Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Are Women And Men The Same?" with Louise Perry

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"Are Women And Men The Same?" with Louise Perry · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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Good day, humans. Welcome to SafeSpace for dangerous ideas, uncomfortable conversations with
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me, Josh Sips, your humble warrior princess. Look, the fact still remains that we're about
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to roll out more content. I keep saying this, I've been saying it for a few months now,
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things move slowly when you're as busy as I. And if you want to be on the beginning of this
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UN, C-O-M-F-Y, C-O-N-V-O-S. Just shoot an email right now, pull your phone out, you pocket,
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and say, subscribe, question mark, and that you'll be at the front of the line, you'll get benefits
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of other people, don't, when we start rolling out extra content. And look, this is one of those
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episodes that I just so wished I was in the same room as Louise, with four hours instead of one hour.
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I apologise for the audio, the quality of the audio is not quite as good as my usual
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standards, because the portable studio that I normally use was not with me, so we were just sort of
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chatting on a laptop. It's a shame, because Louise is such an interesting person with so many
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interesting ideas, so excuse my tinny audio and hers, and the fact that I was kind of whispering
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because my children were asleep in Australia, and she was kind of whispering because she has a
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17-month-old who was presumably napping in the UK. Louise is a writer and campaigner, she's a
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columnist at the New Statesman, she's a features writer for the Daily Mail, she is the co-founder of a
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non-Palisan feminist think tank, and she's become suddenly one of the most important young feminist
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voices in the UK. We do not go into trans and gender issues here, this is focused on the gender of
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the two binary sexes and whether or not men differ from women, and whether women have been
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ill-served in some ways by the shift in gender dynamics and the sexual revolution that's taken
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place over the past couple of generations. Her debut book is called The Case Against the
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Sexual Revolution, a new guide to sex in the 21st century. I hope you enjoy as much as I did,
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despite all of the technical flaws this conversation, with Louise Perry.
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I have a 17-month-old son, yes. Wow. If we just before I came on the line had done the most
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shocking explosive nappy. And we realised he was turning there going,
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oh wow, oh wow, that's so cute. What's he saying? And then we realised that, oh wow, has come to
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me, you need to change my clothes immediately. Oh wow, means I've done something so impressive
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that even I, I can't believe what I'm capable of. When are you going to load of this?
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Yeah, I remember those days, that much. I'm doing a book tour at the same time as having a 17-month-old.
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Yeah, it wasn't a great idea to be on it, but here we are. I mean, although book tours now don't
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actually generally require you to leave your study. No, that's true. I suppose there's a lot of
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as a lot of just this isn't there sitting in front of you and talking to people in far away
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locations. Yeah, the only exception is literary festivals, which you actually have to go to,
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but yeah, vast majority of the book tour has just been talking down and working for him, yes.
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Yeah, good. What was wrong with the sexual revolution, Louise?
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Well, so what I'm arguing against in this book is what I think is a simplistic and naive narrative
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of the sexual revolution that you'll often hear in progressive spaces, which is that it was
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it was done for and by women and it was a holy to our benefit. And I don't think that's true. I
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don't think it was really done sort of by anyone that there's any conspiracy. I don't think anyone
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even really foresaw what was going to happen to be honest when you had things like the pill and
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during the scene. I think it was just a large scale historical event that was primarily driven
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by technology, particularly the pill, but also all sorts of other ways in which our lives had
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changed materially in the last 60 years. And there is an ideology that's come along with that,
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and it's an ideology that sort of justifies the changes that we've seen and sets everything
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against a kind of progress narrative where everything's always getting better and things
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are just going to keep getting better as long as we stick at it. I don't believe in progress.
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I'm a progress apple state in the sense that I used to be very sort of
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straight down the line guardian reader. That makes sense in an Australian context.
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Yes, yes. My family are actually Australian. My grandmother gets the guardian week too,
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but I don't know if that's, I don't know if that's done to practice.
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The guardian here is not a, they don't print it. It's just an online publication, but not a
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lot. Okay, but you know what I mean culturally and people when I say I was a guardian reader.
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I mean, we have a lot of American listeners as well, so that would be
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broadly on the left, an NPR. It's an NPR listener, yeah, yeah. And I'm not really anymore,
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I should not say that, it's not really the guardian, but just in the sense that I'm not,
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I don't really subscribe to that notion of progress, even if I do believe with,
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even if I do agree with progressives on some things.
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You're talking about cultural progress here or technological and sort of
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humanitarian. What cultural, I mean, I suppose, I mean, I suppose technology can be understood
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in that way in the sense that it always builds on old technologies. So there is a sort of
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directionality to technological progress, which sort of makes sense. But I don't think that we
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should understand social progress in that sense. I don't, like, when it comes to women's history,
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for instance, there's this, I'm putting it clearly, but there's this
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quite dominant historical narrative of women's history that basically women were,
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women were oppressed by men up until the 20th century. And thanks to the work of feminist
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campaigners, like suffragists and so on, we sort of wriggled out from under that oppressive
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yoke and things are just going to continue in that vein and keep getting better and better.
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I don't think that's a very persuasive narrative. I think that the primary way in which
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we should be understanding women's history is actually far far more to do with material conditions,
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things like I would argue, for instance, that actually the washing machine and the microwave
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and the central heating system and so on, explain much, much more the ways in which women's lives
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changed in the 20th century than anything political. And the pill is obviously a very, very strong
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example of this, which clearly has given women more freedom in the sense that we can control our
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reproductive lives much more easily than we used to, but has come with all sorts of sometimes
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very painful trade-offs. So the case of sexual revolution is a book about those trade-offs,
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basically. And what are we meaning by the sexual revolution just so that people don't get confused?
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So I don't really write in this book about changes to working lives, which obviously
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is often comes under that banner. What I'm thinking about really is changes to sexual culture and
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sexual behaviour. And I'm really dating it from the advent of the pill in the 1960s, which was
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originally and 1950s, which was originally available to only to married women and then became
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available to unmarried women. And I think that the pill was extraordinarily transformational in
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the sense that it allowed women to suspend their fertility in a way that they'd never been able to
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in, you know, 99% plus of human history. This was simply not available. And what existed before
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in terms of laws and norms and institutions like marriage and so on, all these things existed
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to try and deal with the fact that there was no pill, you know, because the fertility was a
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a kind of hard biological limit that had to be negotiated. But then we've found technological
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ways of suspending and managing fertility. We've seen amazing social transformations,
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which I don't think actually we've rewrapped our head around. They're that recently.
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Doesn't that call, doesn't that technological transformation go hand in hand with the cultural
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transformation that took place during the sexual revolution and the second wave feminists and
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the German griers and Camille Pilots making a convincing case on traditional small,
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liberal grounds that this half of humanity needs to have all the same opportunities for human
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flourishing, whether that's professional or sexual, as the other half does.
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Yes, so the material change happens at the same time as the ideological change. And I think
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they really go hand in hand because it's worth remembering that some of this ideological change
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was happening even before the pill came on the scene. And there have always been periods in history
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where you see this sort of cycling between periods of more permissiveness followed by periods of
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more restriction. So for instance, in Britain, Georgians were much more kind of
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sexually open than their Victorian grandchildren and so on. You do see a little bit of
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reaction, encounter reaction in terms of sexual culture. And already in the 1950s and 60s,
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you had playboy, you had pin-ups, you had Marilyn Monroe, subject of this new film that's just come
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out. She lived almost all of her life actually in a world without the pill and without
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decriminalised abortion. So the sexual revolution was already sort of starting in the sense that
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there was some eccentric people who were already experimenting with new ways of living.
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But the reason I think that it stuck in this case and became so much more mainstream than
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I think at any point in human history before is because we had technological means to
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do timid political fertility that our ancestors never had. Right. What were the downsides of that?
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So I think that what we've seen is basically a move towards a sexual culture that favours
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male interests more than female in the sense that there are some really important ways in which
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men and women are different. Some of them are obvious and physical. I say obvious, I mean they're
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actually sort of a great deal of political culture which is within the last decade. But I think
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ought to be obvious and I think I think last majority of listeners are going to agree with me that
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that it's women who get pregnant, it's men who do the impregnating. And women are also significantly
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smaller and less physically stronger than men, which has all sorts of important social consequences
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in the sense that women are just much more vulnerable in any kind of heterosexual encounter,
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more vulnerable to violence and also more vulnerable in the sense that women literally bear the
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consequences of an unwanted pregnancy and have never been able to rip and run in the way
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that men have. Right. So there's that even in a world with the pill and decriminalised abortion
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and so on, you still have unwanted pregnancies, you still have women
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dealing with sometimes very painful consequences of any kind of sexual relationship that goes awry.
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And I mean one of the really perverse consequences of the pill which I think Noah would have
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expected is that you have this tech that comes along that allows women to control their fertility
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and what happens, you have a huge spike in the rates of single motherhood,
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which I think just goes to show how complicated human beings are, you know.
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It doesn't have to be a causal relationship there, does that? Can't that be concurred?
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I think there is a causal relationship because I think the secrets of what happened is this,
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I think that you have the pill end of the scene and the early pill in particular is not that
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reliable. You're talking like 90% reliability, which is still roughly the range for typical use
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now. And the pill is still the most popular prescribed method of birth control, even though you
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also have things like the coil and the arm implant and so on. The so-called long-acting
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reversal, long-acting reversible contraceptives, larks, and there have been people recently in which
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are more reliable. The early pill is not actually that reliable, but it's just reliable enough
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to really, really quickly dismantle the institutions that used to exist to basically regulate
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horny young people, right? The criticism of marriage that you often get from many second-wave
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feminists and also since is that it oppressors women to which I say, yes, it does, but I think
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it also oppressors men, or maybe more accurately repressors both men and women in the sense that
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what the marriage institution does in the period when it's really strong is it says you can't have
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sex outside of marriage. You know, any children that are born from sex outside of marriage are
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not considered legitimate in legal sense. You'll face social consequences for it. You have to
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sign up to this institution where you stand up in front of everyone and you promise to be faithful
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to this other person for the rest of your life and you have social and legal obligations to this
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other person that you have to keep. The whole point of the institution is that it does control
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people, it limits what you can do, it limits your freedom, but it also establishes a basis on which
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you can build a family on a secure footing, you know, particularly thinking from a woman's
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perspective. What the marriage contract does really is it says, this man has to support me and
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has to support my children. But when the pill comes along, I mean, the phrase I use in the book,
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which is not actually my phrase, I heard it somewhere back. I can't remember where
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is when when when motherhood became a biological choice for women, fatherhood became a social choice for
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men. In the sense that it became socially acceptable for men to say, well, this isn't my problem,
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you know, you weren't taking the pill. Look at me. I don't doubt that it's part of that
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that equation, but I mean, a Christian conservative would say that the breakdown of the family has,
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you know, causes all over the place, part of which might be the pill, but that the rise in single
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parenthood and single motherhood has all kinds of complicated cultural reasons that stretch
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beyond the pill. I mean, I think it's interesting what you say about marriage being restraining on
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both parties, because I hadn't thought about it that way, but of course, all cultural institutions
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and political institutions are there to restrain our wildest tempers, aren't they? I mean,
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we have political institutions in order to constrain our temptation for mob violence and
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retribution and tyranny. We have the church, we have marriage, we have education set up in the
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way that it does to constrain the way that people are able to misinform their own offspring.
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Aren't these the things that kind of stitch together the fabric of modern civilization,
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ways in which we voluntarily enter into restraining agreements with each other and ourselves?
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I would say, yeah, yeah, I mean, the
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an idea that has come out of liberalism, I mean, some people would say that it's not really true to
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original liberal ideals, but is the idea that freedom is almost the only virtue or is the
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virtue that has to be placed upon absolutely every single other virtue? And I think that's wrong.
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I think that it's not that freedom doesn't have value, it absolutely does, but
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in thinking about things like all the institutions that you mentioned and family relationships,
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and really any kind of relationship or property ownership or anything that sort of fixes you down
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and puts obligations on you, all of these things restrict your freedom. And actually, if you
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want to be utterly free, you can't really have any of that. You really can't have a family.
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I mean, nothing more. We started the show by talking about kids.
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Todd Lorde. Yeah, right. Like, no, I was friend. You had a baby not long after I did, and she
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said something very memorable, which is that there's nothing that will restrict your freedom more
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than having a baby except possibly going to prison. And those long nights can feel like prisons.
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I thought. Yeah. Well, within your 14th night of sleepless,
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whaling and nappy changing, it's true, but of course, there is that line for creatives that there
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is freedom in constraint that actually, if you're a poet and someone tells you to just write a poem,
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that's quite difficult. But if someone tells you to write a poem about the sensation that you get
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when you're looking at your grandmother's face, then that's actually an easier task. In the
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constraint is a certain amount of creative freedom, and maybe that's a border lesson for the rest
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of our lives as well. But I just want to clarify something that you said because I let it drop
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and I'm not quite sure what it means. You said that the pill in the sexual revolution led to
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women essentially behaving more in the interests of men, but surely prior to that, they were
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even more tools of men, were they? I think so it comes down to the ways in which men of female
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sexuality differs. And this is, I know, a potentially controversial point, but I have a whole chapter
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where I lay out the evidence on this because I think that the evidence is really, really strong,
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and I think it's actually not in our interest as feminists to ignore it. I think that there are
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certain ways in which men and women psychologically differ on average. So there are loads of
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outlines. It really needs to be understood as two overlapping bell curves. So you've got
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lots of men and women who are just somewhere in the middle in terms of these traits. And then you
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extreme tales, and it's at those extreme tales that you see the biggest difference when you're
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talking about differences in average traits. It's easiest to explain this with a whiteboard,
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the point is that on something like sexuality, so there's a trait that psychologists call
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socio-sexuality, which basically describes your eagerness to have casual sex, or your
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desire for sexual variety, which is the way that affidavits tend to phrase it. It's not quite
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the same as your sex drive, so you can be, you can potentially be so high in, have a high
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sex drive, but only want to have sex with one anonymous partner. But if you're interested in
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having lots of partners and jumping into bed quickly and doing all sorts of adventurous,
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sexual things, that probably means you're high in socio-sexuality. And there are women for whom
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that's true, but in general, and I don't think this should be a surprise to anyone who's
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lived in the world for more than five minutes, men are hiring that trait than women are,
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which is why you see, for instance, men watching a little porn and women do men buying sex
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much, much more often than women do. I mean, it's very, very unusual for women to buy sex 99%
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of them to the men, and it also means that men in general are more eager to have sex
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earlier on in a relationship, having sex on a first date, for instance. And it's very
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striking if you look at early writing of women who lived through the advent of the pill,
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and were involved in the sort of social milieu of that time that was all about free lives and all
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of this, that those women found that yes, the pill brought them benefits and that they
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didn't have to worry quite so much about, and I wanted pregnancy, although bearing in mind that
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actually it's efficacy at that era was a little bit dodgy and unreliable, but it also meant
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that actually their bargaining power was quite suddenly limited. And women will talk about the fact
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that they previously could argue with a boyfriend or a date that they couldn't have sex because
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of the risk of pregnancy, and that was a way of sort of the default answer was no, that we
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would not be having sex because of the obvious risks. But then when the pill arrived, that excuse
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didn't work anymore, and women were having to defend their own sexual boundaries in a situation
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where the default was yes, and you see, and that's a difficult thing to do, particularly because one
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of the other ways in which men and women differ psychologically is that women are more agreeable than
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men are on average, again, meaning that women have a tendency to put their own desires secondary
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to other people. And what you see, therefore, is a shift in the sexual culture where male preferences
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towards having sex earlier and having more partners and having less commitment all become
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much, much more mainstream. And we're now in a situation where for young people, including
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school age people, and it's been a long, for a long time, hook-up culture has been pretty mainstream
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on so university campuses. It's now increasingly the case at schools as well that this is sort of
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considered to be a righted passage that you will go through. And for some, I mean, or hooking up.
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Are younger people having less sex? Well, I think what's going on, yeah, that is an interesting
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paradox. I think what's going on there is that you've got simultaneously young people having,
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they are having less sex, but I think what's going on is that the sex that they are having is
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much more likely to be casual, because actually people who are in committed relationships, including
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marriages, have more sex than people who aren't, counter to all the jokes.
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When I hear you articulate this, I think of the women who I work with, I work in a majority
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women office, and my superiors are mostly women. And when this topic comes up, I think they
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regard it as being a bit of a dinosaur attitude to think that these are hard-wired biological
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differences rather than culturally constructed ones. And they would probably say that
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all of the things that you're talking about, the desire for, yes, they would
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grant that if you survey people and if you look at their behavior in our culture, the way that
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it has evolved, and with the power dynamics that are inherent in it, and the advantages that the
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crew to males in the sexual sphere and in the cultural sphere in ways of exhibiting their own
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dominance and asserting their own desires, that needless to say, men behave in traditionally
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masculine ways, and women have been acculturated to behave in traditionally feminine ways.
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But that doesn't tell us much about the way that things would be if we were all in a treated
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equally culturally and self-equently liberated in pursuing our sexual desires, and that when you
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take the lid off, I mean, I even have many left-wing male friends who think that if you to really
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took the lid off, then women are just as much horned bags as men are, but they don't sell culturally
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permitted to do that. Yeah, so that's the counter argument, and that's the kind of classic
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mainstream feminist view on this, that this is all to do with socialisation, particularly during
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childhood, and that things could be radically different if only we had different expectations of
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how men and women behave. I think that there is clearly some role of socialisation. You do see
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some variation between cultures and how men and women tend to behave. My first degree was in
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anthropology, so I'm, I use a lot of anthropological data in the book, because it's a fabulous way
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of understanding one's own culture by looking at how other cultures differ. And Tilly, there is some
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variation, but there's not that much variation, like there's no, there is no culture on the anthropological
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record where women are more eager to have casual sex than our men. And there are, kind of biological
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realities that never go away. Regardless of socialisation, you know, it is always going to be riskier
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for women to hook up with a man, because of the pregnancy risk, because of the violence risk.
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There are risks that women run that men just don't, and it means that you have to, you have to
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really, really fancy this person and really, really want to have sex for that, for that
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risk to be outweighed by the benefit to you. And clearly, there are some women for whom that's true.
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There are outliers in every possible direction, but, you know, if there is no culture in which
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we see across the board, women being more eager to hook up than men, to me, it feels like
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if you're flipping a coin a thousand times and it comes up heads every single time,
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it seems a lot more like he says, there is some, that the coin is weighted in some
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immusible way. Right, but that way too. What we are talking about is
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is biology in the end and a product of our revolutionary history, which makes perfect sense,
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because the nature of our different reproductive roles is that women just commit a lot more
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and risk a lot more through pregnancy than demand, because you've got nine months of labour,
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you've got the dangerous childbirth, you've got many, many years of infant and child care,
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where your young men can reproduce every time they orgasm. So you would expect us to have
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different attitudes towards such relationships on that basis. Yes, can I just tease a part,
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aren't there two ways that the coin can be weighted? The one way in which the coin, the coin toss
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can be weighted, is the evolutionary biological way, which says that there are big differences between
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male and female sexual drives, but then the knockaway, which it sounds like you may be conflating
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with that, is that there are practical material reasons why it's more dangerous or at least
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in a man. Then the cultural relativist, I suppose, can come back and say, well, yeah,
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that's why we need to eliminate those reasons. So if men weren't violent and women had total
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autonomy over their own reproductive systems, then you would have erased the waiting of the coin,
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and that those facts don't tell us anything about whether there's an innate biological
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difference in sexual authority. I don't think that you can eliminate those differences.
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I mean, that's the project, right? So the idea from people who think that is a product
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of socialisation is to say, okay, we get rid of all the ways in which women are put
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into disadvantage or women are disincentivised from having sex like men, from hugging up.
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I mean, we can get onto this, but I don't know who decided that that was like the ideal way of
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having sex with women. That's right, that this was aspirational, but whatever. If that's the goal,
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we say, okay, we educate men in ways that make them less likely to commit sexual violence.
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I don't know, change the cultural narrative so that women aren't shamed for wanting to have
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those kind of sexual relationships and so on. I don't know how you eliminate the difference in
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physical strength, unless you want to say that we give women firearms. Yeah, I was just saying
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that America, you know, feminists case for this kind of amendment, yeah. That's a really hard one
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though, how do you deal with that essential inequality? The contraception thing,
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yeah, women contraception gets more effective every day, so you potentially do reach the point
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where there really is no pregnancy risk, but then I think the problem that we get to is that actually
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we're really overestimating or the people who propose that project are really overestimating
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the extent to which we're really masters of our own bodies and our own minds. You know, we've
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we spent 95% of our species history as hunter-gatherers and there are a lot of ways in which
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we haven't really, our brains haven't really moved, moved out of that. Our brains and our bodies
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are still to some extent expecting that set of conditions, even though we've obviously changed
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radically in the role, sorts of ways in which evolution, psychologists have identified that
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that history feeding into our contemporary behaviour in terms of things like, yeah, how we
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behave on Twitter is an influence by a revolutionary history. And I think it's very clear from the
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research and this goes stronger every day that our sexual behaviour is too. And I think the
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problem that a lot of women are encountering, and this is I think the problem with with viewing
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this all as we're taking the blank slate view and doing this all as something that we could kind
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rewrite culturally, is that it's increasingly normal now for women of of my age and younger
33:03
and 30 to view having sex like a man is aspirational and actually as compulsory. And
33:14
there's a lot of effort that women put in to suppressing feelings of discomfort and distress
33:22
in response to sexual encounters that they actually are not necessarily, they don't entirely want,
33:28
although they don't entirely want on these kind of casual terms, the hook-up culture, it's
33:33
births. And there's also a server data showing that women feel more regret, more distress, more
33:44
there's a negative impact to their self-esteem and so on, which men are not experiencing
33:49
after these encounters, women are also very unlikely to orgasm in these encounters, so the actual
33:54
kind of sexual benefit to them is pretty slight. And I think what's going on is that actually
34:04
it's really, really hard to train yourself out of your instinctive responses and you can only
34:13
really get so far with it. And I think more over, why should we try? Why is this the goal
34:23
that we should be encouraging women to have sex like men to imitate male sexuality?
34:29
When actually I don't think there's anything wrong with typical female sexuality?
34:35
It's hard to know, isn't it from the outside the extent to which women are young women are
34:43
pursuing more casual partners because there's an expectation for them to do so and the extent to which
34:50
the increase in casual sex over the past couple of generations is taking the lead off a pressure
34:58
cooker that had been suppressed for centuries. So I'm not sure how we would arrive at a conclusion
35:04
about whether or not the women with the false consciousness who are merely doing what society
35:10
and culture expects them to do are the ones pre-sexual revolution who did everything that men
35:20
required of them or the ones post-sexual revolution who, according to your theory, it sounds like
35:25
are doing everything that feminists require of them. Maybe now they're just more free to pursue
35:32
the good life as they see it. I don't think they're doing what feminists are asking of them. I mean,
35:38
I think that some feminists are kind of cheering on this culture in a way that I think is unwise,
35:44
but I don't think it's, I don't think it's, I think false consciousness is too
35:50
too stark a way of putting it. Don't think it's that there's a sort of elaborate conspiracy.
35:58
I don't think that anyone is kind of imposing this culture top down in any way. I think what
36:05
it is is that the incentive structure has changed and that the culture has changed. And particularly
36:11
when you're thinking about young people, we know that anyone who's been a teenager, I mean, we know
36:17
that the teenagers are wildly preoccupied with what's normal, with what's cool, with what other
36:24
people are doing. I don't think it's outrageous to suggest that young women and young men
36:30
are responding to the cues around them and to what other people are doing and what seems to be
36:36
aspirational and making their sexual decisions on that basis, which of course they have always done.
36:42
And it used to just be that the sexual culture was different and what was considered if it was
36:46
desirable was different. And instead of girls now being shames for being frigid brewed,
36:54
girls would previously have been shames for being too promiscuous. So it's just kind of
36:58
flipped in that in that way. What I'm arguing now is that I think that the template which is now
37:06
which is now dominant and which is I think falsy represented as being just as you say kind of
37:12
relieving the pressure cooker and just allowing women to sort of finally be free and behave
37:16
sexually as they would they would have always liked to is that I think that actually the current
37:21
sexual culture is encouraging women to do things that actually aren't even their interests
37:29
and are so much more in the interests of the Hugh Heffner's of the World. I start the book by
37:34
talking about Marilyn Monroe and Hugh Heffner as this kind of perfect example of to
37:40
male and female icons of sexual revolution who experiences sexual revolution in extremely
37:45
different ways. And Heffner you know Heffner had a ball I mean I think he did in the end end up
37:52
being a pretty pathetic old figure but he as an attractive high status man he was interested
38:02
very clearly very high in in social sexuality and very interested in having as many partners as
38:06
possible and always having his kind of blonde hurrying around him all times. It was usually in his
38:13
interest to to be in a in a culture where any of the old restrictions were were done away with
38:20
and it was easier to persuade women into bed than ever before but the problem is that there
38:26
there is a real that is not the preference of the typical woman is basically the problem
38:34
and there are even though there are some women who I think sincerely share those preferences
38:43
when we're talking about what norms should be what kind of cultural template should exist
38:52
I think that we have to be thinking about what what protects the interests of
38:59
that majority of women and I and I don't think that this kind of no holds bar I'll suppose
39:05
sexual liberation does that one interesting controversy that keeps seeming to arise is how we talk
39:13
about women young women keeping themselves safe from sexual violence I don't know if it's the same
39:20
in the UK but relatively frequently here in Australia there'll be an apology that has to be
39:27
issued by some police chief for mayor because after an incidence of sexual violence or some other
39:37
violent individual who might be on the run they the mayor or the police chief will say something
39:42
like you know don't walk through the park at night alone if you're a woman or you know
39:46
be careful who you talk to or some such thing and then everybody says you're blaming the victim
39:53
and you're saying that it's this happened most memorably when the mayor of Aubrey I think yes
39:58
said that women shouldn't walk through the park at night alone and then had to come out the following
40:03
day and apologize for saying that because we should be focusing on the male who was the threat
40:09
rather than the women who were doing anything wrong they should have every right to walk through
40:14
a park at night as much as they want and it's it seems a rather esoteric response to me when
40:23
you're talking about something as brave as the well-being of a young woman it seems it seems more
40:30
esoteric and less pragmatic than you might want do you have a take on that yeah I mean I think that
40:38
it's I used to work in in a rate crisis centre before I became a journalist so I am very
40:47
sensitive to this issue of victim blaming I mean I think what feminists really mean when they
40:51
talk about this this kind of victim blaming languages the worry is that if we if we go around saying
40:57
that women shouldn't be doing should shouldn't be doing things that potentially put them at risk
41:03
then when or if they are attacked police and juries and and newspapers and so on
41:12
are going to be less willing to to take the side of the victim and to to properly
41:19
go after her attacker because the the idea is that actually she she's partly culpable and you
41:25
know obviously I feel as though the attacker is solely to blame regardless of the circumstances
41:31
and that that fear of um swaying juries and so on is a is a real one but I also think that there is
41:41
a certain hypocrite going on um in that we all tell our loved ones to do things like this
41:50
and we all take precautions ourselves and you know ask our friends to text us when they get home
41:57
and tell our daughters and our sisters and whatever um not to do certain risky things
42:04
but for some reason there's a well not for some reason I know the reason there is a
42:10
publicly you're not supposed to say that and I think that that kind of deliberate
42:19
deliberate difference between public and and private discourse
42:22
the problem I think with doing that is that there are girls particularly and and women but we're
42:30
particularly talking about girls and really young women here who actually don't have anyone telling
42:35
them that who don't who don't have access to that private discourse where you're told to do all
42:40
all the all the sensible things and are actually you know young people in particular are so
42:49
I'm so desperately needed guidance I mean I think this is one of the ways in which
42:54
progressiveism as a sort of ideology um that we that we spoke about at the top of the show the idea
42:59
of everything a history set on this kind of linear path one of the problems whether
43:05
is that it really valorizes um youth and assumes that new ideas are necessarily
43:12
better ideas that you have to have this constant process of renewal you do this even with like
43:19
an example I use is um in the book as if the friends the American TV show which is
43:26
as all of a sudden has loads of articles you know mystical kind of articles about
43:31
how problematic it is and how it doesn't but the the the speed of rejecting old things
43:39
is amazing right like the the actors and friends aren't even middle-aged yet
43:45
and they're really considered problematic so yeah but the problem with that whole view of things is
43:51
it means that you're basically valorizing in experience and making it very difficult for
43:58
for young people to to learn from older generations and the problem is that you know teenage girls
44:05
really don't know so yeah many of this basic safety stuff and they they really don't know
44:11
anything about the dark side of male sexuality and you know in a way that's kind of lovely
44:17
that they are so um so innocent of the of the world's horrors but it also does make them very
44:24
vulnerable and I think that we do them into service when we are not honest um about things like
44:33
you know not just walking through a park at night but things like um getting really really drunk
44:39
in public that's not something that used to be considered um a good idea or social acceptable even
44:45
in the even in the 80s and 90s that was not that was not a a typical thing um whereas now
44:55
now it is and I think that it's one of those things that we say we might we might
45:04
privately advise our friends to to go steady or to um you know look out for our friends and
45:12
when they're out drunk and so on like we sort of have private private systems of trying to
45:18
mitigate the risks um but they do fail and um yeah I'm not that I had this conversation
45:27
actually with group young people recently who came to a literary festival that I was speaking at
45:31
and we we I spoke to them afterwards and they were saying but shouldn't people be allowed to make
45:37
their own mistakes and say yes I mean that is to some extent a part of life you do have to
45:42
just learn through experience the problem is that there are certain mistakes that will destroy
45:47
your life and I don't know if we want to be sort of asking young women to play Russian roulette
45:57
not actually knowing that that's what they're doing. I'm not even sure I'm not even sure how much
46:06
they don't know that they're doing it in the sense that I'm not sure I agree that
46:11
we're keeping a generation insulated from the reality of male violence at least in Australia there's
46:17
been a real reckoning in the past five to eight years of the the pauling behavior of some men
46:27
in the halls of parliament house and the unessential ones of media and politics and business
46:34
and if anything now I think I mean I hesitate to bite my tongue to say that I think it's exaggerated
46:41
because I don't want to downplay the reality of a hardship but I think the the commonplace view
46:47
among many of my female friends is that pretty much most men are potential rapists and you really are
46:55
risking yourself being with putting yourself in any kind of a compromising situation with another
47:02
human being who may be a male member of the species it makes me wonder whether or not the you
47:08
mustn't tell a girl not to walk through the park at night when there's a rapist around you mustn't
47:13
tell a woman not to wear provocative clothing when she's going to be surrounded by a lot of drunk
47:20
forny young men you mustn't tell a woman not to get blackout drunk on a university campus when
47:26
she's going to be surrounded with males she doesn't know whether or not that messaging is actually
47:30
an attempt to defy reality rather than a naivety or an ignorance of reality it almost seems
47:40
like precisely because male sexual violence is so ubiquitous we're going to insist on creating
47:49
a new reality in which we deny at its place and behave as if it weren't there as if we can
47:56
extinguish it through sheer force of will and language that i don't know if that makes any sense
48:02
but that does fake it the fake it till you make it till you make it baby yeah yeah yeah i'm
48:09
hungry it isn't it isn't interesting apparent contradiction in that you get on the one hand
48:16
sometimes sometimes yeah hyperbolic language about the extent of male sexual violence i mean i
48:29
really do think that hashtag not all men is true to the i mean it's just patently true to the
48:36
fact that the vast majority of men are not rapists or potential rapists and there's actually
48:45
lab research demonstrating this where you you could come in up to various or men or women
48:51
you hook them up to various gadgets and they'll tell you they kind of measure sexual response and
48:56
the majority of men when they're shown kind of violent sexual imagery are not are not
49:02
they're not interested in it they're not they're not a risk um the issue of course is that you
49:07
don't know you don't know which yeah dangerous and which went on yeah um there are some indicators
49:12
but not that many um so how do you manage this i mean that i think that the i think that the fake
49:20
it till you make it strategy is a is a poor one but it it's rooted in the idea that we spoke about
49:29
earlier that all of this is to do with socialization and then actually what the project needs to be
49:35
a cultural one in terms of you know remaking people's ideas and right and so much emphasis on
49:41
things like consent workshops in schools as a as a solution to um as a solution to these kind of
49:49
aggressive impulses i mean i don't think that consent workshops are bad um i i've taught those of
49:56
in my time i think they're fine i don't think that there's silver bullet by any means and i think
50:01
that actually the thing that they do is different from what most people think that they do i don't
50:07
think that they dissuade anyone from being sexually violent i think what they do is they they tell
50:14
victims or potential victims um what the law is and and that they're allowed to kick up a bus and
50:20
they're allowed to go to the police authorities if if someone um assaults them and they also provide
50:27
a kind of institutional they set the institutional line in the diva school or a university or whatever
50:34
tells its students in a content workshop that this is the law you're not allowed to break it
50:38
if if students are found so have been doing so then they then they can come down hard on them so
50:44
they're not useless but also this idea that you can just re-educate um potential aggressors
50:54
i think is naive to the point of being dangerous yeah that's interesting i hadn't really superimposed
51:02
the nature versus nurture debate or seen it as an underpinning of all of this but i think you're
51:09
right that it's almost like if you can just tell all men not to rape then they'll as a cohort be
51:20
less likely to do so which may be somewhat true in the sense that there can be a conversational
51:26
intolerance amongst men you can encourage men to have to be more intolerant towards misogynistic
51:33
points of view and sexist opinions when they hear them but whether or not there's a direct
51:38
nexus between that kind of cultural nicety and violent rapists being deterred from
51:44
violently raping people is another question because that is such a small cohort of men which doesn't
51:52
mean that they don't commit a lot of offenses they do and lots of women's lives are deranged by it
51:58
but you know the vast majority of men have never considered doing it and will never do it
52:04
so the extent to which you can kind of shoehorn the bad people out of the equations simply by
52:12
requiring all the the rest of the males to shoulder more responsibility for the minority and
52:19
then myths that we're usually not even aware of yeah i think you do need to believe that it's all
52:25
stemming from a cultural conversation rather than the biology of human depravity in order to get
52:34
there i mean while we're on this i'll let i want to let you go soon and it's getting late here but
52:39
while we're on the nature versus nurture thing once outside of the sexual realm in terms of
52:44
interest you talked about agreeability and stuff but i don't let you go without touching on
52:49
the paid disparity why there are so many politicians and CEOs who are still men the google memo
52:56
that people might remember which one google engineer wrote about there being engineer you know
53:00
differences in interests in engineering and things like why are why are boys and men interested in
53:06
boyish managed things and and and girls not and does that explain any of the things that my feminist
53:14
colleagues would say are all down to power structures and sexism
53:21
yeah it's those bell curves again just some extent so so a non comprehensive list of ways in which
53:29
men and women do seem to differ on average agreeableness is one women tend to be more
53:36
um easily nice to put it colloquially um neuroticism women tend to be more anxious and depressive than
53:45
men um risk taking men are more risk tolerant than women are that's partly linked to age as well
53:53
so young men are more risk tolerant which means things like you know they want to be formula one
54:00
racism and and have you know go to war and all these physically risky things but it also means
54:07
things like being um risk taking as an entrepreneur or whatever which is has plays into professional
54:15
realm right um the sexual gap we've talked about um this thing this this interesting people
54:23
versus interested in things um phenomenon again you know you're explain that it's funny how a lot
54:30
of very clever people um really struggle to wrap their heads around the idea of overlapping bell
54:36
curves and the fact that if you're saying that men tend to be this and you're really not saying
54:41
this is an absolute thing by any means and and people tend to say oh but I know this person who
54:46
isn't like that at all which to which you say of course fine though that's completely
54:50
compatible within the model it's just that at the population level I mean what what James
54:54
Damon was talking about in the Google memo is that the tippy tippy tippy tip of the most highly
55:02
skills you know people who are obsessed with things i.e. Google engineers um and given the fact
55:12
that you do see this this skew you would expect that extreme tale to mostly have men in it
55:19
which is not to say that they won't sometimes be some woman but the fact that there's any kind of
55:23
disproportionality doesn't doesn't isn't evidence in and of itself of their community kind
55:28
discrimination in hiring practices I mean the other thing that you you've also got to remember is
55:34
that the gender pay gap is really a motherhood to pay gap because actually women are slightly
55:40
out earning men in their 20s now and actually a lot of the traits that we talked about like
55:45
agreeableness and uh conscientiousness is another one women tend to be slightly more conscientious
55:50
than men on average those are actually traits that are very well suited to the modern mega
55:54
market um if you're working in a knowledge economy or subsequently kind of role being agreeable
56:01
and conscientious is very helpful and we increasingly live in a world where where male physical strength
56:08
or physical strength in general which of course is possessed mostly by men has so much
56:12
their economic importance there just aren't many jobs like that still existing so what we used to be
56:19
have profound you know think of for the men kind of extracting coal from the ground to keep society
56:24
running um increasingly those jobs are a melting way and it means that the male physical strength
56:32
doesn't have the importance that it used to which is why you see women um increasingly dominating
56:38
certain jobs until they have children and then their earnings fall to cliff um and uh that's
56:45
really the source of the gender pay gap overall particularly when children are little so
56:53
so go ahead well i was just gonna say so Louise my i have five year old twins a boy and a girl when
57:01
they are our age entering middle age do you think that the world will be more do you think that
57:10
gender roles will be more or less defined and will there be less more or less difference between
57:19
the sexual behavior of men and women that's such an interesting question i think that the
57:26
i think that our economy now encourages at least in the world of work a sort of
57:37
gender neutrality um in that actually what up
57:44
what what is best for profit and for GDP is is basically just treating running women as kind of
57:53
undifferentiated worker widgets um it was obviously hugely hugely the the the the world of work
58:01
that we inhabit now is so profoundly opposed to family formation um basically for women because
58:09
just the biological reality is that you've got to take more time out if you um if you're pregnant
58:14
and afterwards and um and women do tend to have more of a kind of biological tug towards
58:20
being with their children than men do which means that women are more likely to want to step out
58:25
of the workforce so um but but what's happening on that front is that is that people are just having
58:31
a lot less children and this is this is obviously the big the big story of this century is birthright
58:38
falling off a cliff and the fact that we're very soon going to be going into population decline
58:41
because i mean there are a whole bunch of reasons for that but one of them is to do the fact that
58:46
working lives are just really incompatible with with family formation so yeah so in 30 years time
58:55
40 years time where are what experience our children can have i don't know i mean i think that
59:02
i think that that kind of gender difference does have a way of popping its head up in unexpected
59:06
places i think even if you suppress it in one area of life i think people tend to be drawn towards
59:14
that kind of polarity in other areas of life um the example i give in the book is of um
59:21
bdsm which has become super super mainstream in recent years and partly that's to do with the
59:28
porn industry but i think it's also partly to do with the fact that i think when we are living
59:33
more kind of gender neutral lives people for some reason seem to be drawn towards almost play
59:40
acting at extreme versions of masculinity and dignity um i think that's what i think that's a
59:46
a massive reason why bdsm has become as popular as it has which does suggest that there is something to
59:52
do with does suggest that this is irrepressible in some way it's just all about how it's expressed
1:00:01
you're making me wonder whether there's something to do with the rise of the org right
1:00:05
and the far right there as well in terms of this traditional obsession with traditional masculine
1:00:13
tropes um i mean there's a whole probably a whole political conversation for another day about
1:00:18
the the expression of gender in uh sort of meta politics uh there i definitely see some sort
1:00:27
of a craving across the across certain cohorts of of male populations for
1:00:36
less a feat compromise and more traditionally masculine certainty in affairs maybe that's an
1:00:43
echo maybe you'll come back with the materialist action if that in the economic one but uh
1:00:48
yeah it could be cultural too Louise thank you for your time it's i feel like we've only
1:00:52
scratched the surface but it's uh it's uh what it's great to hear your point of view and next time
1:00:58
you write a book we're gonna have a four-hour conversation instead hello for a trip thank you so much
1:01:07
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