to sell digital products, courses, coaching, and memberships all
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00:58:04
engagement, and even links with Shopify. And I believe in it so much that I'm going to launch a Stan challenge. And as
00:58:12
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shipment. That's ketone.com/stephven. I'm excited for you. I am. Manosphere talk. Um, I was I found this graph as well, which just shows the sort of explosion in people searching tradife,
00:59:39
which means traditional wife. Yeah. And it seems from 2024, there's been this real explosion in people searching for this trend. And you said something a second ago, Erica,
00:59:50
about young boys in particular being more vulnerable I think with your words than the young girls that you're seeing. Yeah. So, how do these ideas come together to to and also link in and
01:00:01
parlay into this word manosphere because this subject of manosphere has been at the very forefront of conversation. It's
01:00:08
everything's a little out of balance. Everything's a little out of whack. So, it was out of whack in the 50s and so we
01:00:13
fixed it and now it's out of whack in a different way. Uh we went from the patriarchy of men dominating women to
01:00:19
now we have the patriarchy of women dominating men. I mean, what we need to do is not go back, but come to the
01:00:25
middle. We need to It just makes common sense. How are we dominating men, though? Oh my goodness. Um, that 60% of
01:00:33
college students are women and graduate students. Dominating. Let me finish. Let me
01:00:39
finish. Young men are afraid of women and the power they have over them to accuse. No, it's true. In universities,
01:00:46
it's a real thing. I know because I have two sons and um you know there is again
01:00:53
the correction was necessary. We needed to course correct in society. Absolutely. But we've gone so far. So we took so the men were powerful and the
01:01:04
women weren't. So the women said give us some power. So now the women took the power and now the men feel powerless.
01:01:11
You need a society that's balanced. It needs to be balanced. And the idea was that where we wanted to go and and the
01:01:17
truth is that all movements often go to extremes. The women's movement, those women had to go to extremes because to
01:01:24
change society, you have to do that, right? So should some women not go to university? Is that what you're saying?
01:01:31
No. But actually, I think there needs to be a balance in society of men and women. If we say that we are going to be like Amazon women and not need men
01:01:42
anymore, the truth is that the way it works is that by the research is that um women will marry at their educational level or above and men will marry at their educational level or below. That
01:01:56
means that because we have fewer men in college and graduate school, women are not finding partners. I'm just going to
01:02:02
jump in there and talk about a report that came out in 2025 which um sent shock waves across the UK. It was called the Lost Boys report. I think we we
01:02:09
might have talked about this uh in a previous episode, but it was a report by the Center of Social Justice which
01:02:14
highlighted how many young men are now struggling in school, facing increased mental health problems and lacking positive role models, leaving them lost
01:02:19
and isolated. And as a result, they said they suggested that many of them are turning to what we call the manosphere.
01:02:25
And to give a definition to the manosphere because I didn't actually know what it was. The definition I have from Cambridge dictionary is manifir
01:02:31
includes websites and discussion groups focused on men's rights which often oppose feminism in some way. And just to
01:02:38
give a sort of a a topline look at some of the stats around this. By age 5, 25% of boys in the UK are falling behind in language communication skills compared to just 14% of women. At GCSE level boys
01:02:50
results are on average half a grade lower than girls. The same applies for mental health and wellbeing. Obviously,
01:02:56
we know about the suicide rates in young men. Um, with nearly three and a half, they're nearly three and a half times
01:03:02
higher than those of young women. Eating disorders have risen as well in young men. And from an employment perspective,
01:03:07
as of late 2024, 15.1% of men aged 16 to 24 were not in education. Um, compared to 11% of women, which equates in the UK to about 550,000 men. And lastly, um,
01:03:20
young women are between the age of 16 and 24 now earn nearly 10% more than their male peers, reversing the
01:03:25
traditional gender pay gap in this age group. And I could go on and on and on. Specifically, the things that I've kind of not talked about are just how family dynamics have changed. And by by age 14,
01:03:37
nearly half of firstborn children do not live with both natural parents compared to 1970.
01:03:43
And this was this was really shocking. And I think it really rose an argument which I saw play out in I saw the Sunday
01:03:48
Times do a big piece about it. I saw it on LinkedIn which is what is going on here. And is this a clue as to why we
01:03:54
now have this term manosphere? It's a reaction manosphere is a reaction to the the pendulum swinging too far. The pendulum needed to swing for sure. I
01:04:04
slightly disagree. So I think I spoke at the beginning about the sexual revolution being two things. So one is
01:04:10
the ideological thing we've we've spoken about quite a lot and the other is the material changes which no one designed
01:04:17
really like this wasn't coordinated by anyone. This just happened. This is just how technology goes. And I think in
01:04:22
general that history should best be understood as technology with everything else kind of running along in its wake
01:04:28
including ideology. I actually think a massive thing that that's going on with young men, it's not actually feminism
01:04:37
that has messed them up. It's actually technology and economics. So it's that one of the the most consequential things of the 20th century and before this is really
01:04:49
industrial revolution onwards is male strength became less important economically.
01:04:56
Blue collar work is less valuable than it used to be. It's less available than it used to be. It turns out America was
01:05:02
saying that girls um predominate at universities. girls actually tend to be better suited to a lot of work which has
01:05:08
flourished in this era. So say service sector work or um uh working in education and things like that. there's basically been a boom in um areas of
01:05:21
life which are better suited to women professionally and the opposite has happened with men and I really think
01:05:27
that a lot of what's going on with men say turning to the manosphere is this feeling of being
01:05:34
economically devalued and there are feminists who cheer that on but that's not basically that's that
01:05:41
pretty much has actually nothing to do with ideology it's actually to do with just much bigger changes in the world
01:05:48
and we should expect by the way I mean if AI continues a pace we should expect to see the same sort of social effects
01:05:53
happening that this this when you change how people earn their money and particularly when we're talking about
01:05:59
people matching up like women tend to want to marry a man who I think being a provider is not quite right I think what
01:06:06
women really want though is a man who provides excellent insurance a man who when you've just had a baby and you
01:06:12
can't work or you're ill or you want to spend more time home your children, whatever. You want a man who can step up
01:06:18
and can look after your family. And unfortunately, the nature of the economy means that there actually aren't that many of those men. And that that makes
01:06:26
men feel really bad and it makes women feel resentful and it creates a lot of dysfunction. And it's not really
01:06:32
anyone's fault. It's just what's happened. I want a partner. I want someone that when things are going badly
01:06:39
for them, I'm there. when things are going badly for me, they're that they're there for me. Like, I want a partner. I don't want this biological essentialism
01:06:50
of he's got to step up and be the provider and the protector. I don't want that. Deborah, can I ask to that point
01:06:56
then on that partnership? Um, as a man, I still kind of assume that a woman is more likely to choose me if I have more money than her and I can pay the bills and I take care of And so I looked into some of the research around that and
01:07:07
there's still an expectation amongst women that their their male partner will earn much more than them. And when they did they did this this big I think it's
01:07:14
about 70%. I'll put the right stat on the screen. When they did this big analysis of dating behavior where they looked at 1.8 million online dating
01:07:20
profiles across 20 different countries if you earned more so if you had higher income you are 255% more likely to get
01:07:28
an indication of interest on these applications. And so I I would love to live in a world where that wasn't the case. But it seems that women are still choosing men that earn much more money
01:07:40
and that expectation of therefore being the provider is so inherent in reproductive success as a man. There's a
01:07:47
reason for that though. So what we haven't talked about, can we talk about children now? Sure. We can talk about whatever you like. Um if you want to
01:07:54
raise children and be the primary attachment figure for your children and it's usually the mother. Sometimes it's
01:08:00
the father now, but it's still usually the mother. Children need a primary attachment figure as present as possible
01:08:07
in the first 3 years if they are going to be mentally healthy in the future. All of the research shows that if you're
01:08:13
going to be as physically present as possible, unless you've saved a lot of money as a woman, you need to depend on
01:08:18
your partner, on your team member. My husband and I were a team before we had children. We both earned a lot and worked really hard and spent our money equally. But then we decided it was a
01:08:30
strategy. We were going to have children and I was going to work as little as possible so I could be there for them.
01:08:37
And he did the bulk of the earning. And now the joke is I'm out in the world and I'm going to be taking over and he's
01:08:43
going to be sitting by the pool, you know, and I'd be fine with that. But that's what teamwork is. But the idea
01:08:49
that I could lean on my husband financially in those years and not have to earn money and be able to be present
01:08:54
for my children, there is a very good reason why that is critical for children. And we don't talk about
01:09:00
children. We're sitting here. This is the first time we talked about children. We're talking about adults uh and and
01:09:07
individuals and no children are dependent on us. If you you don't have to have children to be happy, but if you
01:09:13
are going to bring children into this world, you have a responsibility to those children. And it surpasses any
01:09:19
individual desire you may have. And you're saying the mother should be there in those opening years. The primary
01:09:25
attachment figure who's usually the mother. Daycare is terrible for children. Let's define daycare. Daycare
01:09:31
is anything under the age of three. Otherwise we call it preschool. We used to call it nursery school. 3 to five
01:09:37
before kindergarten. Okay. So anything under the age of three where you put your child in group care is daycare. And
01:09:44
what it really is, they're day orphanages. You separate a baby who needs skin-to-skin contact, the sound of
01:09:51
their mother's voice, her eyes, her physical and emotional presence to soo that baby when they're in distress from
01:09:57
moment to moment to help to regulate their emotions. So, two things mothers do. They buffer children from stress,
01:10:04
which is so important because the part of their brain that regulates stress is meant to remain offline for the first
01:10:10
year and very quietly slowly come online for the next two years. So what are we doing? We're throwing babies into these institutional orphanages. It's overstimulating. It's stressful. If you
01:10:21
walk into any daycare, you are going to hear many, many children crying. Children are not meant to cry much in
01:10:28
the first year. They're meant to be held by their mothers and and held against their mother's bodies. So they buffer
01:10:34
children from stress and they regulate their emotions. So what we're seeing as a mental health crisis is a crisis of
01:10:41
emotional regulation issues in children, adolesccents and adults. Depression, anxiety, ADHD, these are all emotional regulation issues. That means people
01:10:52
cannot regulate their emotions. And so we're just giving them pills. We're not saying where does emotional regulation
01:10:58
come from? What's the origin of it? And the origin of it is in the very early days of your life. If you had a mother
01:11:05
who soothed you when you were in distress from moment to moment, it regulates your emotions. So it's only
01:11:11
after three, 85% of the right brain is developed by three. It's only after three that you internalize the start to
01:11:18
internalize the ability to regulate your own emotions or to deal with stress and adversity in the future. So does that
01:11:24
mean that if I'm not home as a mother for those early 3 years, you think there's possible chances that my child
01:11:30
might grow up to be somewhat traumatized or have some kind of It is not what nature intended for us. And so we have
01:11:37
made social changes that are about narcissism and self-orientation and me me and don't involve an understanding of children's irreducible developmental
01:11:48
needs. And if we did, then maybe more women wouldn't have children. And that would be fine. I have no problem. I'm
01:11:54
not a pronatalist. You don't have to have children to be happy. You can, you know, build businesses, build houses,
01:12:00
have loving, intimate relationships, not have children. But if you're going to have children, you need to know that
01:12:06
drop dropping and running, putting them in daycare, or now, let's talk about very poor women because this is always going to come back at me. What about very poor women? There are so many
01:12:19
solutions for very poor women that do not involve daycare. And I hate when people say poor
01:12:25
women have to rely on daycare. Why should they have to rely on daycare when rich women don't have to rely on
01:12:30
daycare? And the truth is there are other solutions. Poor women can live together and support one another and
01:12:36
form communities. They can share care of a caregiver. It's far better to have a single surrogate attachment figure, a babysitter who is a full-time babysitter
01:12:47
than putting a child in daycare. So, if you can't be there and you're poor and you have to work, then it's far better
01:12:53
to have first kinship bonds, someone who's related to you because it's going to be a more similar investment in that
01:12:58
child than anyone else. Secondly, a single surrogate caregiver, a babysitter or nanny. If you can't afford it, share the care with another mother because that's still going to be better for that
01:13:09
child than uh than putting them into an institutional group environment. Because what you're doing is you're basically
01:13:16
putting uh usually no less than five children with one caregiver under the age of three. In in some cases, it's under the age of one. And if you've ever
01:13:27
had a baby crying, you know that that baby is going to get the other babies crying. And now you have five babies
01:13:33
crying. There's no way you can soo them in when they're in distress. There's no way you can regulate all those babies
01:13:38
emotions. We are doing terrible damage to our children by putting them in daycare. Now, daycare was the feminist
01:13:45
agenda. It was about the the second wave of feminism. They said, "Put your babies
01:13:50
in daycare. It's the only way you're going to go back back to work and work work." And and they didn't talk about
01:13:56
children. The first wave of feminists, they talked about children. Um Mary Shelley and Mary Wstonecraft, they believed that mothering was powerful work. It was work. It was a career. It
01:14:09
was admired. It was elevated. They also believed in fighting the patriarchy. They believed in equality. But they
01:14:16
didn't forget about mothering. The second wave of feminists, I think it was Betty Friedan said that um staying at
01:14:23
home with your children was she called it a concentration camp with comforts. That was the beginning of the tide.
01:14:30
That's when the tide turned for women where the narrative changed. So women felt women who were loving being mothers
01:14:37
and loving raising children suddenly were told that they were in a concentration camp and that they were
01:14:43
prisoners and oppressed. And some of them were and some of them probably shouldn't have had children. And many of
01:14:51
them weren't. And even today me we people write me every day and say thank you for saying what you say because society's narrative is so uh much about
01:15:03
we have no value unless we go out into the workforce. So can I ask you genuinely want to know what
01:15:11
baby boomers tended to be raised by stay-at-home mothers because financial world was totally different then like
01:15:18
you know we're not when you talk about very poor women I have university educated friends who cannot afford to buy a property anywhere they don't have
01:15:28
parents that can give them money they're never going to be able to save that much money and they move out of a rented property probably once a year because
01:15:34
the landlord moves them on and then the boiler is not working and so on and so on and so on. And I have a local food
01:15:40
bank that I donate food to and I often get chatting to people. There are nurses, full-time nurses who live in
01:15:46
London who have two children at home who the the hospital cannot have any more nurses leave because there is there are not enough nurses. It's a real problem that the NHS is so understaffed. Various
01:15:58
reasons for that in America too. But the nurses can't give up their job because their children would have nothing to
01:16:05
eat. They are at food banks with a full-time nursing job. So, we're not talking about, you know, I don't really
01:16:11
know what you mean by very poor women. I There are women with professional roles who will never own own their own home,
01:16:18
who are struggling to keep the lights on, struggling to put food on the table. Now, when I heard you talk on Steven's
01:16:24
podcast before, you said, "Well, look, you know, people don't want to downscale, and when when my children
01:16:30
were young, we did without things like second homes and vacations." And Erica, there is no hope for a second home now for anyone. And I understand that's different. Your generation was different. No, but that's why I said
01:16:42
women who are workingass and must work. There are solutions for those women that don't involve putting their children in
01:16:48
daycare. And we're not discussing those solutions. But do you see, listen, I would love if the government of every
01:16:56
government would say, "Here's the option to stay home for 3 years. Here's here."
01:17:01
Well, and great, they should Hungary, there are some and that is amazing. And I think lots of parents, and for me, I don't think it has to be the mother, and
01:17:12
I've got friends who are same-sex parents and who have the most incredible uh relationships with their children. I
01:17:19
don't think it has to be a mother, but I I feel like there's lots and lots of parents who would love to stay home for three years with their children and be
01:17:25
able to afford that and to be able to afford to get and and that that corporations would then go, you know,
01:17:32
there's a lot of evidence that if you take three years off to raise your child, when you come back, you've got a whole new skill set. You Yeah, there's
01:17:39
books written about that. Oh my god. You go back into the financial district, you've negotiated with a toddler for three years, step inside. Absolutely.
01:17:46
And yet often that is not recognized. women are pushed out of the workforce. So, I am 100% with you that attachment
01:17:53
is important and that many parents would love to take three years off and this is
01:17:58
not being made possible by unregulated capitalism by governments who do not care. Agree. And I'm from America where
01:18:05
we don't have any paid leave at all. Absolutely. You know, I just I go I go and advocate on the hill for this. I
01:18:11
mean, I've been advocating for a decade for paid leave and I don't seem to be getting anywhere, but I'm trying. What
01:18:17
are your thoughts on this, Louise, in terms of the role that feminism has had on mother mothers and motherhood and
01:18:23
someone in the trenches? So, we I I mean, I should say I partly as a consequence of reading Erica's work and
01:18:28
also having you on my podcast. Um, we have moved heaven and earth to not put our children in daycare, which has
01:18:34
involved quite a lot of like creative thinking and we are poorer than we would otherwise have been, you know, and and
01:18:40
people look at us like we're crazy sometimes and think, why why have you made your life so complicated? And it's because um me and my husband both have
01:18:46
this really strong feeling that we don't want to put them in institutional childare. And that is weird. And one of
01:18:52
the things that I really don't like in the UK policy space and I this is true in other countries like the US too is that governments at about the turn of
01:19:03
the millennium seem to have cottoned on to the fact that they can use women to boost GDP. And um David Goodhart, who's a a friend and author, he wrote a book recently
01:19:15
called The Care Dilemma. And he described this this uh historical event as a one-time boost to GDP. It's not
01:19:23
replicable. But in really the 1990s, obviously the sexual revolution predates this, but really the 1990s is when you
01:19:29
see this massive surge of working mothers. This idea that you should be out of the house 40 hours a week,
01:19:35
children daycare, that's pretty new. and governments like this because governments like women paying taxes.
01:19:42
Mhm. And I think that to some extent some should we say non-maternal feminism has been a little bit naive about this and thinking that if we can get the
01:19:55
government to support daycare based initiatives that that's good for women. There's so much research on this showing that actually most women find it really really hard and it's a it's a very
01:20:06
common thing in mom's groups and on social media and and so on and women thinking I do not want to leave my my 66% of women in UK want to stay home if
01:20:13
they bring all want to work stay home more yeah and what I object to is the current arrangement that we have in the UK and elsewhere where the government does nothing for you if you're a
01:20:25
stay-at-home mother the government actually punishes families in the tax system if you're a single earner a family, you will earn you will pay more
01:20:32
tax than if you earn the same amount but across two incomes. You are directly punished. This was deliberately
01:20:39
established as a quote unquote feminist policy so that it would so that it would
01:20:44
channel women back into the workforce after they'd had children. I also don't like the fact that the only setup that's
01:20:49
available in terms of getting any kind of funding from the government is for daycare. You can't put money towards a nanny. you can't put money towards
01:20:56
having your a grandparent or an aunt or something help. Yeah. The only way that you can get any kind of subsidy is
01:21:02
through daycare. And I think that I mean talking about choice that's removing choices from women and most women don't
01:21:09
want to take that choice and they're doing it because they're being channeled in that direction by economic forces which I object to. But I don't think
01:21:15
that's that's to call it a feminist policy. It feels like guilting women twice. what I said at the top about
01:21:21
relieving women from this emotional burden of guilt. I feel like if that's a that's a cap an unregulated capitalist
01:21:28
policy, that is not a feminist policy. I I think what she which if I heard her correctly, she said that they were using
01:21:35
feminism in a way. They used it um as a as a banner, but it's actually the government wanting the GDP. I mean, that's what I heard. I don't know. Yeah. Well, and also it's a policy. The thing is that women disagree on stuff, right?
01:21:46
So, including, you know, present company included. Um, some women I mean this is kind of the whole story of the second wave. There are some women who for temperamental or
01:21:58
life circumstance reasons have benefited from this. For instance, pushing daycare
01:22:06
as one example. I could I could list loads. There are some women who are more temperamentally inclined to work full-time, who don't like being stay at home moms, who find it boring,
01:22:18
frustrating, whatever it is. Can I ask you a question, Stephen? Go ahead. Would you take a three-year career break?
01:22:25
Would you be able to do that? Would I be able to take a threeear emotionally, mentally? So, I would be It's possible,
01:22:32
but my would that be my choice? No. It's obviously possible because I have the means to. So, I'm a different person. I'm slightly more privileged person to ask. But would I want to take three
01:22:44
years off my career, stop doing this um to solely raise children? I would I would
01:22:50
not want to. You would struggle. And and the thing is men aren't expected to. So,
01:22:56
we have different nurturing hormones. We have a biology that's really different. I I think we just need to take into
01:23:02
account that no one is judging Steven for saying that. But if I said just couldn't do it, people would be like
01:23:14
and that societal expectation and that societal guilt needs to be acknowledged. But men and women are different. They are different. Steven could say other things which would have people's jaws on the floor like I don't want to
01:23:26
financially support my wife and child. I think people would be quite shocked by that. I mean we just have different expectations from I just don't want to
01:23:31
go back to men are from Mars and women are from Venus. No no I want to give some evidence of that. So there is hormonal research to show that men and
01:23:38
women respond to nurturing differently. We have different hormones, different amounts of hormones. They come, it comes
01:23:44
from different parts of our brain. Uh women produce when they give birth, when they breastfeed, when they nurture their
01:23:50
young, they produce a ton of oxytocin if they're healthy. Oxytocin helps you to attach to your baby. And it also is is inversely connected to cortisol. So it
01:24:01
lowers the baby's stress. It lowers your stress and it raises the well-being of the baby and the well-being in you. And
01:24:08
so what we know is that oxytocin is passed back and forth between babies and mothers. Right brainto right brain
01:24:14
connection. Oxytocin makes mothers sensitive empathic nurturers. It makes them very attuned to the distress of
01:24:20
their babies. When fathers produce oxytocin when they stay home, it comes from a different part of their brain and
01:24:26
it makes them more playful tactile stimulators of babies. They tickle the babies. They throw them up in the air. They chase them around. They encourage
01:24:32
uh risktaking. They encourage exploration. They're great with uh with separation. But in terms of providing
01:24:39
that emotional security and that emotional regulation in those early days, mothers do it differently. Fathers
01:24:46
produce a lot of vasopressin. It's called the protective aggressive hormone. There was a study that was done
01:24:51
where fathers and mothers lay in bed together. It was done in the UK. And when the baby cried, almost nearly every
01:24:59
time the mother woke up in the middle of the night to the baby's cries and the father slept through it. But when there
01:25:04
was way, listen, when there was a rustling of leaves outside the window, the fathers woke up and the mother slept
01:25:10
through it because of the predatorial threat. We are wired. We are mammals. We are not better than mammals. We are
01:25:17
mammals. And mammals have been doing this for thousand for millennium. And evolutionarily there's there's a reason
01:25:23
why we have different responses, different nurturing behaviors that are correlated with our hormones. We are not
01:25:30
the we are equal in so many ways, but we are not the same in terms of our nurturing behaviors. That doesn't mean a
01:25:36
father can't learn. It doesn't mean a father who wants to be the stay-at-home dad can't learn to be a sensitive,
01:25:43
empathic nurturer, but if we can't acknowledge that we're different, then we can't teach what we need to teach.
01:25:48
You said we need education. We need all kinds of education, but you can't educate a father that he's different
01:25:54
than a mother if you're not admitting that he's different than a mother. We are different with exceptions. We're
01:26:00
we're it's not it's not men from Mars, women from Venus. It's overlapping B curves. So, there are outliers, but but
01:26:07
at the population level, which is what we're talking about, you have to acknowledge that there are differences. Did you say that six, what was that
01:26:13
number you cited? 66% of women would like the opportunity to be able to stay at home. That's a UK figure. 60% in
01:26:19
America, 66% in the UK. I don't know the numbers on men, but I would guess that it's really low. And that I know that
01:26:26
there are other statistics around when fathers aren't earning that can cause I mean it's kind of difficult to
01:26:33
because there are obviously confounding factors. Maybe fathers aren't earning because they are very depressed or because they're have poor health or
01:26:39
something like that. But when fathers aren't earning that tends to be bad for relationships, bad for men's
01:26:44
self-esteem. Like I think whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, I think the truth is that most
01:26:52
people aspire to something like kind of traditional gender roles with some flexibility. And I don't think that we should consider that to be like some
01:27:03
inconvenient problem. I think that if that's what human beings are like, then our politics ought to accept that and
01:27:10
allow people to flourish and allow people to have the things that they want while trying to ameliate the trade-offs.
01:27:16
So, you're you're agreeing with me that we need agency and autonomy and people need to choose because men are taller
01:27:23
than women, right? That's an observable fact. Overall, it doesn't give you any information at all about me and Tom Cruz. So, we're talking about trends. We're
01:27:36
not talking about the first time Steven holds his baby and nurtures it and thinks, "Bloody hell, I'm going to take a year off cuz I can afford to and wants
01:27:44
to do that." It it the all we can ever talk about is trends. We cannot talk in absolutes because we don't have any information about what I as a if I were a mother, what I should do or what
01:27:56
Steven should do as a father. But what about policy? So, like the example I gave, right? The fact that at the moment you basically will not get any money
01:28:02
from the British government unless you put your child in daycare. They will not give you money for being a stay home parent etc. That's a policy choice and
01:28:08
we can't be neutral about that. We have to decide are we going to incentivize one thing or another. In practice it's
01:28:14
fantastical to say we just need to give people as many choices as possible. That's not how humans work and it's not
01:28:19
how societies work because societies are greater than the sum of their parts. So another example, Elizabeth Warren of all
01:28:26
people wrote a book called the two income trap. I forget when the '9s I think this was before she became a really prominent American politician where she argued that one of the really
01:28:37
important things in boosting house prices in America and this is true elsewhere. There are other factors too
01:28:42
like mortgage interest rates and stuff. But one of the reasons why house prices have rocketed and have made it more
01:28:48
difficult to be a single earner family or to be a nurse and feed your children, you know, as we were talking about is
01:28:55
because banks started giving mortgages based on two incomes. And it became possible to this this crucial legal change in in Britain happened in the 1990s similar elsewhere.
01:29:06
Basically, instead of just borrowing against the father's income, you're borrowing against both incomes. And then all of a sudden, house prices go up
01:29:15
because people have more money to spend. And it becomes disastrous for a family who are paying their mortgage based on and of course rent because rent is all just downstream of property prices
01:29:26
paying their mortgage on the expectation that they have two incomes. This is a really good example of why you can't
01:29:32
just think at the individual level. It would be really easy to say, well, just give women choices. with fine. The
01:29:37
problem is when it becomes the norm and when it becomes public policy for a certain choice to be made, suddenly everyone has to make that choice or they suffer serious consequences. And of course, people can be weird and there
01:29:49
are people I know them who look at the property price problem and say, "No, I want to be a stay at home mother. I'm
01:29:54
going to move house. I'm going to like take up some cottage industry job at home." Like, you can do it, but you have to be agentic. But also, can you can you live on an Etsy shop and to have a
01:30:07
slightly smaller house? That's not what I know. I I people are really struggling, guys. We need these
01:30:13
governments to step up a and allow this. And we need corporations to say, you know, you can have a three-ear break and
01:30:19
come back if this is the ideal thing. What I would also say is I think it's extremely important for whichever parent decides to be the primary carer to have
01:30:31
windows outside where they get fed emotionally, intellectually, creativ creatively. If what floats their boat is
01:30:40
early childhood development and that's enough for them, that's great. That's that's autonomy. That's awesome. But
01:30:48
that is not most people's experience. A lot of my friends tell me that effectively having a child is becoming
01:30:54
an unpaid Uber driver for someone who doesn't want to go to karate and hates you anyway. And it's hard hard work. But
01:31:01
that's that is a narrative that I'm going to push back on, which is part of the problem, which is that it's the
01:31:07
narrative of misery, which has been promoted. And it's not miserable to have children. It's joyful. It's the most incredible love you'll ever experience in your life, but it's also really hard.
01:31:19
And I think we have a bunch of [ __ ] actually, right? We are producing, we are producing women and men who are [ __ ] And I'll tell you what I mean by that. They cannot deal with
01:31:30
discomfort. They cannot deal with frustration. They cannot deal with sacrifice or hardship or responsibility.
01:31:37
They want it to be easy. Who said raising children was easy? You don't get the good stuff unless you put in the
01:31:43
work. And it's the same if you're out in the world. Of course, it's easier to go to a job than it is to stay home with a
01:31:50
child because a child demands more of you, but it also gives back more. And I'm going to say this is not a binary equation here. So, 66% may want to stay home, but they may want to stay home and
01:32:01
have part-time work or do some work from home. It may not be as binary as as you're making it out to be. It's not
01:32:07
like you have to stay home for three years. And it's not an elitist idea. So, can I just answer the guilt question
01:32:13
because I didn't get to answer that because you said you're making a lot of women feel guilty. So, guilt is actually
01:32:20
quite a healthy emotion in small supply. Guilt is a very healthy. It means that your ego is
01:32:27
functioning. So, if we're not just preoccupied as women on our own needs and desires and self-orientation and narcissistic uh sort of wishes, then listen listen
01:32:41
then we have no you I mean if we're not just concerned with ourselves then when we leave our very very very young
01:32:48
children we should feel badly because we those children need us. If we stop feeling badly for our children when we leave them, you break the bond. You
01:33:01
can't turn off attachment. So, a little bit of guilt means your ego is functioning. It's a good sign. Now, the
01:33:09
response to that may not be that you can stay home with your children, even part-time, but at least it informs you.
01:33:15
So, whatever time you have with your children, you spend it wisely. I mean, I think it was um it was Penelopey Leech who said well before me that don't have
01:33:27
children if you don't want to care for them because you can have a very productive and creative life without
01:33:33
having children. But if you're going to have children, you need to care for them and they're your responsibility. Can I
01:33:39
push back on the word narcissistic? Because I'm thinking of those nurses that I met down at the food bank. One of
01:33:45
them had a I think a nine-year-old and the others had the other had two small ones. the idea that that woman is
01:33:51
narcissistic in any way. I just You've used it a couple of times and that she should feel guilty when she drops that child off. I I feel so sad that it's
01:34:02
another layer of oh, it's this healthy guilt. Women feel so much guilt all the time. Nobody is worried that women
01:34:10
aren't feeling guilty enough. They are trying so hard and this world is becoming more and more and more and more and more fraught with inequality.
01:34:23
That nurse is running around desperately trying to give people. One of them said to me at one point, I want to give
01:34:29
people even a good death. I don't want to leave them. I have to go over here and throw medicine at this person. This
01:34:35
person is dying. I want to sit with them and hold their hand because they don't have any family or they're not here. We're talking about this the most
01:34:42
empathetic person. I think we're asking too much of women. Well, evidently, but to say that that you use the word narcissistic because she's going to do her job as a I didn't call that woman
01:34:53
narcissistic. I said there's a tremendous amount of narcissism out there in women and in men that they do
01:35:00
not think about their children first. They think about them. Now that doesn't mean that nurse that nurse may be the
01:35:05
exception and there's a lot of exceptions but the truth is we have a very narcissistically oriented society.
01:35:12
We do that's why we have all these narcissistic disorders. What do you think addictions are? Eating disorders,
01:35:18
alcoholism, drug addiction, these are all narcissistic disorders. So why are they on the rise? Because narcissism doesn't make you a bad person. A narcissistic disorder means you were
01:35:30
neglected as a child and you form defenses to help you to cope with that neglect and that abandonment. And we are
01:35:36
neglecting and abandoning our children on a very fundamental level in the years that they need us most. And they are
01:35:42
developing as a result narcissistic disorders in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Louise, I want to just bring
01:35:48
you into this for a second because I know you're a mother of two two young boys. There was a comment made earlier
01:35:53
about many women consider parenthood and I don't want to mischaracterize anything you said Deborah but to be why would they want to be an unpaid Uber driver. I
01:36:00
was saying that like that's sometimes the experience. It's not just all roses and happiness and joy. So therefore you
01:36:07
need something outside for your head space. That's what I mean. I don't mean you can't be a full-time parent. I do
01:36:12
mean mo a lot of people don't just find it a a singular joy and they just need a
01:36:18
little something outside even if they can afford to stay home which most people can't. That's what I mean. So to
01:36:24
that point and then also to the point about narcissism and individualism. What are your thoughts here? I'm primarily
01:36:29
angry with politicians. Okay. In terms of making the life of say this nurse really difficult unnecessarily. Though the thing that I also
01:36:40
want to draw attention to is the extent to which branches of feminism have made a mistake like there have been feminism is very
01:36:50
complex. It's also very old. It didn't start in the 1960s but um you know Eric is talking about maternal feminism. I
01:36:56
would also call myself a maternal feminist and I think that feminism has had a a really difficult relationship
01:37:01
with motherhood certainly since the 60s because motherhood is really difficult because it particularly if you got if
01:37:08
you're ideologically committed to the idea of gender sameness underplaying the differences biological differences between men and women sometimes called biological determinism then motherhood is a real problem for
01:37:20
you because it really highlights those differences and I think that there are a lot of just facts about men and women
01:37:26
that we don't actually know widely and a lot of young people certainly don't know. One of the things that a lot of
01:37:32
women don't know is how much they're going to want to be with their babies because we don't really talk about this.
01:37:39
And it is a difficult fact for the idea of men and women being basically the same with different different like bits and bulbs. And that is partly because we're not properly educating women about
01:37:50
what the experience is like. But it's also because unfortunately there has been this this strain of feminism. It's
01:37:56
not all feminism at all which has basically aspired as much as possible to make women like men. And that includes
01:38:03
women being like men professionally, women having sex like men. That's the expression they use in Sex in the City, having sex like a man, right? Basically
01:38:09
enjoying hookups without any real emotional connection. And I think that's a real trap for feminism is to assume
01:38:15
that women should want to be as much like men as possible. Even women's bodies, even if you look at teenage girls bodies, they all aspire to be like adolescent boys, you know, they don't
01:38:27
want breasts, they don't want hips, they they want to be right. So, so it is it's almost as if we elevated
01:38:34
in a funny way. Feminists were trying to reject patriarchy, but they ended up idolizing it and wanting to be it and
01:38:41
then rejecting everything feminine. And that's a problem, and it's certainly a problem for motherhood, you know. And I
01:38:46
think what maternal feminism says is actually maybe women are all right and maybe actually this feminine stuff is
01:38:52
good and maybe motherhood is actually just as valuable as your professional life and we should aspire to feminist
01:39:01
ideas, policy, education, whatever, which prizes that and how how much do you see
01:39:09
women elevated who are mothers? I mean, do you you go to a cocktail party and you ask a woman what she does and she
01:39:14
says, "I'm a stay-at-home mom and I'm raising my children, the back will turn on her, whether it's a woman or a man."
01:39:21
And so that means that we've denigrated and not just deprioritized, we've depprioritized, we've denigrated it,
01:39:27
we've dismissed it, we've turned it into something less than. And so remember that what helped women to feel valuable
01:39:35
in society was the admiration for them. Feminism has to get to a place where it says you have choice. We admire your choice to stay home with your children
01:39:46
and admire our choice not to have children. Um, you know, but the idea that the second wave of feminism, it was about it's all drudgery and it's
01:39:56
disgusting and boring and it made it into this. And now you have these websites which are frightening to me,
01:40:03
the the scary mommy websites where you have women saying, "I hate breastfeeding and I hate pregnancy and I hate my
01:40:10
children." And it's so disturbing to me because what have we done to those women? What have we done to society that
01:40:16
we have those websites? It's okay to feel frustrated, to feel bored, to have many feelings about mothering, but the hostility towards mothering, the hostility towards children, the
01:40:28
hostility towards raising children. If we don't admire mothers again, there will be no mothers in the future. I feel totally the opposite of that. It's so interesting because I'm not a mother. I
01:40:40
had a Guilty Feminist podcast episode where Susan Calman, who's a a comedian, came on and we said, "What do you want to talk about?" And she said, "I want to talk about the fact that I've never wanted to be a mother." I said, "I've tried to have children, couldn't, but I
01:40:52
have lots of nurturing relationships, love children. I have never had more fury in my inbox." Like, we were monsters because we weren't mothers. So,
01:41:04
what you're saying is true that sometimes someone, oh, you're a stay-at-home mom. And I despise it. Be
01:41:10
staying being a stay at home parent is a job of work. And I want women to be celebrated for staying home with their
01:41:16
children. I want men to be celebrated. Uh men tend to be celebrated more if they do that work. I want women to be
01:41:21
celebrated. I want all parents of any gender to be celebrated for that. We agree on that. Have we have we got a you
01:41:28
said something there which links to the next thing I wanted to talk about which is if we don't correct this in some way, we're not going to have mothers. And
01:41:34
when we look at the birth rates and the fertility rates, this 50% of young women don't want to have children. So, you
01:41:40
know, again, I'm all for choice and I'm I think women have to come together. So in a way the feminism movement didn't
01:41:47
unite women, it split women in many ways the second wave of feminism. Women were
01:41:53
historically for millennium the caretakers of a community, the community leaders. They would check on the elderly. They would feed the poor. They would take care of the children. Right?
01:42:05
So what happened is that we took them out of their caretaking roles and it was like taking a keystone species out of the environment. Much of the environment
01:42:17
degraded and shriveled up. That's why we're seeing 50%. That's why we're seeing, in my opinion, that's why we're
01:42:23
seeing such a rise in mental illness. Women aren't going to check on their neighbors anymore. They're not feeding
01:42:30
the poor at their local church. They're really preoccupied with making money and materialism and the GDP and and a world
01:42:38
in which they are no longer caretakers. Now, not everybody's meant to be a caretaker, but the point is once we lose
01:42:46
that that lynch pin, the the society degrades, the ecosystem, it it it degrades. Is it our job to be down at the soup kitchen and checking on the elderly neighbor? Surely that's the
01:42:58
community's job. We should raise our sons and daughters to do that. All children should be raised to check on.
01:43:04
It's not women's job. I work in a writer's room at the moment and I love it and I am not less good in the room
01:43:11
than any man. I get so much joy from it. It's so exciting. If we say, "Oh, feminism took away my key lynchpin role where I have to like go to a soup
01:43:22
kitchen and then check on a neighbor and check on the graph." While men still get to go into the writer's room and create an animated feature film like it was in
01:43:29
the 50s or the 60s or even the 70s or the 80s or the damn 90s, let's be honest, I don't get to do that. The film
01:43:36
gets to be more male. It tells the story to the next generation and the boys get to make that film and the stories go on
01:43:41
and on and on that my role is checking on the elderly neighbor and the man's role is to go and write the exciting
01:43:48
movie and create that's not the counterpart. Men do pro-social things, too. They don't just write TV shows.
01:43:54
They fight fires. They earn money. They chop wood. They I mean I'm being really talking about what Erica was saying
01:43:59
about the unpaid labor of checking. So can I say I think that one of the problems we have in the contemporary
01:44:05
world and this applies just as much to men as to women. We talk about the manosphere earlier is that
01:44:10
gender roles contain both privileges and responsibilities both of them. So men do other pro-social things, right? And I
01:44:17
think that generally one of the problems that we have in contemporary culture having rejected so much of traditional
01:44:23
gender ideas is that gender roles traditionally contain both privileges and responsibilities. So for men the
01:44:29
privileges are kind of obvious like feminists have drawn a lot of attention to these. But men also have counterpart responsibilities which includes things
01:44:36
like dying for their country or for their family which includes doing backbreaking labor. uh you know there
01:44:41
are all sorts of hard things that men are expected to do in exchange I think this is the unwritten agreement in exchange for those responsibilities those privileges rather women have that
01:44:53
too so women have some privileges you get to uh the women and children first principle when it comes to saving lives women are often the beneficiaries of what's called benign sexism so men being
01:45:06
kind of uh differential to women like nice gentlemanly men being differential to women. There's this cognitive bias called the women are wonderful principle where people will actually if you ask
01:45:17
someone to do you want to save a a woman that you don't know or a man that you don't know from drowning people will overwhelmingly choose to save the woman. So there are those privileges. There are
01:45:28
also responsibilities and they include things like caring work which is hard and the danger and difficulty of
01:45:34
childbearing which is really hard. And I think that one of the problems, and maybe this is narcissistic, I don't know, this is a this is a touchy word,
01:45:40
but maybe this is narcissistic, is that both sexes want the privileges without the responsibilities. And you see that
01:45:47
within the manosphere as well. That's what the manosphere want. They want all the privileges of masculinity without any of the responsibilities. They don't want to have to be the breadwinner for
01:45:54
their families or to do difficult work or to risk their safety doing anything. And I'm afraid sometimes feminism is
01:46:00
like this as well that we expect women to be given to be deferred to and to be prioritized, but we say, "I don't have time to do all this stuff for other people. That's ridiculous. I should be like writing TV shows." I mean, that
01:46:12
that's not the counterpart, right? Like writing TV shows is great, but it's not like essential work to society, whereas
01:46:19
raising children and protecting your community really is. And we do need people to do that of both sexes. Problem is, we can't put a price on on it. And
01:46:26
that's the problem is that we can't put a price on how important it is to raise children. There's there it's unpaid
01:46:32
work. And because we focus so much in society on paid work, we can't put a price on how elevated women's work should be. Meaning how elevated nurturing children should be in society.
01:46:45
You know, I mean, my kids always say, again, I'm going to get a lot of help for this, too, but my kids always say,
01:46:50
"It's not fair that people in finance are earning all that money and doctors and nurses and social workers and
01:46:57
teachers earn so little." And they used to say that when they were little and I had a hard time explaining to them why
01:47:03
that was. And all I could say was the world is not a fair place. But that's not a very good response. And so, you
01:47:10
know, I think the idea that we have shifted this narrative towards working out in the world and paid labor and and accomplishments out in the world and achievements out in the world as opposed
01:47:22
to what's right in front of you. The accomplishment which is maybe the greatest accomplishment of raising
01:47:29
emotionally, mentally, physically healthy children that you put out into the world for the next generation. I
01:47:36
mean, we have to survive as a species. And so that's every all of that paid work is also important and you should
01:47:42
have the choice to do that or nurture or some of both. But if I were going to say
01:47:48
my one goal out of this podcast would be to to to help people understand that we have denigrated
01:47:55
maybe one of the most important work you can do instead of elevating it. Instead of admiring women for staying home and
01:48:02
dealing with the boring moments and dealing with the hardships and dealing with the sleeplessness and the frustration, it's much easier to go to
01:48:09
work. It is much easier to leave your children in daycare or with a nanny, not the women that have to, believe me. But
01:48:16
it is much easier if you have a choice to go to work because being out of the house is it's harder work staying home.
01:48:23
So why aren't we admiring the women who are staying home and doing that hard work and having those boring moments? I
01:48:29
I I agree that parenting is difficult work. I agree that raising the next generation is extremely valuable. I agree that the people who do it, whoever
01:48:40
they are, should be uh respected and should be it be paid in in the way that we live in a capitalist society. And if we don't put a value on it or we don't create tax breaks around it or you know
01:48:55
have child endowment around it, we then say it's not important. So I I absolutely agree with all of that. I do not agree that women we pull feminism
01:49:07
pulled a lynch pin out when it said women women shouldn't have to be the ones that visit the neighbor and do the do all the unpaid labor around in the community. I think that should be unpaid
01:49:20
labor in the community is important but that's what why they call it community and not women's work. It's a community
01:49:27
effort. So, I should do it, but I should also get to go to work in the writer's room and my husband should do it and he
01:49:33
should go and get to do his job. So, I don't think I think a lot of times today I don't know I think maybe I don't know maybe without meaning to I've heard from both of you even though we agree on many
01:49:47
things feminism really did a number on us or feminism pulled the lynch fing or it's feminism's fault. Without feminism,
01:49:54
none of us would be around this table because Steven wouldn't value our voices. Absolutely. Like in the nicest possible way, if you were in a man in the 50s, would you invite three women on
01:50:06
effectively like a TV, radio show, whatever media was available? 100%. It's why I said feminism did a lot of good, but it went too far. And so that that's me saying I I respect the women that
01:50:19
came before us that created uh a paradigm that allows us to work out in the world to have a voice to have
01:50:26
choices to have control. But why is it feminism not going too far and capitalism not accommodating and our
01:50:32
government's not accommodating the new world that we live in that is obviously better for women? We none of us could
01:50:38
get a credit card a couple of dec few decades ago. conjugal rape was still legal in this country till like what I
01:50:44
don't know you would know better than me like the 90s something technically in case law you know I it just
01:50:51
we wouldn't have been able to go and get a mortgage or a bank account on our own we couldn't have anything so instead of
01:50:57
blaming feminism which has got us around this table so frequently I feel we should look at okay feminism got us here and now what would we like next feminism
01:51:08
has got us this far so what Can how can we encourage instead of damning feminism, encourage feminism to make
01:51:17
sure we admire and respect and pay properly the women in our workplaces and also admire and respect and pay properly or make sure that women are in safety
01:51:29
and security when they parent. How can we do both? I I agree with that. I feel when you keep saying well feminism did
01:51:36
this, feminism did this. At this time, this is this is we got to meet this moment. women, we have to meet this
01:51:41
moment. And do you know what this moment is? This moment is a moment where Row versus Wade has been overturned.
01:51:48
Where far-right Christian nationalists are rising up to take away our rights. There are people in America right now saying there should be one vote per household and that should go to the man.
01:51:58
I have seen Paula White who is the faith zar of at the White House saying it's God's arrangement that women be in subjection to men. I have lived that. I will not go back. You are both
01:52:10
professional women, intelligent women. You have written books. Please come with me and say feminism has got us this far and feminism can take us further. If you
01:52:22
keep saying feminism's to blame, the manosphere are watching and they take those clips. They take those clips. They
01:52:27
go see women are saying feminism is so I think the idea is I believe in maternal feminism where all women are respected
01:52:35
whether they work at home or they work outside the home L. So I think that that is exactly why we need to be thinking
01:52:41
about maternal feminism because if basically if feminism cannot reproduce itself literally if it if it if it is the case that a feminist society is a is
01:52:52
a very very low fertility society which has no which does not respect motherhood
01:52:58
which discourages women from having children because it's limits your freedom etc then feminism dies out
01:53:04
feminist societies die out they wither and die and conservative very conservative, not the kind of
01:53:09
conservative I'm okay with, like the very conservative societies, if they are the only ones that can accommodate
01:53:15
children, then they win. At the moment, the best predictors of within within low
01:53:23
fertility societies like ours, the best predictors of how many children you have is basically how religious you are and
01:53:28
how conservative you are. It used to be up until relatively recently that Democrats and Republicans had basically
01:53:34
the same birth rate. Now Republicans are massively outstripping Democrats. And the thing is that all of this stuff is
01:53:40
is at least to some extent heritable. People are to some extent they they adopt the politics and the world views
01:53:47
of their parents. Not always obviously people rebel but in general you imitate the culture you were raised in. And also
01:53:53
some of this stuff is actually heritable like there are personality traits which make you more religious or make you
01:53:59
inclined to certain politics which are heritable partially. So basically current the current trajectory while
01:54:06
we're kind of arguing about the rights and wrongs of this stuff the current trajectory is for a societyy's become much more conservative and that's what
01:54:13
the birth rates phenomenon spells for everyone. And I mean I and I genuinely think as someone who likes being able to
01:54:20
have my own bank account and vote and whatever I actually choices Yeah. Right. Like I I'm a centrist here. Okay. And I
01:54:26
actually think that if we care about any of that stuff, then we have to find a way of having a feminism that is fertile. Deborah, we need a fertile feminism according to Louise. Listen,
01:54:38
I'm as barren as [ __ ] Steve. So, I can't help with this. However, um I'm fine about it. Don't worry that I don't want you to feel sorry for me. I I uh I have a an amazing life and in the end
01:54:51
think this was probably the better thing for me. But um all the fe I don't think
01:54:56
we need to call it maternal feminism. All the feminists I know either have children or really support the mothers
01:55:03
in their community including me. I uh I don't I don't recognize this guys. I don't recognize it. I feel like I go on marches, feminist marches in
01:55:16
London. There's children everywhere. secular progressive people are so so below replacement just on the data. How
01:55:24
do you respond? I'm talking about we're going to run out of these people if they don't start having kids. I mean makes it
01:55:31
it I there's probably reasons for it like if you're more progressive, you're more aware of climate change. You're
01:55:37
more you're less you're more likely to pay your taxes. You're less likely to have um e excess wealth to raise the
01:55:44
next generation. You're going to be more aware of like what am I bringing the children into? If you have a vision of
01:55:49
the world that God's going to save everything and you, you know, you're just going to vote this way and
01:55:55
everything is going to be great, maybe you pump out more children if you think that, you know, your God, whoever that
01:56:01
is, is going to save the day. I don't know. Do we need to be having more children though? Because my my concern
01:56:06
about it is is what are we having them for? If the world is getting more difficult to live in, if it's if people can't afford a home, even like a nice rented property that feels quite stable,
01:56:19
if they can't afford a home, if they're working millions of hours and not being able to balance parenthood and feeling very stressed and, you know, the the
01:56:30
manosphere is rising and it's it's boys are so depressed and girls feel like this and all of that. What are we having
01:56:36
it what are we doing it for? Unless we're going to create conditions that people want to live in that make us
01:56:44
happy or at least, you know, no one to be happy all the time, but what are we what are we doing it for? Make sure you
01:56:49
keep what I'm about to say to yourself. I'm inviting 10,000 of you to come even deeper into the D of a CEO. Welcome to
01:56:56
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01:57:35
daccircle.com. I will speak to you there. The hardest conversations are often the ones we avoid. But what if you had the right question to start them with? Every
01:57:47
single guest on the diio has left behind a question in this diary. And it's a question designed to challenge, to connect, and to go deeper with the next guest. And these are all the questions
01:57:58
that I have here in my hand. On one side, you've got the question that was asked, the name of the person who wrote
01:58:04
it, and on the other side, if you scan that, you can watch the person who came after who answered it. 51 questions
01:58:12
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01:58:18
conversation goes. And people play these conversation cards in boardrooms at work, in bedrooms, alone at night, and
01:58:25
on first dates, and everywhere in between. I'll put a link to the conversation cards in the description below and you can get yours at the
01:58:31
diary.com. I want to talk about one last subject. Um, which is the subject of pornography.
01:58:40
You left this for the end. Cool. We're not perfect. Yeah. I just I'm I'm interested to see how you all think that
01:58:46
the impacts and implications of pornography impact everything we've talked about today, whether it's men, it's women, it's children, etc. And also
01:58:52
how that ties into feminism. I would say there is there is increasing evidence that everything we do alone on our phone excessively is causing us to
01:59:03
disassociate, is causing us to get some kind of addiction property from it, is causing us to disregulate, is causing the breakdown of regular communication
01:59:14
in society. So do you think porn is a net negative for society? I I think it's it's a moot point because it's always been there and it's always going to be there. But I would like But
01:59:27
if you could press a button and get rid of it and pressing that button, would that cause society to be better or worse
01:59:33
in terms of happiness if we use that as a metric? And any of the metrics that one would use?
01:59:39
Honestly, it's like saying, can you press a button and get rid of human sexuality? I I don't know
01:59:46
what what the world would look like if people weren't seeking it out. But where there is no before we had porn, people
01:59:52
always drew things through. Can I say that when it was two-dimensional, when you had when boys had a Playboy magazine
01:59:58
under their bed or they stole their father's Playboy magazine, that was actually less harmful than the the the
02:00:05
movies and the video because um it two-dimensional isn't as powerful as the I guess video. Video I mean, I'm saying films. Yeah. Modern porn is a super stimulus. Yeah, it's a completely It's
02:00:16
not like real action is not saucy murals in Pompei, right? It's it's designed to
02:00:24
be incredibly stimulating like in in and it's very clever actually like the way that the the the porn platforms work. It's really it's a clever product and like we're talking about unre unregulated capitalism like this is the
02:00:36
preeminent example. It's designed to tap in to our most profound desires. Uh, I mean, particularly for men using it, it's like hyper visual. Everything's exaggerated. It's I mean, one of the
02:00:49
reasons why it's a bad idea to use porn in general, aside from it being super unethical as an industry, is um it will
02:00:55
make the rest of your sex life worse generally because it will mean that real sex will not measure up. If you've
02:01:01
trained your brain to enjoy the super stimulus, the normal stimulus becomes less exciting. Like how if you eat junk
02:01:09
food then it becomes less attractive to eat vegetables or whatever. Like it's it's not like Playboy of the 50s cuz it left room for fantasy. There's no I mean it's it's so explicit
02:01:21
that it leaves no room for fantasy. Even your own fantasy and is it harming men as well, Luis? Yeah, absolutely. I mean,
02:01:27
not least, one of the things that is uh certainly anecdotally a massive problem with compulsive porn use is erectile
02:01:34
dysfunction when you're actually trying to have sex with a real human being because you've trained your brain and
02:01:39
you've also trained the rest of your body to only respond to this particular stimulus and to masturbation. If I put
02:01:44
the button in front of you, like I said to Deborah, would would you press it to porn forever? Of course I would. Porn is
02:01:50
all bad for not least the porn forwards. I mean even just on that basis in the same way that I would ban some hideously
02:01:57
unethical industry that had nothing to do with sex because people I mean like the suicide rate among poor performs is
02:02:03
appalling or like I can't remember her name but the the most the most promiscuous woman in Australia that only
02:02:09
fans model who last just last week had sex with 583 men in one day and was hospitalized subsequently right this is
02:02:16
what we're talking about in practice this is like a hideous industry it is so bad for women I cannot I cannot
02:02:23
understand how feminists could endorse it. I just can't. It's one of my strongest opinions. Can you would you
02:02:28
ban saucy murals in Pompei? I can't. No, you can't ban anything. So, would you But but there's the button. Saucy murals in Pompei, which by the way is number five on the
02:02:40
They're They're too They're two-dimensional. I don't mind two dimensional. It's funny. I don't mind two dimensional. Um it's when it it's
02:02:46
live action and they actually with video games uh they did studies to show that um the more realistic the video games
02:02:54
the more harmful they were to to teenagers and so there's something about so the murals were two-dimensional and
02:03:00
maybe they would be considered art. So you would press the button to end the threedimensional porn there and you
02:03:06
would you wouldn't press the button. I mean I I just think the button's right there. What you do? You can press it. No one's watching. Okay. that the wholesome
02:03:12
couple who were really into each other. I thought this is modeling something that I think is very healthy people
02:03:20
doing violent things to women and like hentai porn which I discovered in my research. Um which is animated porn with
02:03:28
like Lolita style girls that look really young and violent stuff. I we obviously
02:03:34
we need regulation and we need discussion. I am not the person to lead it, but you know, if if you would press
02:03:43
the button to get rid of the saucy murals in Pompei, then it's kind of erasing human sexuality, I think. And I
02:03:49
don't know what Well, would you or not? Would you leave those up as a sort of little racing artifact? What would you
02:03:55
do, Louis? I think I would put it up in a school room. I mean like I think everyone accepts that even that really
02:04:02
mild stuff needs to be like what about limited if not if not it needs to be limited if not legally then socially. What about statue of David? What about just the naked form?
02:04:14
No, I would not ban that. But I Deborah, I think that this is a rhetorical trick to avoid the fact that this is the least
02:04:19
feminist industry we can conceptualize. And a lot of feminists have really dropped the ball on this and have actually decided to prioritize their own their own status and their own
02:04:31
commitment to sexual liberalism over actual real women who have been sexually tortured within this industry. And it makes me really angry. And I think that
02:04:40
I mean this is true in all all sorts of areas of feminism. I mean what we're doing here is an intrafeminist argument, right? Like we're all basically starting
02:04:46
from the same position which is we think that women's interests ought to be protected that women's flourishing ought to be promoted children's too. What
02:04:52
we're arguing about is over how to do that and that's an argument that's going to go on forever and has gone on forever
02:04:58
and I think it's good. We should have these arguments but if we can't start from the premise that like the sexual torture of women for profit is bad then
02:05:04
what are we doing? Why does it make you angry and and what part of it makes you angry as it relates to feminism?
02:05:09
possibly is partly from having worked with victims, I think. But I guess it's the I guess it's the dishonesty I just don't
02:05:21
like. I'm not accusing of being dishonest, but I just think that this ideology is just so riven with contradictions. Where did Where did
02:05:28
feminism drop the ball in prioritizing the interests of a small unrepresentative group of women over the interests of other women? And I don't just mean in terms of like class or
02:05:39
wealth, although that is a factor. I mean a lot of it is to do with personality. We've talked about agency.
02:05:44
We've talked about some people are more maternal than others. You know, I think that one of the one of the perennial
02:05:49
problems with feminism is that the women who tend to sort of rise to the top and get media careers. I do realize I'm in
02:05:55
this category are not representative of other women and will often have preferences that are very different
02:06:01
which are just not shared by everyone else. I want to ask you all a question just for me which is something that I contend with now that the world has
02:06:07
shifted and changed and definitions have shifted which is about masculinity and what it is to be a good man. I aspired
02:06:13
to be a good man. Um and I'd like you all to tell me one by one what masculinity now means to you and how all of the the men that have gotten to this point in the podcast and and also the
02:06:25
mothers of men and fathers of men should be raising their young boys to be good men. And how does that sort of contradict or how is that in harmony with our evolutionary nature? So
02:06:37
starting with Louise, I think that the key task that every society has to set itself is how to young men in particular have this incredible energy
02:06:51
that can be put to good things and to bad. Like the the the greatest discoveries in the world have overwhelmingly been made by young men
02:06:57
and young men also commit the vast majority of violence, right? It's this this particular group is contains the
02:07:04
most incredible opportunity and also the most incredible danger and every society faces this problem like what do we do
02:07:10
about these guys like how do we how do we cor correctly channel that in a way that's pro-social or antisocial
02:07:17
and I don't think our society is doing an especially good job of that I mean to some extent we do pacify men with porn
02:07:23
and video games so they're less dangerous than they have been in previous eras but at the same time I
02:07:28
don't think that we're deploying male male talents as well as we could. And I don't think that we are um encouraging
02:07:35
men to become good husbands and fathers. What about the provider, protector, procreator narrative? Scott Galloway has talked about that men should aspire to be providers, protectors, procreators. Is that accurate? Yeah, that sounds
02:07:47
about right. Yeah. I mean, I I've written about CAD and dad mode as well, like how do we encourage men to reject
02:07:54
CAD mode and embrace dad mode? What is CAD mode? I like that. A CAD, you Oh, he's a cat. Kind of an oldfashioned word
02:08:00
for a man who would sweep in on a motorbike or a car boy. Yes, I wasn't going to say that, but you know. So, is there So, okay. So, just to make
02:08:12
sure I've completed your my perspective of how you think about masculinity. So, should I be holding the door open for my
02:08:18
partner and should I be paying the bill on the first date? I think chivalry is great. I think that rejecting chivalry
02:08:23
was a mistake. Yeah. Okay. Um but also it's not the most important masculine virtue. I mean I most of the most of the
02:08:30
virtues should be demonstrated by both sexes. Yeah. You know honestly whatever but
02:08:37
there are some which I think maybe men need to focus on more and women need to focus on more. And I certainly with
02:08:42
raising my boys who are very little at the moment but we've we've me and my husband have talked a lot and thought a lot about how do we encourage
02:08:47
specifically masculine virtues. And sometimes that means parenting boys slightly different from girls. In what
02:08:53
way? give me an example of a masculine virtue you're trying to bring out like this question about how what to do about young male aggression. I think a tried
02:08:59
and tested way of doing that which we're certainly going to try with our kids is um combat sports or sports in general or
02:09:06
basically teaching young men how to sublimate and regulate and and channel effectively those feelings of aggression
02:09:12
in a way that is constructive and not destructive. Deborah, how do you agree disagree with that
02:09:18
perception? That's not at all my worldview. I think we should be teaching our children to find their humanity and their empathy no matter
02:09:31
their gender. When I researched my book, Six Conversations We were scared to have, I thought that it was going to
02:09:37
show me that the internet and especially social media made us less and less empathetic. You know, we think about keyboard warriors and they can't see
02:09:43
your face and all that. But what I discovered is in fact every single day social media asks us to be more and more empathetic to fewer and fewer people.
02:09:55
That is a cult. I was in a cult. You have to be very empathetic to the people in it. And the second someone steps
02:10:01
outside, they're dead to us. And that is what I see on the internet. I see it in I think we're all in a big series of
02:10:07
cults. So I I see now this rise of young men being told women are dreadful. Women
02:10:15
have taken our place which is just it is not for girls not to go to university to
02:10:22
make things more fair for boys. It is for us to nurture our boys to make sure if they're feeling lost or they're
02:10:27
feeling that they they can't compete or they're out in the world and they they're flailing around, we need to
02:10:33
build them up. We do not need to tell girls to step back. that is we've we haven't got equality yet. We're nowhere
02:10:39
near it, much less pulling ourselves back to make more space for boys at this point. We desperately need to invest in
02:10:46
our brothers, in our in the boys in our community in any way we can. I went into
02:10:51
a school and chatted to the boys about gender norms and how they felt about it and what impositions they felt or what
02:10:58
random things were weird. And I said to them, what what would be weird if a boy did it for no reason? Like there's no
02:11:04
And one of them said knitting. He said if I brought my knitting knitting to school, he said, you know, not that he
02:11:09
knitted. He said, everyone would laugh at me and why? There's no reason for it. And another boy just went, I'd bring
02:11:14
knitting in. I wouldn't care. Are boys and girls fundamentally, biologically, physiologically, neurologically
02:11:20
different? And therefore, do they need a different approach? They're hormonally different. We kind of understand that.
02:11:26
We all agree with that from birth. So, do they need to be raised differently to cater to that difference? I wouldn't
02:11:33
exacerbate it. I would say we all should be I as I said I want a partner and I think we should be raising both of our go both our girls and our boys and any children that feel that they're neither
02:11:45
to aspire to their humanity to their empathy to look out for each other I think exacerbating roles and telling
02:11:53
boys you're like this and girls are like that is pushing us further away and it's
02:11:58
it's it's pushing us back decades and generations. Should a man, a young boy be a provider, a procreator, a
02:12:05
protector? Should should we instill those values in young boys? No. Why? Because there's this there's this heavy imposition on boys and there's a heavy imposition on girls that their life
02:12:18
should look a certain way. And we've got to a point where men can stay home and raise their children. Where women can go
02:12:25
out and explore new territory, where we see that women are as clever as men, as talented as men, as able to debate as men. Why would we push this back and go,
02:12:38
well, girls, it's really more feminine if you do this and boys, girls will fancy you more if you do this. So, what
02:12:45
does what does a young man, what should his virtues be? You said empathy and those kinds of things. And then on the
02:12:50
chivalry side of things, should I be holding the door open for every woman that walks through one? Should I be
02:12:55
paying that bill on the first day? I think it's lovely when all human beings hold doors open behind them for other
02:13:02
human beings. I I really disagree that we should not when we issued chivalry, what was going on was that there was a period of time where it was like she's more gentle. She needs help. And it
02:13:15
stopped people seeing us as people who could be entrepreneurial CEOs. So, so women said, "Look, could you just not do that?" Because if you're not holding the door open for any of the guys, then you hold it open for me, they see me as
02:13:26
somehow less than sweet, sexualized. So, we said, "No." Now, I think, look, honestly, if a man holds the door open for me, very, that's very nice, whatever. I don't think people see me that way anymore. I don't think it's a
02:13:37
big deal anymore. I don't like the idea that you have to pay on the first date. I I think you know if I've invited you out, I'll pay. If you've invited me out, you'll pay. I mean, you're much richer
02:13:48
than me, so probably you should pay. But that's nothing to do with gender. Steve, is there not something evolutionary in
02:13:53
that if we look back through our ancestry that the the qualities of fertility are more attractive to to men
02:14:01
and the qualities of being a provider and more attractive to women. So if I if I don't sort of invest in becoming a
02:14:09
provider as a young man, I'm actually going to do much worse when I get older. According to the the some of the data we referenced earlier, 250% less women are
02:14:17
going to opt for me. So if I if I don't sort of build a base and become a provider, am I not am I going to be a
02:14:24
disadvantage as a man in the society that we live in? But also, if we look back through our evolutionary history, is that not hardcoded into us? makes me
02:14:31
feel so sad that boys feel this huge responsibility when we are now at a point when it is it is evident that you do dragons and you sit next to Deborah
02:14:42
Megan who's every bit as good an entrepreneur as you. So why is it your responsibility? Why is it men's responsibility? We can both raise children. We can both we've we've
02:14:53
demonstrated we can both raise children. I've got the society I live in. But we let's reshape it. Let raise your
02:14:59
children to think differently and reshape it. Is the society we live in a consequence of our evolutionary survival
02:15:06
of the fittest, natural selection, pick a good partner so that you can reproduce past and you know you see this in women
02:15:12
where I watching this dating show called Pop the Balloon which I love which has just gone to Netflix and it's so crazy that when so basically Pop the Balloon
02:15:19
is 10 men stand in a line with a balloon um or 10 women stand in a line with a balloon and then a man or woman walks
02:15:25
out. So when a woman walks out and she looks at the lineup, she will go down the lineup and pop every balloon of a
02:15:31
man that's below six feet tall. Just like that. It's crazy. Every And just they'll say, "Why did you pop his balloon?" "Uh, small, short. Why did you
02:15:37
pop his balloon?" Short short short. This is just part of I know it's it's so destructive though. Like look, we can talk about evolution, but I've seen David Atenburgh shows wi where our
02:15:48
shared ancestors who are primates um are ripping each other apart. They a chimp comes up and they rip the chim limb chimp limb from limb. What human beings have done is evolved to be better when
02:16:01
we are when we war we are not better. But we know our better nature and our better self doesn't do that. Are we are
02:16:08
we fighting against I remember hearing someone on the podcast tell me that across across cultures men and women
02:16:14
typically go for the same thing. So like men are going for a certain hip ratio whatever and women are going for a
02:16:19
certain like shoulder ratio. Are these things not like fundamentally evolutionary? It's a status symbols.
02:16:24
Like my husband's shorter than me. It's a status. And status is an evolutionary desire. It it is, but we can be better
02:16:30
than that, can't we? Can't we teach our girls and boys and non-binary young people that that that these are these
02:16:38
superficial things aren't what we should be like aspiring to. We should be aspiring to get past them. The idea like
02:16:44
a lot of it is we know this because different cultures have different beauty standards. different times in here in
02:16:51
history have had different beauty standards and men tend to go for the beauty standard of the time they're in
02:16:57
or the location they're in and therefore it is social it's hey that one means that you're a successful guy in no way evolutionary in your mind I think if it is evolutionary get over it get past it
02:17:10
get beyond it good luck what do you think I'm going to say I don't know I have no idea I disagree with almost
02:17:16
everything she said Um so boys are neurologically more fragile than girls. Uh more uh boys are born in the world and more girls survive. They don't
02:17:28
survive because uh boys don't survive uh as much because they are incredibly neurologically fragile, emotionally fragile too. What that means is they're more prone to aggression, behavioral
02:17:41
problems, ADHD like behaviors which is distractability. They're more sensitive to stress from a very young age. Um,
02:17:49
they are not the same as girls. They don't learn the same way as girls. They need lots of physical expression during
02:17:56
the day. If they don't get it and they're forced to sit in circle time like little girls can sit in circle time, little boys go off the rails and
02:18:03
then they're labeled as having attentional issues. And so we are educating little boys today like little
02:18:09
girls which is why they can't keep up. So if you ask me, we should separate little boys and little girls. So, in
02:18:15
terms of the neurological fragility, they need that attachment figure even more than the little girls. When it
02:18:20
comes to going to school, maybe we should separate little boys and little girls when they're little so we can
02:18:26
cater to their individual needs. Uh, and it and it is different. Um, and in terms
02:18:31
of going forward, men and women are not exactly the same. And even if we try to,
02:18:37
thousands of years of evolution are not going to be turned around in 50 years. So we may make some of these changes,
02:18:43
but that's not realistic. What's realistic is that we've functioned in a way that is based on survival for
02:18:50
thousands millennium. And and we're going to keep functioning that way to a certain extent. There may be some people
02:18:56
who branch off and try to do it differently. You know, the other thing is that young men today are not they're
02:19:02
they're at a disadvantage when it comes to school. And I'm going to say we need quotas. And this may sound radical, but
02:19:09
when it comes to college, it should be 50/50. So my kids went to a school and when it came to nursery school, they
02:19:15
balanced the class. That means if you go to any preschool, they have half girls and half boys. That's just the way they
02:19:22
do it. They balance it in other ways, too. Alpha girls and beta girls and alpha boys. You can't have all the same
02:19:29
kind of kid. But the idea that we have to balance the odds otherwise we're g marriage is also going to come to an end
02:19:34
because of that statistic that women are only going to marry at their educational level or above. So we're going to
02:19:39
marriage will end too. So which girls shouldn't go though? It's not which girls shouldn't go. It's giving boys
02:19:46
advantage to succeed. And it's saying you know what we have uh 50% girls and 50% boys in this college in this class. So in America we have a lot of universities. I don't know the UK
02:19:59
system. It's not my country, but in America, there's a lot of different places you can go. But the idea that all
02:20:05
it's like funneling the all the kids are being funneled in this way. And what I will say is that if we don't balance the odds, so girls and boys have uh equal opportunity in college and graduate
02:20:17
school, we are going to have a huge social dilemma because nobody's marrying and we have single parents. Then women are going, "I can't find a man." And they're having children on their own and
02:20:28
that's causing a social problem because now we have little boys and little girls that don't have fathers. So all I'm
02:20:33
saying is we need to balance the odds. That's it. Well, you have to make more spaces because if maybe that's the
02:20:40
solution. If 60% because otherwise what you're saying is boys who are less academic get the places of the 10% of
02:20:47
girls that now can't go in. So is America going to create more spaces? there's less funding. I'm not great at math, but I'll I'll say we can have 60 and 60. I don't mind 120.
02:20:59
Okay. Um, thank you all so much for being here. I just want to give you an opportunity
02:21:05
just to summarize your thoughts on the sexual revolution in two sentences if you can. I'm going to repeat the insight
02:21:11
of a great friend of mine, Mary Harrington, who's also an author. She wrote this amazing book called Feminism Against Progress. She says that feminism
02:21:20
kind of bubbles up at moments of big societal change when things have really changed materially and there's like a reassessment of gender relations. And I think that's the reason why we're seeing this right now. It's because we it's
02:21:31
because of the digital revolution. So so much has changed, so much is in flux. We're having this like renegotiation of how men and women are supposed to relate to one another. And this always happens.
02:21:43
And I think that it's it's good to talk about it and one way or another men and women are
02:21:49
going to have to learn to get along cuz otherwise we won't reproduce the species.
02:21:55
Erica, so I believe in freedom of choice. Um but not if that choice is to do harm to children. So I believe that children should always come first in our lives. Our family should always
02:22:09
come first. Freud said, "You need love and meaningful work, but your love should always come first." If it's your
02:22:16
children, if it's your spouse, if it's your parents, if it's your next door neighbors who are your best friends, uh love always has to come first. And so, we have become a world where we put work
02:22:28
first. And so, what I would say is I believe in choice of all kind. Uh I don't believe in demeaning or
02:22:33
diminishing someone else's choice. If they make that choice, I'm fine with it. But don't demean or diminish my choice.
02:22:40
your practice. I think the sexual revolution has given women in spades agency, autonomy, and
02:22:49
emotional freedom. We don't yet have enough emotional freedom. There are many women around the world who have less
02:22:55
agency and autonomy than they did 100 years ago. We must fight for them. And I think everything is better when women are free. I think we can create our own structure and we need to be desperately
02:23:10
need to be our own guiding light. So any women watching this, take everything we've said on board and
02:23:18
then decide for yourself. Do you want that spaciousness in your life or do you want rules? And I believe that feminism,
02:23:28
all feminism should be maternal feminism. I don't think we need the word maternal in it. And I really, really,
02:23:34
really want all of us around this table who believe that feminism has given us the right to sit at it to say that feminism has given us a lot. And
02:23:47
unregulated capitalism has taken and that the next stage is to work together because if we divide as women and as feminists, there is no hope. There is so
02:24:01
much coming our way from the farright Christian nationalists. We must stand together.
02:24:07
Thank you so much. Um I want to just appreciate all of you for being here because I think progress starts with
02:24:13
these kinds of conversations and I think all too often in society these conversations happen in little silos and
02:24:19
echo chambers. So everyone's belief just ends up being reinforced. You you just confirmation bias just doubles down on
02:24:25
whatever you think. And it's it's not easy to step into these environments when there's going to be people watching
02:24:30
this that sit on different sides of this table in terms of their perspective. So I applaud you for doing the thing that I think is most most sort of conducive
02:24:36
with progress, which is having the conversation and being respectful in the ways that you disagree about that. So
02:24:42
thank you so much. You all have incredible books. There's I mean there's so many that I can't even I can't even put them all on on on the table or hold
02:24:48
them all, but I'm going to link all of the books below. So, if you want to hear more from all of these wonderful people at the table, Erica, Louise, and
02:24:54
Deborah, about what they think on these subjects, please do go and buy their books. Um, going to link all of them below for you. And where else can we
02:25:02
find you, Louise? Where's the best place to hear more from you about what you think? So, I have a podcast called Made
02:25:07
My Matriarch. Um, MM, you can find it on YouTube, all the other podcast platforms. I've had Erica on before.
02:25:13
Maybe Deborah anytime. You're very welcome. Um, I talk about sexual politics, but also
02:25:20
I mean I say that the things that I'm mostly interested in are um, birth, sex, violence, and death. So that's what the
02:25:26
podcast is about. And religion. I'll link that below as well, Erica. Uh, www.comomasar
02:25:32
komar.com. Um, you can find everything I do on there. You can make an appointment with
02:25:37
me because I do virtual appointments. Um, and I also started a nonprofit called Attachment Circles, which is an
02:25:44
educational platform, but a community building platform. So, please, you know, go to Attachment Circles and join and if
02:25:51
you feel generous, donate because we need the resources to get the community building going. I'll link all of that
02:25:57
below as well. Then, Deborah, I do the podcast, The Guilty Feminist. So, if everyone could um subscribe and uh do
02:26:05
all those things, that would be great. But I'm also starting uh a new grassroots movement called the road to
02:26:10
Gilead because there are moves in this country from far-right American Christian nationalists to take our uh abortion rights and to take our LGBTQ plus rights and I'm really scared about
02:26:23
it and I've been talking about it around the country on the book tour and I've discovered other academics and people
02:26:29
who are very worried are also talking about it. So, if you would like to hear more about Road to Gilead, you can sign up to the mailing list at
02:26:35
guiltyfeminist.com and you will get the occasional email about uh the shows we're doing, but also Road togilead
02:26:41
grassroots um uh projects coming up. I shall link all of that below, too. Thank you so
02:26:47
much. This is a very long conversation, but it's exactly what I was hoping it would be, and I I found my opinion shifting and changing throughout. So,
02:26:53
that's success for me. This has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to this show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show. So, could I ask you for a favor? If you like
02:27:04
the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us, the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my
02:27:10
commitment to you is if you do that, then I'll do everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week.
02:27:16
We'll listen to your feedback. We'll find the guests that you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much.
02:27:28
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