"Casual Sex Is Almost Always Dangerous For Women!" This Is What Casual Sex Is Really Doing To Women - Louise Perry
Guests: Louise
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
§01Transcript — part 1
I think casual sex is almost always more risky for women than it's worth it. Why? Because, one... The things you're saying, you know that they're unpopular, but you're saying them anyway. Yeah. Why? Parents are really worried about their daughters and also their sons and really, really want them to know this stuff. Louise Perry, journalist, author and podcast host. She is renowned for her views on topics such as sexual politics and the impact of modern feminist movements.
She's a journalist. We have a culture that prioritises male preferences for casual sex. And you're saying it harms both men and women? I think in different ways. So, for example, a lot of young women kind of go along with it. Even if they don't want that, that causes a lot of misery. Because women in particular tend to get emotionally bonded from sex more than men do. Do we know that? Yeah. But there are also other problems that we should talk about.
So... Would it be better for men if we waited longer before we had sex? Waiting until engagement is a better call. The problem is when you don't have the expectation that people wait, there's really nothing stopping those very attractive high-status men from playing the field and not being forced to commit. And then low-status men just have none. When people are left to their own devices on dating apps and you monitor it carefully, this is basically what you see.
But in a monogamous system, you have to commit to a woman and remove yourself from the dating pool. So what is the uncomfortable advice that both men and women need to hear on this subject for their best interests? This is a profound problem and it's partly because I think we don't tell the truth about it, which is... And governments know this, which is why they're starting to freak out. Louise, in this season of your life, what is your objective?
And why is that your objective? Well... as is kind of obvious. I'm in the having baby season of my life. It's a really interesting experience living the exact sort of social phenomena that I sell off and write and talk about, which is basically the role of women... in participating in public life and the inherent ways in which the fact that women bear children comes into conflict with that, which is very much the subject of my first book, this question of like, if you can artificially suspend that, if the pill arrives...
the 1960s, and suddenly women can go from being constantly, I don't want to say at risk of pregnancy, because that's not the right word. Pregnancy is a good thing, but constantly having to negotiate the possibility of pregnancy, and then suddenly a new technology comes along, first time in the history of the world, which pretty much cuts that out. What does that do to women's... public role, the social experience of being a woman. And my argument is it's had so much more of a profound effect than we tend to acknowledge, right?
because the fact that it's women who bear children is so, so, so socially important in terms of our ability to work, our economic vulnerabilities, our ability to participate in politics, all of this. And the pill is just this enormous game changer where suddenly it's a choice. And I'm in a season of my life where I've chosen it. For anybody that is not watching on video, Louise is six months pregnant. So that's the reference. With my second baby.
What is it that you think society at large disagrees with you on as it relates to these issues? I think that most people, well, most people. I think that the kind of dominant narrative is that this has been an unambiguously good thing and there's been no trade-offs. And I think there is ambiguity and there have been trade-offs. That's basically the disagreement. And I think there are pretty much trade-offs with everything, not least a massively, massively consequential new technology like the pill.
Do you think the net impact of the pill is positive or negative? I suppose it depends on which area of your life you're talking about. So I think that one of the things that the pill and other reliable contraception, one of the ways in which it's magical and really good is that it allows people to be It allows people to plan their families. It allows women to have spaces between births, which are healthy. It's really, like, in a lot of cases, it's really bad for you to be constantly pregnant, right?
It has a really, really deleterious effect on the body. So on that front, fantastic. And on a personal level, fantastic. The trade-offs are normally in other areas of... life like well like we have massively falling birth rates and there are political and economic problems arising from that um that's not just downstream with a pill but the pill is a really big part of that story sexual culture has changed so much um and i think that causes a lot of misery particularly for uh younger women women who are younger than me Sexual culture has changed in what regard?
In that I think that it has shifted towards, and you'll be careful here, because what I don't want to say is that the sexual revolution has been fabulous for men in general. I think that a lot of men have not done well by it. But I think in general that the really big winners from the sexual revolution have been a small subset of men. So what I write about in the book is the Hugh Hefner's of the world, right? Hugh Hefner who found a Playboy magazine.
Massive sexual appetites and are attractive and can basically have as many women as they want. Don't have to get married to them because Christianity has faded away. Don't have to worry about unwanted pregnancies because of a pill. You know, for they've had a ball. And I think that what we've seen in the culture is more of a... sort of the centre of gravity has moved more towards their preferences. And some women are okay with that. You know, some women genuinely enjoy the sort of being the playgirl, right?
But most don't. I think that there is some important average differences between men and women psychologically, not least, I mean, that's not just what I think, like the data is, I think, unimpeachable on this, and not least when it comes to sexuality and a cultural, culture that prioritises male preferences when it comes to sexuality is going to be more costly to women. So who are you, Louise? And what experiences in your life and what sort of upbringing has informed the way that you see the world?
I started off as a very kind of basically holding the mainstream progressive view, being very kind of conventional in my thinking. I went to a very, very progressive university, School of Oriental and African Studies in London. And when I left university, I worked for charities, including working at a rape crisis centre, which was... which had a significant effect on me in the sense that... I was very familiar with sort of standard feminist theory.
Standard feminist theory says men and women are basically the same. There aren't any real important differences between us, either physical or psychological, apart from, you know, the baby's bit, whatever, who cares. And that sexual violence, rape, is not about sexual desire. It's about power. It's a power play thing. It's all sort of understood in political terms. And then I actually went to work with victims and I noticed things, I sort of couldn't help but notice things about what they'd been through that made me think, I don't think that's true.
Like, you know that the modal victim of sexual violence is 15? It's really young, right? Really young. And also the age of... perpetrators is also skews quite young, like teens and 20s is the most common age group. And one of the things I noticed or couldn't help but notice is that perpetrators, basically the peak age of perpetration for men, young men, is the same as testosterone peak. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah, it's the same curve. It's also the same curve you see in other kinds of violent crime.
There's basically just testosterone rises a lot in your mid-teens and then drops in your 30s. And it's basically during that period that, I mean, there's a massive upside to this as well. Like, you know, testosterone is also the drug of the hormone of being adventurous and risk-taking. And there's a lot of upsides to having that sort of youthful male energy The downside is things like rape. And ditto, the peak age of female victimisation is also peak fertility.
So what's your conclusion from that? That it's not about power, it's about biology. Or it's not just, you know, if you look at, say, sexual harassment in the workplace, it's rare for like junior men to sexually harass senior women, right? Yeah. So there clearly is an element of people that sort of making decisions based on social power structures and so on. But I know when it comes down to it, this is a biological phenomenon. It's also not unique to humans.
Other animals, other primates are also sexually aggressive, you know, basically for the same reasons. So sort of what we're dealing with is like a, is an eternal problem. How do we... How do we channel male aggression in the right directions? How do we protect young women during these vulnerable years? This is a profound problem and it's a problem that every society faces. And I don't think that we deal with it as well as we could. Partly because I think we don't tell the truth about it.
And not least feminists don't tell the truth about it. Because if you say, oh, there are no physical differences between men and women, male and female sexuality is basically the same, women having as much freedom, sexual freedom as possible is obviously the best possible thing, you know. I think what you end up doing by telling these untruths, frankly, I mean, people say these things with the best will in the world. But what you end up doing is actually putting young women at risk.
Young women who don't... who don't know the truth because how could they? You know, 15-year-old girls, and I say this as someone who used to be a 15-year-old girl and has also spoken to lots of 15-year-old girls who've really learned this the hard way, they don't know, they don't know these realities about, you know, the fact that, like, men have double the upper body strength that women do on average, which means they can punch twice as hard as women can on average.
You know, things like that. I think that we, I think we should be more honest with these people. young women, then that was my motivation for writing the book. And also why I ended up, partly as a consequence of working in a rape crisis, ended up moving politically and becoming more sceptical of a lot of sort of dominant political ideas. So if we think the understanding of the physical and psychological differences between men and women are central to understanding how we should respond and behave and the advice that we should give to men and women, we should probably talk about what those differences are.
You mentioned physical differences between men and women. So strength being one of them. Yeah. Are there any other physical differences that are really pertinent to this subject? Yeah. So strength sports are the biggest gap between men and women. Sort of sprinting cardio, like short distance, there's also a big gap. And it's funny, when you look at the numbers of like the fastest man in the world, the fastest woman in the world, they're not that different.
But if women did not have their own reserved sporting categories, there would be no women in elite sport. Because the fastest woman in the world would be the thousandth fastest man in the world or something like that. Because once you're getting into elite sports levels, that's when these differences become very... obvious. And there's this expression that's, I think it's the golden ratio in endurance sport where women are always, it's like 85% or something of what men are.
The very most accomplished elite female athlete and the very most accomplished male athlete. There's always this gap. So anyway, so the cardio differences are not massive. The strength differences are pretty big. This physical difference, what does this then mean for the subjects we were talking about as it relates to sort of sexuality and society more generally? So it means, for instance, that I think casual sex is almost always more risky for women than it's worth it.
For women. Why? Because being, one, being alone with a man that you don't know, basically, is what we're talking about, is inherently dangerous for women just because of that physical asymmetry. Two, because women are the ones who get pregnant. Like even with the pill, even with the most reliable contraception, you've still got that small chance. And so that either means that you... carry a pregnancy to term with all of its physical risks and emotional risks, or it means you have an abortion.
Like basically all of those costs are borne by the woman. The man might have no idea if this has even occurred, right? So there's this sign of essential asymmetry there. which you can try and get past with technology, with contraceptive technology, but you can't quite. You know, it's still there. The psychological differences between the sexes in terms of sexuality are also important. They're not as massive as, say, upper body strength, but on average they are very, very marked, and one of those differences is that men are basically keener on casual sex than women are.
Men want to jump into bed more quickly than women do. How do we know that? Looking cross-culturally is one big clue. Because you might say, and some people do say, like there are these studies, they're quite funny, where researchers will go onto university campuses and get an attractive woman, an attractive man, and they go up to members of the opposite sex and basically proposition them and say, like, do you want to go back to mine right now? And in 0% of cases, do women say yes.
0% and this is consistent whereas in quite a high proportion of cases men will say yes right and that is consistent across it's been done in different times different places you know you might say oh it's because women are scared of slut shaming or you know that there's like a social penalty for women and that's a little bit true but then when you see There's been surveys done of basically every country in the world, to my knowledge. And in no country do women watch more porn than men.
In no country do women express more of a desire for casual sex than men do. In no country do women buy sex more than men do. It's basically only men who buy sex. It's very, very rare for women to buy sex. When you see these gaps absolutely everywhere, I think that's a very strong indication that you're dealing with something innate. That should be, that should certainly, that's certainly the simplest explanation, isn't it? Rather than that you, you know, you flip the coin a thousand times and it comes up heads every time.
It's that plausible. Is there anything in the animal kingdom that might refute that point? Is there any, you know, certain animals where the woman is the dominant sort of sexual aggressor? So yes, but not animals that are similar to us. So like spiders or something like that. In terms of other primates, I mean, there is variation with other primates. Bonobos are quite into casual sex, for instance. Bonobos are quite different. Because people do get a little bit triggered.
Because you're not saying that women don't enjoy sex at all. You're not saying that they aren't as horny in certain situations as men. But you're just saying, on average, men are more keen on casual sex than women are. Yes. Yes. Yes. And there are always outliers. Of course. I mean, you're talking about overlapping bell curves, right? Yeah. So the average is different. But the thing with overlapping bell curves is it's more obvious at the tails.
So, for instance, like people who buy sex or people who become addicted to porn or something, they're basically entirely male because you're talking about this sort of tippy-tippy tail of people who really, really desire sexual variety. Yeah. Most people obviously are not out there. Most people are somewhere in the middle. But when you're talking about culture, you need to be thinking about the big picture. You need to be thinking like, okay, what does a culture of casual sex, how would a culture of casual sex affect men and women differently?
And how does it affect women differently? Because if you're saying that it's innate, it's not a sort of social construct. There's something deep within our wiring in men and women that makes us have a different sort of proclivity towards sex, casual sex. Why does that have a consequence that's negative for women? Basically, what women are more likely to want is monogamy, like not necessarily marriage, but certainly signals of commitment. If you think about this in our evolutionary, in terms of our evolutionary history, it makes perfect sense, right?
Because having sex is pretty much the most consequential thing a woman can do, right? Because if you get pregnant, you've got... Nine months of pregnancy, which is risky in itself. Childbirth, which is very risky in the ancestral environment, less so now, fortunately. And then you've got maybe 15 years or something of having to look after a child until it's capable of being economically self-sufficient. That's an enormous thing to happen in your life.
And it also means that women can only really reproduce once a year, absolute max, right? Whereas men in theory can reproduce thousands of times a year and can have basically no involvement in raising the children, but take basically no risks whatsoever. So if you look at it in those terms, of course women would be pickier. Of course they would. And that is indeed what we see. But I think that what we're, I think that the reason that young women express so much unhappiness at the moment with the social culture is that a lot of young women kind of go along with it.
I know this is kind of surprising to men, right? And I've spoken to men about this who find this completely bemusing. They're like, why would... If you don't want to have sex, don't have sex. It's fine. Like, what's the big problem? Like, women are so lucky because they can't step out onto the street without being propositioned. They can have, you know, they have so much choice. Like, you know, you girls are so lucky. What are you complaining about?
And I think it's this problem that one, okay, two problems. One is that both sexes are not necessarily very good at understanding what the other sex actually want. And that's partly comes from the fact that I don't think we're honest enough about sex differences. So like men think that the fact that women can get casual sex at any time of any day is... is amazing. And women are like, but I don't want that. That's like horrible. I don't want to shag some random man on the street, right?
So there's that gap in sort of, there's that empathy gap. And similarly, I think women have an empathy gap. Like they probably don't realise how, they don't realise, one, how many men basically don't have access to any kind of sexual relationships and feel incredibly... resentful and frustrated about that they don't realize how scary it is for men to approach a woman things like that so there's like a mutual sort of incomprehension um and i think the other thing is men find it very hard to imagine doing what a lot of young women do which is basically going along with sex that they don't really want to have because they want to be polite and because they don't want to scare off a man who maybe they do fancy, and because they don't want to be uncool, and because they don't want to be weird, and they don't want to be a prude.
You know, one of the features of teenage girl psychology, and maybe this is into the 20s as well, but particularly teenage girls, is teenage girls are so, so concerned about what's normal. Whenever you have contagious mental illnesses, which like historically are quite common. So something like the Salem witch trials. Apparently girls are now giving, like getting Tourette's from TikTok because it's like a viral thing on TikTok. Hysteria in the 19th century, anorexia.
There's a lot of examples of these, right, where mental illnesses, which are seen to be socially contagious, people catch it from each other. You end up with this mimetic effect. They always start with teenage girls, always. Sometimes they spread to other groups, but teenage girls are always like the first, you know. And I think it's because teenage girls, probably for self-protective reasons, there must be some adaptive reason here, are very, very socially sensitive.
They're very like constantly... aware of their social position, what other people are doing, what's cool, what's not cool, obsessed, which is also translates to things like fashion and slang, slang, ditto, you know, a lot of slang starts with teenage girls because they're this very, this very mimetic group, right? And that's fine, that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does sometimes have bad effects. And one of them is, for instance, the idea that being a prude is incredibly cringe has taken hold really, really effectively among this group of girls.
And so, you know, I'll talk to girls or read or listen to girls saying like, you know, I went along with the most, like, degrading, upsetting, whatever, sexual things because, like, I don't know why, because I wanted him to think I was cool, because I didn't, you know. And I think that's something that... I think that's something that a lot of people find difficult to empathise with. And we'll say, and some men do say, in criticism of my position, like, why don't these girls just sort of get a grip?
When you say that there's young girls and women going along with it, are you talking about both the type and the frequency of sex? Or are you just talking about the casual sex and then the different ways people have sex, like BDSM and choking and these kinds of things? Yeah, so all of the above. Okay. I mean, I think particularly it's the, BDSM is a bit of a complicated one. We'll get to that then. Yeah, we can get onto that. We'll separate that one.
In terms of the casual sex thing, so like having sex on a first date kind of thing. Historically, very, very, very rare. Like such a weird cultural convention. And you think that happened because...? Because the pill, number one. Because it means that you can do it without it being... without pregnancy being at high risk. And I think it all ends up being downstream of that, that it then changes. Like, it basically used to be... You can actually read accounts of women who were... who were in their 20s, say, at the time when the pill came along.
And they'll say, I used to... It used to be the case that you'd go out on a date... And the expectation is we will not be having sex. Right. That was the that was the agreed upon thing. Not to say it never happened. Obviously it did. But that was the default. And then you might have sex on engagement or when you get married or maybe when you're going steady. You know, that expression you hear in like old high school films. But that was a way down the track, right?
And then the pill comes along and you read women saying, like, it suddenly completely changed things. It suddenly was like the default was not, we're not having sex. The default was, we might. And so suddenly it became a negotiation. And it became a, there's this evolutionary psychologist, David Buss, who specializes in human sexuality. And he writes about this sort of eternal power play, basically, where women would like to wait longer before they have sex and men would like to have sex sooner.
And there's always this sort of volleying back and forth, like who's going to win, basically, right? And the pill massively shifts it in the have sex sooner direction. Yeah. And so, yeah, you say women who, you know, it used to be the assumption I would not have sex after a date. And now I'm having to like, this is so often what actually is happening in Me Too kind of cases. I mean, obviously Me Too cases is a lot of range. You've got straightforward, really criminal behavior, like Harvey Weinstein or whatever.
But you also quite often what's going on is it's not even... It's so much more subtle than that. It's like the Aziz Ansari case, do you remember that? Quite an interesting case because he, in terms of the response, so Aziz Ansari, you know, famous actor, comedian, he goes on a date with this woman who's a fan. And it's all going well. And then they go back to his and he wants her to have sex and she doesn't want to, basically. But she also, he's like a famous man who she likes, like she might want to in the future.
She doesn't want to like, she doesn't want to offend him. She doesn't want to mess it up. And so there's this like subtle kind of tussle and they end up doing some sexual stuff or whatever. She goes home. She feels terrible. She subsequently says to him, you took advantage basically by text. He says, sorry. And then later she sort of spills the beans in a magazine article. And that kind of thing is basically an invention of the sexual revolution, that kind of conflict where there's that degree of ambiguity.
It wasn't that unreasonable for him to think that sex would happen. It wasn't that unreasonable. The problem that she found herself in is that she had to try and as politely as possible say no without... That's a really difficult social game, isn't it? Particularly when everyone's drunk. right? And she ended up, I guess, like they both messed up to some degree. Like he didn't read her social cues. She didn't communicate clearly. Like so often that's what's really going on with these Me Too cases.
There's like, there's so much ambiguity in terms of what everyone is supposed to do. And you've got this tussle between what men and women prefer. And I'm I mean, adding alcohol is really bad. You know, there's this bias that men have. It's like a deep-seated bias where men will tend to see sexual interest where they're more likely to see sexual interest where there is none. They kind of overestimate how much women fancy them, basically. I know.
Don't talk about it. And alcohol makes it worse. Oh, really? Yeah, alcohol exaggerates that effect. So if a man's drunk, he's more likely to see sexual interest when it isn't there. And then if she's drunk as well, she's less able to successfully navigate this difficult social situation. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. It does just feel like we're... The lack of social rules just sort of sets everyone up to fail, and it's kind of inevitable that you're going to end up with these...
these, I guess, tragedies, right? Of people not understanding one another. So sex becoming a negotiation now, when historically it wasn't such a negotiation, and therefore sex happening much sooner in the interaction between men and women, often on the first date, maybe the second date. You're kind of alluding to it there, but I just want to get clarity on, you're saying it harms both men and women in the long term. I think in different ways. Yeah.
So I think the harm that's done to women is feeling... Is emotion, well, no, there are obviously some situations where the worst possible thing happens. You know, you go home with a man who turns out to be incredibly dangerous. More common is women just feeling bad about themselves. How do we know that? Like, is there, have they done studies? Survey data. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. You just ask women, like, how do you feel after different kinds of sexual encounter?
Like a one night stand. Yeah. Yeah. And then you ask men the same thing. And women feel, um, disgusting basically to some degree is sort of the dominant. Um, I included this quiz in my book, right. For men and women, like basically, um, for people who had, had casual sex or some kind or another, right. Who participated in this culture. And I, I sort of pulled the questions from my male and female friends. Um, and, uh, One of the questions for women was, have you ever had a consensual sexual experience, which now makes thinking about it in retrospect makes you feel like kind of physically uncomfortable, that gives you a disgust response.
And so many women say yes to that. And one of the reasons for that is that women have a much lower disgust threshold than men do. So women feel disgust more easily than men do. In response to all sorts of things, but including in response to not non-consensual, but unwanted sex. You see, like, the kind of subtle distinction? Like, legal, but not really desired sex. Women are more likely to find that just makes them feel disgusted. Because? Well, probably because of this evolutionary thing, right, where, like, having sex with a man who you don't want to get pregnant by is a bad decision.
And a big risk. And a big risk. Yeah. So you talk about in the book about how... icks are more prevalent amongst women, essentially. Yeah, the ick. Yeah, it's a really interesting expression, isn't it? It's that women use it to mean when they're like, they like a man, and then suddenly something switches and they get the ick, and all of a sudden they're like, oh, no. Yeah, I've got a friend, who I shan't name, who met this really great guy on a dating app.
And I was looking at who, because she was asking me for some advice on her dating profile or whatever, not that I could give anyone advice, because I've basically never been on any dating app. She showed me this photo, this guy, and this guy was like really good looking. He looked like he played rugby or something. He was just like, I was like, what a great guy. And she was like, no, he's got boxes on the wardrobe behind him. He's got like cardboard boxes on the wardrobe.
She was like, oh, I was like, this guy is like, he's like perfect. He's like, he's like an action figure. But because he had boxes, cardboard boxes on the wardrobe behind him in the profile picture, she was like, oh. Interesting. bizarre i thought you know is that a cultural thing or is that innate this because there's no guy that i know that would look at a profile yeah of a stunning woman and go oh she's got cardboard boxes on there although might they do you think for a woman they were like deciding whether to marry do you know i mean Because men do tend to have sort of two, there are kind of two tracks.
§02Transcript — part 2
Like there's the woman I'd have sex with and there's a woman I'd marry. And they're different categories. And maybe the, I don't know about cardboard boxes necessarily, but maybe what it's showing is you're like messy, disorganized, not very grown up. Yeah. Or maybe you don't have, maybe you're living at someone else's house, maybe. Yeah. Or maybe you're on the move. Don't have much money. Yeah. I guess she's looking for cues of like, bringing a really long term.
Yeah. Good bet. Which goes back to your evolutionary principle. Exactly. Yeah. That's a sensible thing to be doing, really. I think Ix should be listened to. generally do you think like our i think our bodies often know i think our bodies are often sensitive to like little cues that we might miss consciously so you think women should listen to their ex yeah but some of them are getting a little the one that always makes me laugh is if a man on a date the date goes really really well and then at the end of the day he pulls out his wallet to pay and he has a velcro wallet Right.
Is that an X for you? Mm-hmm. I'm not sure if it would be a personal ick, but I guess maybe we should respect it as an idiosyncratic ick. I don't know. I think in general, it's good for men as well. I think it's good for people. I think it's, you ever read The Gift of Fear, Gavin DeBecker book? A really great book. It was published like 30 years ago or something. I think Oprah made it quite a big deal. And it's about, it's by, I think he used to be a bodyguard.
He's like a personal security expert. And he tells all these stories. It's mostly about women. And maybe this applies to men too. Where women basically ended up getting attacked by men who they did actually have bad vibes about in some way. But they ignored those. And it costs them. Right. And his argument is that fear is a gift and that you should listen to your instincts because often, again, highly, you know, very evolved to be very, very attuned to these instincts.
Right. There's a reason why we are descended from people who listen to their instincts in this regard. And often your unconscious will spot things that your conscious brain hasn't spotted. And maybe you'll be worried about being impolite or being weird or whatever, you know. So I can't remember all of the stories, but I remember there's one of a woman who a man offered to help her carry her shopping up to her flat. And he was really insistent about it.
And she was like, okay. So she let him. And then as soon as he was in the flat, he shut the door and attacked her. And she was lucky to survive. She said later that it was weird. It was weird. He didn't feel like he was just being nice. She got bad vibes from him. She got the ick, whatever. There was something going on. But her conscious brain said, he's just being nice. And so she ignored her instincts and she let him into her flat. And that's the sort of example where actually...
I think that our unconscious brains know are actually very wise about a lot of these things. Women's more than men's in that regard. Interesting question. I would guess probably yes, because particularly in relation to the sexual violence threat, which women carry and men don't as much. Men certainly don't carry it from women. If men get sexually assaulted, it will be better than men, almost always. Like, again, you know, really interestingly, if you show women, I think this is true for women, but not for men, as far as I know.
If you show women a map of their local area and ask them to say which streets they would not want to walk down alone late at night. And they, you know, they highlight those streets. They map on perfectly to actual rates of crime. And these women know nothing about this. They're not familiar with local police statistics or whatever. It's just vibes. They just feel unsafe in these areas. Those vibes are actually really accurate. Surprisingly so. And I guess because, yeah, it's this evolved thing that... Like, to put it really bluntly, rape is a very bad outcome for women evolutionarily.
It's something you really want to avoid. And so we have these inbuilt systems. Baitful, right? Sometimes, but it's also just that the... Well, there are several costs. There's the carrying a rapist baby and all the downsides of that. There's the risk of being ostracised by your community. Maybe your husband, like... casts you out. There are so many downsides, even aside from the physical threat. And we've evolved some very good systems to try and protect ourselves against that.
I also think that to some extent, you know, the 15 year old girls, they do have these instincts. So they have some degree of like inbuilt protective instincts, but they also they do also lack life experience. which is, I think, why we have or ought to have social conventions that also protect them. Do you know what's interesting? This is called the Diary of a CEO podcast, and although we've strayed quite far from business and people tell me that all the time, my lens, because I run businesses when I'm not doing this, is always to think about how a lot of this applies to business.
And as you were talking about, the way that I heard it is that women have a different sort of radar yeah sort of like than men and are able to spot different things than men and i thought about how useful that is in business and what a great case for diversity that is both in like the hiring process because often and i've this is just an observation from running businesses often the women that run some of my businesses are able to spot something in certain candidates that it wasn't abundantly clear to me And often, again, this is anecdotal, one candidate who all the men in the interview process are good with, fine with, all of the women in the interview process have a problem with.
And a problem they almost can't explain. Interesting. It's a vibe they're getting. It's a vibe, yeah. And the men in the interview process often, sometimes, not always, don't have the problem with this individual. But then all of the women in my organization have a problem with this person. And so over time, I've learned that maybe I don't have the radar. And maybe, you know, maybe I need to listen to both sides to make an informed decision. And it's plausible when you think about evolution that men and women have a different sort of sixth sense.
Yeah. I see it in my partner. Obviously, I can't give an anecdotal example because my partner, but it's like she's operating on a different frequency oftentimes to me. And that's kind of what makes the relationship work. My husband says I'm a witch. Yeah. Yeah, I think my partner's a witch. If we're making it a safe space, my partner is a witch. But she's a white witch. She knows she is. But she can just, it's like she can see things that I can't see.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's a great book to be written about how these sex differences play out in the workplace. Because again, I think it's because we, because there's a bit of a taboo about talking about it too much. And there is obviously a risk. I mean, I don't, The reason, big reason why feminists don't want to overplay these psychological differences between men and women is because historically they have been used to discriminate against women.
The women are too irrational to do X, Y, Z. And that's a completely reasonable concern. But I also think that just pretending, therefore, that they don't exist doesn't really do anyone any favours because they do. And I think we should just be honest and be honest, but also simultaneously be like, you know, this doesn't mean that women are inferior. For me, it's a case for diversity. In some places. I mean, I think there probably is an argument for...
In like the hiring process, for example. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I think there are probably some roles where, or indeed things like, like in policing, for instance, um... To be really direct, I don't think that women should be in frontline policing roles because I think that the physical differences are too profound, particularly in the UK where police officers don't carry guns. The average woman, even a really strong fit woman, is going to really struggle in a direct confrontation with the average male.
But if I was to rebut that, I'd say, you know, what happens if you have a crime where... involving several women, and a man shows up without the empathy or without the ability to sort of resonate or to relate... So, yeah, so I think women should be involved in criminal justice, but because, for instance, probably women are better at interviewing. Yeah. I wouldn't be surprised. And interrogation, you know. So there are probably some roles where women are going to outperform men.
Again, it's, you know, it's the overlapping ball curves. There'll be some men who are really good at this, whatever. But you'd expect there to be a female advantage in that role. But there isn't a female advantage in the, like, role. being out and having physical confrontations with people role. And I think that's fine. I don't think that we should... There's this very frustrating tendency in policing, in fire service as well, for people to notice the fact that there are fewer, say, female firefighters, and therefore to lower the physical demands to get more female firefighters in.
What if the physical demands, what if the test was... Is the test the same for both? I.e. if I want to be a frontline police officer, I have to pass the same physical test irrespective of gender. Yes, that's true. But one of the things that they've done over the years because of pressure, like feminist pressure, to be blunt, is that they've changed the standards. So they've, say, reduced the upper body strength component. Or they've made the, like in policing and in firefighting, all these, and military, you have to oblique tests, stuff like that.
They've lowered the standards necessary in a lot of roles. Okay, so that's really the issue then? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's what, yeah. Because there's, I mean... Several of the women upstairs would whoop my ass in a bleep test. They will. They, like, run marathons and stuff, all of them in the bloody office. They'd all whoop my ass. So really the issue is about making sure the standards are sufficient for the requirement of the role. Yeah, don't lower the standards so that you can get more women into these physical roles.
Just accept the fact that... There will be, I mean, I do know actually, I like one female firefighter that I know personally from Jiu Jitsu. She's so strong. She's so fit. She passed a very, very high standard. Great. You know, you will get that woman in a thousand. He can. And in which case, fine, you know. But what I don't think is wise at all is like engineering it such that you have 50-50 in every role. I think that that's a recipe for disaster.
So, but just to be clear on this point, because you said you don't think women should be involved in frontline policing. If they can meet the required... Yes, the very high standards. I think that one woman in a thousand, yes. But I... One woman in a thousand? Yeah. You think that's it? Yeah. Is that because of upper body strength you're talking about? That's a big one. It's also aggression. Okay. Like you do need a certain level of, you can watch a lot of body cam of police having physical altercations.
And it's quite common for instance to see female police hesitate more than male police do. Probably not always a bad thing, if you think about the amount of people just being killed. It depends, doesn't it? I mean, yeah, there's also, yeah, policing is a complicated one, because also in America, say, where the police have guns, female police are less likely to shoot than male police are. So, you know, maybe that's good, right? But if it's something like, I don't know, there's a lot of body cam footage you can watch of, say, a female and a male police partnership confronting someone, the man goes right in, and the woman is like...
Because these are quite deep-seated instincts to be less physically aggressive. And this is a thing, I mean, we talked about right at the beginning, this thing like the testosterone curve for men in their teens, 20s, 30s. It has its disadvantages. It translates into sexual violence and violent crime and whatever. But there are also obviously situations where you need that, where actually having physical courage is so important. If you're running into a burning building or whatever, you know, so it's this, again, it's this like eternal problem that societies have to try and solve.
Like we have this youthful male energy and we want to put it to the best possible purposes and we don't want it put to dangerous purposes. it's so complicated because um i understand and i'm i understand that there's physical differences but policing is so complicated because you're policing both men and women so women have a different testosterone curve for example so yeah would it therefore be better for a woman to show up in that scenario who is going to match that person's maybe although women really don't commit very much violent crime at all so if you're talking about like physical altercations the chances of it being a woman are not high But if a man shows up, then when... Maybe he would escalate more.
He would escalate more. I've had a few conversations about this subject with people. And then I remember seeing, obviously, it's a particular front of mind story, what happened in Australia recently with the terrorist attack in the mall. And we were in Australia at the time and I was watching the footage. And there was a woman that showed up with a gun, shot the terrorist. And there was also that man, did you see, who barricaded the escalator? Yes, and he was holding a chair.
Who's just a member of the public. Yeah. So that was really interesting because this idea of... I read this article about heroic masculinity in the New York Times, written by a woman. And the article goes to highlight these instances where the man runs in the building, 9-11. I think it was like 98% of the people that died in 9-11, firefighters, were men. Yeah. A couple of women as well. Yeah. And then I saw that video of the terrorist attack in Australia.
And you have the guy on the escalator holding a chair, threatening this terrorist that he's going to smash him with a chair if he comes closer. And then the person that ultimately ended the terrorist attack was a woman with a gun. And so, you know, it's super nuanced, isn't it? Yeah. What's really interesting about this physical courage thing is so often people say later that they didn't even think about it. There was no conscious process. There was no like, should I or should I?
They just do it. And you don't really know if you're like that, I think, until you're confronted with a situation like that. You know when women will definitely do that, that absolutely not thinking is protecting their kids. Yeah. Yeah. And then you do read amazing accounts of women. diving on their children and taking lifting cars because like their child is stuck under it and they just have this like almighty surge of strength like there are and actually that's that's an interesting situation where women can be very aggressive in defending their children like and that's true in other species as well that you can have this just the red mist descends in that set of circumstances so yeah Something on, we're talking about icks and I just wanted to hover it off because there's kind of two sides to this ick argument.
There's this, I've got this radar, which is useful and it's protecting me. And then there's this other sort of more newer social TikTokification of the ick, which is probably causing people not to get in relationships. I've got a friend that, she's been on about, she goes on about 100 dates a year. And she's like, I think she's actually starting a dating podcast because... she's that unsuccessful at dating. And in my head, I go, I think this might be part of like a broader social issue that the reason we're not coming together, we're having less sex, all these things, is because in part because of these icks, we think everything is a problem because social media told us it was.
Yes. And yeah, and I think it's probably true going back to this mimetic thing, right? There are probably some... social status signs which are very mimetic like one of the things that some women will do for instance is they'll like say I will only date a man over six foot and actually and just set that cut off and you can be very objective about that on the app because they say how tall they are, I mean I'm sure everyone's exaggerating but like they say how tall they are and it's a really silly thing to do actually because you're cutting off like I don't know 80% of men more depending on the group of men um you're just cutting them out.
And actually, if you were to meet this person in real life, the fact that they were 5'9", you wouldn't even notice, probably. So sometimes I think that modern technology can encourage a level of pickiness, which is actually really counterproductive. And again, it's like... I think so much of mutual sexual attraction is about the... about pheromones, about vibe, about being in person. And dating apps don't capture that at all. So I'm sure that definitely works against, yeah, there are 100% women who are way too picky.
Definitely, definitely. We talked a second ago about how the introduction of the pill and how that caused negotiation in this first sort of encounter impacts women. We didn't cover how it impacts men downstream. Would it be better for men if we waited longer before we had sex with a woman? You know, in your book, you talk about waiting three months, but then you whispered something to me, which I'll let you say just in case you don't want to say it.
I think probably actually waiting till engagement is a better call. So you think we should wait until we are engaged with someone before we have sex? Yeah. You bite your lip when you say that. I'm saying that because there are trade-offs and I acknowledge them. And also it's more difficult to do that in a culture where that's weird. Yeah. Because what you end up doing is cutting out anyone who, for whom that's too weird, right? Like you basically cut out a big chunk of your possible matches by insisting on that, unless, say, you're very religious, in which case everyone in your religious community is going to have the same expectation.
But for most people, that's going to be quite... quite a weird thing to demand, which is why I said three months in the book, because it seemed like more reasonable and more achievable. Also, because my mum said to me when she read the draft, she was like, if you say this, if you say wait till engagement or marriage, that's the first thing every reviewer is going to notice about the book. It's going to be a big deal. So you'll get more of a hearing, you know, if you're more reasonable.
The thing is, we're a really weird culture in this regard, like basically every other culture. There is obviously variation, you know. So my first degree was anthropology. And one of the things about anthropology, which is so powerful and interesting when you're interested in contemporary social issues... is that there are a lot of differences between cultures. Of course there are, and that's what's interesting for anthropologists. But there are also a lot of similarities.
And actually there have been various efforts over the years to compose lists of human universals, which you find in absolutely every culture. It's called the anthropologist veto. If you find a culture that doesn't have this, then you can kind of strike it off the universals list. But the universals list is pretty long, and it includes things like every culture has religion. in some fashion. Every culture has gender roles in some fashion. Every culture has wages war in some fashion.
There are things that everyone does. And everyone has marriage customs of some kind. They can look different from ours. I mean, the most common way in which cultures differ from our culture or at least our culture up until recently is permitting polygamous marriage. So about 80% of cultures permit polygamous marriage. Only permitting monogamous marriage is... more unusual. I think we're drifting back towards permitting polygamous marriage through polyamory, but we can get onto that.
The thing is, I just think the thinking that went for sort of radicals of the 1960s, what happened in the 1960s, it was the pill and other tech as well. It was also an the old order, you know, reject religion, reject conservatism, whatever. And what a lot of people said at the time was, why are we needlessly restricting people? Why are we, you know, limiting people's freedom in a way that makes them miserable? We just got to throw this out the window, right?
And I think that... That doesn't work. Like throwing conventions out the window. That's not how humans work. We have a tendency to construct in one way or another rules around these things. And human reproduction is like the most important. It's a very, very... complex and delicate thing, right? That you have to get right. It's really, it's like a, it's like this enormous coordination problem. You've got to find the right person. You've got to find them at the right time.
You've got to like ensure commitment from them. And of course there's this whole game about how like men might want to, have sex with more people, a woman wants to tie a man down. Like, it's a really complicated game. And what society's come up with is ways of regulating it. Ways of regulating heterosexuality, basically, right? Which means restricting women's freedom. It does. That's what feminists have always noted. It also means restricting men's freedom.
it says there are certain things that men can't do. And we had such a system, you know, we had the, like, you can't have sex outside of marriage, marriage has to be monogamous, all these rules that you have to ask the bride's father's permission, all this stuff, we had it all, right? And we basically threw out the window. I mean, it lingers a bit, but we have very low. I mean, in London, right, now half of children will reach age 15 without their biological father in the home.
There's very, very high figures compared with, say, 100 years ago. Very, very high figures. So we've seen basically the dissolution of that old order. And there are upsides to that. There are. But there are big townshires too. And I think every culture has marriage customs of some kind, apart from ours, sort of. Like, what makes us think... that we alone among peoples can just have a free for all, can just, you know, style it out. People do whatever they feel like.
Do you know what I mean? I think that, I think that the, what, what anthropology tells us is that actually we need structure. We need conventions and constraints and, and, and, and templates. Yeah. You know, and those will sometimes feel restrictive and there will sometimes be people for whom they don't work very well. But I think the idea we can just do without them is not true. I mean, going back to the polyamory thing, if you look at dating app data.
Sometimes people exaggerate this effect a little bit, right? But there is a tendency for basically very attractive men, high-status men, the Hugh Hefners, right, to do really well on dating apps, to get a lot of attention from a lot of women. And then for the bottom chunk of men, in terms of attractiveness, to get none, to just get no matches whatsoever. And this is a tendency, it's called hypergamy, female hypergamy, that women will tend to want to marry up socially.
So they'll want to marry a man who is richer than them, better educated than them, more successful than them, etc. And yeah, I mean, this is basically what you see when people are left to their own devices on dating apps and you can monitor it carefully. That is basically what people do. And the problem you end up with is when you don't have a system of monogamous marriage and you don't have the expectation that people wait, there's really nothing stopping those men from just having loads of girlfriends, maybe having them at the same time, like having little harems, right?
You know, not calling them that, but having basically playing the field and not being forced to commit because no one expects them to really. And it's... like good fun for those men. It's frustrating for the women because they're like, they're having relationships with these men in the hope that it will turn into commitment and then it never does. And so they end up feeling really bitter, right? And it's also frustrating for the less attractive men who are getting no attention whatsoever and who read me or listen to me saying the sexual revolution was good for men and it's like, it wasn't good for me.
I know, I know, I know. There's a real, there's like an inbuilt inequality there. Sorry to interrupt, but hasn't there always been an inbuilt inequality in the male experience? Well, this is what's interesting about the monogamy, polygamy system, right? In a monogamous system, to some extent that's prevented because these high status men, unless you're like a king, unless you're Henry VIII, okay, you can't have multiple women on the go. You have to commit to one woman and basically remove yourself from the dating pool, right?
And so it isn't possible for the really attractive men to sort of amass a lot of... And so I've heard it described as sexual socialism, monogamous marriage, because it does sort of encourage like an equalising effect. One each. Yeah. Whereas in a polygamous system, obviously that's completely permissible. And in extreme circumstances, you'll have high status men having 100 women or something like that in historical examples. And then low status men just have none.
Yeah. And it's quite an unstable, one of the downsides of a polygamous system, it is quite common. And it's probably to some extent our species norm. I think it's what people kind of do and left to their own devices. That's like the natural way we settle if there are no social restrictions. One downside of it is having a lot of unmarried or like having a lot of sexless men is quite bad for social stability because they're very frustrated. They're angry.
They don't have a lot to lose. One of the really interesting things about going back to testosterone, when men have children and get married, their testosterone levels drop. Yeah. they become less aggressive. Like in the year after a baby's born, men commit less crime, they're less promiscuous. Like there's a real sort of... They just have a new sleep. I'm sure that's part of it. But there is like, if you're directly involved in caring for your own child, you do, as a man, you do become less high tea.
And that has a sort of taming effect, right? Or it's like, it's channeling male energies in a different direction, which at a societal scale can be really good in terms of having a peaceful, stable society. And polygamous societies do tend to be more unstable in that sense. there's also more domestic violence in polygamous societies, there's more conflict within households. There are quite a lot of bad outcomes that you get from polygamous systems.
So even though monogamy is maybe not the norm anthropologically, it does seem to be a good norm. And some of the most successful societies have adopted monogamy as their norm and have been successful partly because of that. If you are to have a daughter in the future, I know you've got a son already and you've got another boy on the way. But if you are to have a daughter in the future and that daughter comes up to you at, let's say, 18 years old and says, Mum, I heard on that podcast you did ages ago, 20 years ago, that you said I shouldn't have sex with the guy I'm dating until engagement.
Yeah. Mum, can you just confirm why? What would you say to your daughter? Yeah. There's a few reasons. One is because women in particular tend to get emotionally bonded from sex more than men do. Do we know that? Because anecdotally, you know, in the group chat, confirmed. Yes. But is there science to support that idea? Yeah, I think that you can measure it in terms of things like oxytocin. Okay. And there's actually, I wrote about this in the book, there's this whole horrible genre of journalistic articles basically advising women on how to have casual sex without being miserable.
And sort of what can you do to hack your brain so that you can have casual sex without feeling dreadful afterwards? This is like public acknowledgement that this is a thing. And one of the pieces of advice is things like take ecstasy while you're having sex because it will dull your emotional bonding response, things like that, which I just find so dystopian. I'm like, well, you could just not. Well, you don't have to try and biohack your brain to endure something you don't really want to do.
But anyway... Women get more emotionally bonded from sex than men do. And then you do end up with this kind of asymmetry, which comes up in the group chat, right? Of like, she basically is more into him than he is into her. And if there's no... commitment, not even any necessarily social acknowledgement of the relationship. It might be just friends with benefits or something. That can be really painful. So it's a good idea to basically, if you hold off on having sex, you hold off on having that effect.
And it means you can make clear-eyed decisions. If you see red flags, you're more likely to respond to them properly if you're not befuddled by oxytocin, basically. The other thing is it's like, It's just a really, really good demonstration of commitment. If you, you always risk getting pregnant. You always do. Even if you're on modern contraception, there's always that risk. And do you want a man who is going to ditch you if that happens, basically?
Like, how can you find some guarantee that he's not going to do that? a diamond ring is a pretty good one, don't you think? There are other ways you could demonstrate it, but that's a really good one, and it's a kind of tried and tested one. It's pretty crazy how significant the shift in attitudes towards casual sex have changed. I was reading some research earlier that said 67% of Gen Z think it's justifiable to have casual sex compared to 12% of the pre-war generation.
Yeah. And, you know, when you talk about the diamond ring being a good way to get commitment, Yeah. But... I had a divorce lawyer on the podcast the other day and he said to me that 56% of marriages fail. And that... One thing that skews that though, you know, is that people who have multiple marriages more like to get divorced. Yes, he did say, I think, 86% of people that get married again after that. Yeah. So there's some... But yes, I mean, the principle is true.
So do you think marriage as a system or a technology is good? Or do you just think it's, because in the book, it sounds like you think it's just the best available option. Yeah, because, okay, so the key reason I think that marriage is good, specifically for women, right? It's good for men too, but there's like particular reason why it's good for women. And why I think that feminist arguments against it are flawed is that, The nature of carrying children is that you have a period of some period of time where you cannot participate in the labour market, right?
§03Transcript — part 3
Where you're too pregnant, you've got a newborn, whatever. I mean, when I had my first baby, I calculated that in the first weeks and months of his life, I was spending 40 hours a week just breastfeeding, right? So you can't... You basically... mothers and babies aren't really individuals, right? In the sense that they're not completely autonomous. My friend, Mary Harrington, who's also an author, she said that she, this really, like, she realised this for the first time when she had her daughter and her baby was crying to be fed in the middle of the night.
And she realised that in a sort of, if you looked at their relationship in an individualist way, you were like, okay, you've got one human being who wants to be fed and another human being who can provide the feeding. But they're autonomous agents. They can just make their own decisions or whatever. She's like, no, no, no, I can't just decide, now I'm going to ignore it, I'm going to go back to bed. Like every cell in your body is saying, I must go feed my baby.
It completely changes you physically, psychologically. It's like a completely transformative experience because you... your biological goal becomes keep this baby alive. And the baby is completely dependent on you. There's this child psychotherapist, Donald Winnicott, said there's no such thing as a baby, there's only a baby and someone. Babies can't survive on their own. And normally that someone is the mother. And when it comes to things like breastfeeding, it has to be really.
I mean, we now have formula and so on, so we can sort of... It's that old thing of using technology to take the edge off some of these social realities. But it's still basically the case that mums and babies are like tied together like this emotionally, biologically. And during those times in your life, you need another adult, at least one other adult who's going to do the, you know, getting food, paying rent, doing all this basic stuff to support you.
And who that adult is, is... something that people have experimented with, right? Like attempts at communal child rearing, say, or I mean what to some extent you can do is depend on the state, right? Depend on the welfare state, depend on, say, state-provided childcare services, things like that. that all of those solutions kind of work, but come with significant downsides. The only solution, I think the best solution that we've come up with historically, is for the father of the child to play that role, basically.
And then on this subject of marriage, just to really interrogate this further, because... I feel like I'm in two minds about it. A, because of the stats show that 56% end in marriage, divorce, and you've kind of rebuttaled that because of the remarriage rate. But then even the amount of people that seem to be in unhappy marriages seems to be pretty significant. This is part of what the divorce lawyer said to me. He said, you know, you could say 56% of marriages fail, but if you defined failure as one or two people in that marriage being unhappy, the number is significantly higher And I know a lot of people, again, it's anecdotal, so it's not worth much, but a lot of people that are married, you know, who I would define as being really just kind of the divorce part is so uncomfortable and painful that they've just decided to stay together.
Which is not always in the interest of the kids because if that home becomes toxic in any regard, the trauma is passed down sufficiently to the kids. Yeah, okay. I take all of that. But I do think that, one, the divorce rate is to some extent a product of a divorce culture, right, where it's very permissible, in fact, very normal for people to, you know, a really, really like tricky bit for people to get through is the first year after a first child is born.
because everyone's tired, everyone's stressed, there are money pressures, et cetera, et cetera. No sex. Yeah. There are lots of reasons why that's a difficult time. And it's quite common for people to, whether or not they're married, but for people to break up during that period and then to regret it. Because actually it's a temporary period of your life. It will get better. You will get less stressed. You will get less tired, et cetera. So to some extent, a divorce culture will sometimes encourage people to make...
permanent decisions which they will regret. And there are stats showing that quite a lot of people do regret getting divorced, something like a third of people regret getting divorced. So there's that. The other thing is that there is a lot of, it's not just, it's true, yes, that the people who have multiple marriages are more likely to get, some people can be kind of serial offenders in this regard, right, with divorce. It's also, you know, there's a massive skew with class and education.
So only about 10% of graduates who get married will get divorced. Interesting. Yeah. And that is interesting, isn't it? And it does suggest that to some extent marriage is becoming a luxury good. And there's this phenomenon, right, where a lot of people who are from those kind of elite graduate classes will, they'll talk the 1960s but walk the 1950s. So they'll proclaim all the stuff about freedom and individual choice and whatever, but actually they live pretty conventional lives.
They tend to get married. They tend to stay married. They tend to have 2.5 children, et cetera, and be very, actually be very conservative in their own choices, even if they don't necessarily promote those choices. So, you know, there's that. And actually, I think it's probably because... people know that there are massive benefits to their children from staying together. There are, of course, some instances, particularly with abuse, when it's better for the children, if the parents break up.
That's absolutely true. But I think when you're talking about kind of... vague unhappiness, dissatisfaction, like we've outgrown each other, like that level of unhappy marriage, I think it's much better for the children to stay together. And one big reason for that is because the presence of step-parents, on average, isn't good news for children. How do you know that? There's this thing called the Cinderella effect in evolutionary psychology, where children who have a step-parent in the home are 100 times more at risk of child abuse than children who don't have a step-parent in the home.
100 times. 100 times. I know. And obviously, you have to be careful. I'm obviously not saying that all step-parents are abusive by any means. We're just talking about risk. Yeah. Yeah. But it does go up by a lot. And what was, I mean, when this was discovered, it was taken as proof of the fact that parents having a genetic investment in their children is one of the reasons. I mean, children are very trying, okay? They wake you up, they have tantrums, whatever.
If you have a genetic investment in them, it carries you through those moments. You're like... I love you. I want the best for you. You know, you can sort of get over it. If you don't have a genetic investment in those children, if in fact you potentially have a conflict, if say you have children with the new partner and those children in the household and you want those children to sort of be favoured and do better... unconsciously, right? But there will be kind of a playing of favourites game.
Like, it's not just... In some cases. In some cases. It's not just like violent abuse. It's things like step-parents are less likely to put a seatbelt on their stepchildren. Things like that. It's like subtle but small ways in which stepchildren are disfavoured compared with biological children. And, of course, some people will surmount that and be amazing step-parents. Ditto, like adoptive parents, like... plenty of people will do a wonderful job but it is a really significant risk thing i had this woman called katie faust on my podcast a little while ago who um is a american campaigner for children's rights and she said try this okay google my my my mom's boyfriend and see what google suggests it's not pretty You've Googled it, haven't you?
Yeah. What does it suggest? It's things like, my mum's boyfriend touched me, my mum's boyfriend looks me weird, my mum's boyfriend makes me uncomfortable. Things like that. Is a step-parent better than raising a child without a second parent, though? Probably financially, yeah. In terms of stability and having a role model or something? Yeah, potentially. And obviously some step parents can be really good. So it's difficult, isn't it? But I think the thing that people should know, I think the reason why it's good to know about the Cinderella effect is that if you're, it's quite easy as an adult to kid yourself and to be like, I'm not very happy with my partner, my husband, my wife.
You know, sex not as good as it used to be. We like, he doesn't understand me, like that kind of level of dissatisfaction. If only I was with someone else, everything would be so much better. I ask that in part because I was just thinking as you're saying it about adoption and the implications. Is an adopted child being with a family better than being... I think definitely, yeah. But I mean, this is one of the reasons why adoption agencies are so careful and screen so thoroughly and like the criteria to be an adoptive parent are really, really stringent.
It's because they know that there is this issue. I mean, particularly because also children who are being adopted are more likely to have their own issues and like to be more difficult in some ways. So I think there's a recognition that this is a more difficult set-up. It's a more risky set-up. So you have to be careful. The things you're saying, you know that they're unpopular. Yes. Especially in 2024. Yeah. But you're saying them anyway. Yeah.
Why? Because I think it's true. Did you care about the consequence of people being annoyed about it? Yeah. Although you know what, since this book was published two years ago, I have had, and I really did feel a little bit when I was writing it, like, oh no, have I just completely ruined my life? Am I going to just constantly face, like, am I going to get constant grief for this? Is it going to be a complete disaster? And actually, I would say that like 95% of the responses have been incredibly positive.
And I get emails and messages all the time from people saying, thank you, I've been thinking this this whole time. The feedback you've gotten following the publication of your book, how has it surprised you? And when I ask that, I'm asking in terms of like, who is sending you messages and what they're saying? I would say probably the two most common groups of readers are dads. Okay. who are really worried about their daughters in particular and also their sons and saying like thank you so much for this was the reason I decided to do a young adult edition of the book so in a few months there's going to be a young adult version which is basically like edited made shorter simpler whatever.
because the book has a lot of very adult themes, obviously. And I had so many people saying, I wish I could give this to my 14-year-old. And I just kind of feel uncomfortable doing so, but I really, really, really want them to know this stuff. And so we did it on an audition for exactly that purpose. And often it is dads who are feeling, mums too, but dads who are feeling really anxious about this. What are they worried about? They're worried about, well, they're worried about sexual violence to their daughters is probably the key one.
Yeah. But they're also worried about, say, the impact of porn on their sons and they're worried about the children being miserable. Yeah. in various ways. The other group of readers I hear from are women who have lived this and who have had this exact process of thinking I can have sex like a man, thinking I can completely imitate the masculine template. And that's good for me. And have had this deep sense of cognitive dissonance. which they've only belatedly realised was needless.
Like they didn't have to actually put themselves through what they did, but they felt what they did. You know, they had this process of conforming to something that was bad for them. I hear from a lot of those women. And, you know, in many cases, like... I have had two women in my way recently to say that they are having a baby because of me. It's amazing. It's so cool. Just because they, because they had this, because the anti-mother messaging can be so strong and.
And feel so empowering. Yeah. And this feeling that. this painful feeling that actually there's something much higher status about the masculine template, that there's something lesser, there's something worse about doing the feminine thing, you know, being the mother, I think is very baked in and is actually very anti-woman, I think, you know, to say that being just a mum, there's something wrong with that, that it would be better to have, say, a corporate job, that it would be better to, live like a man.
I think that when we, I think that when we say things like that, what we're basically saying is that what women do is worse, that there's something worse about women. Something like actually very deeply sexist about that in a way that I don't like at all. So a lot of what I try to do in my writing and podcast and everything is actually elevate some of the feminine stuff. which is needlessly marginalised. You know, it's okay to want to be monogamous.
It's okay to want to have children. It's okay to care more about your children than your career. None of those things are bad. It's okay to care more about your career than having children? Yes. You said that a little bit more reluctantly. No, it is. That is okay. I think that it is more common right now in our current cultural moment for women to be pushed towards the masculine role when it doesn't suit them than the other way around. I think historically it has been the other way around, right?
The women who wanted to do the masculine thing and were really intelligent, ambitious and whatever were suppressed and were basically confined to the home, right? That definitely happened historically. I think we've kind of flipped though, actually. And now it's more common for women to be told that being just a mum is worse. At a societal level, there's been a big decline in birth rates, which is quite interesting. Are you concerned about the decline in birth rates?
Yes. I mean, I think it is definitely going to cause significant political and economic problems. To read some stats, by 2050, over three quarters of countries won't have high enough fertility rates to keep their population size growing over time. And the global fertility or to keep it stable over time, the global fertility rate has decreased from 4.84 live births per women in 1950 to 2.2 in 2021, and is expected to drop to 1.5 by 2,100. And the last one I'll read is... Japan's population was 124.3 million, down 595,000 people from 2022.
And the falling rate equals out to almost 100 people an hour are being lost from their population. Countries are taking drastic measures to get their birth rates back up. South Korea, for example, is considering giving families... about £60,000 in cash for each newborn baby that they have. So yeah, there's a societal social impact, economic impact on the declining birth rates. And I've heard you say previously that you think it's one of the biggest evolutionary challenges we're facing.
I think we're going through an evolutionary bottleneck. So we're going through a period where it's partly the pill. People... It's one of those issues that sort of attracts just so stories. People will often be quite confident about, oh, it's this, oh, it's this, you know, oh, it's feminism, oh, it's capitalism, whatever. I think that the single factor that actually best explains why you're seeing such massive drops in fertility across not just Europe and America, but Northeast Asia, as you were saying, and also actually lots of like Middle East has quite low birth rates.
Indian subcontinent has quite low birth rates. Basically, the only place in the world that still has high birth rates is sub-Saharan Africa. So this is basically a global phenomenon. Yeah. The single factor which best explains it is affluence. You cross a certain threshold in terms of GDP per capita and fertility falls a lot. And it's not that high a threshold. It's like US$10,000, something like that. So the richer you get, the less kids you have.
Yeah. I know it's funny, isn't it? Because it seems completely counterintuitive. Yeah. Because often people will say, in an expensive city like London, people will say, I can't afford to have kids. Yeah. And they're sort of right. I mean, it is true that it's harder to afford, it's harder than it was 50 years ago, say, to afford a family home and to live on a single income. So at the kind of micro level, that's true, and that probably does disincentivise people from having children.
Well, certainly, I mean, often what people mean is I can't afford to have children at the standard that I would like in terms of the size of my house and all of this. Having an annie or whatever, yeah. Yeah, I mean, we're all descended from people who had 10 kids in a two-bedroom hut, you know. So our ancestors have all had children in much more difficult circumstances than we have. And I think that it's a really interesting mystery. Why does affluence make people less inclined to have children?
One factor probably is, it's a bit morbid, but mortality salience. When people, this seems to be why there are post-war baby booms. It's not actually because all the soldiers come home and they're really horny, right? It's because war reminds people of death. And actually people have this tendency to respond to death by wanting to create new life. And you can test this in the lab, like if you remind someone of, if you remind people of death and then ask them how many children they want to have, they want to have more.
I know it's crazy, isn't it? But it may be that there's something about having very peaceful and comfortable children. ways of life in affluent societies that actually discourages people from reproducing, which it does seem counterintuitive, doesn't it? But that's probably quite likely. I mean, what's probably going to happen, therefore, is that people who really want to have kids will be selected for. because historically, Mother Nature didn't really care how breedy you were.
She just cared how horny you were, right? Because if you had sex, then children were a likely result. Whereas now with reliable contraception, that's a lot less true. So probably right now, I mean, we're going to see really massive drops in population. In somewhere like South Korea, they have the lowest birth rates in the world. I think it's like 0.7 or something. So that's 0.7 babies per couple or person? A woman is how it's calculated. Okay, fine.
So in order to have replacement, you'd need 2.1 in a culture of low child mortality. Okay. And that means that in South Korea, they're probably going to lose about 95% of their population in the next century. What is going on in South Korea? Why is no one having sex? It's a really good question. They seem to just have like all the problems that we have, but more. Okay. It's like hyper version of all the Western issues with dating and with like, they're also very urbanised and like they're like hyper modern in a lot of ways.
And given that modernity seems to lead to low fertility, they're like further along that track than we are. We touched on it briefly, the idea that porn might be playing a role in people having less sex. I read an interesting study from 2014 from JAMA Psychiatry Journal, where they looked at 64 adult men who watched hours of porn each week and found that there was a decrease in the amount of grey matter in the area of their brain that's associated with sexual stimulation.
Right. The percentage of women who consume porn is increasing, and by the end of 2019, almost three out of every ten Pornhub users were female. The role that porn is playing in all of this, and what's your view on pornography? Good thing? Bad thing? Net negative thing. Net negative. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there are various objections you can have, right? I mean, it's very much not a fair trade product. I think everyone knows that really, like, deep down, right?
Yeah. It's the industry is really horrible, and it has a tendency to take people who are already vulnerable and completely destroy them. Very high suicide rates among porn performers, very high drug dependency rates, things like that. So... Yeah, you're not consuming something that has been ethically produced. And even when some porn claims to be ethically produced, it's often like. those claims are often actually very shoddy. And there's a lot of, like, it is prostitution.
It's prostitution with a camera in the room. So it has the same issues as the sex industry does in general in terms of coercion and misery, basically. So there's that. But in terms of the effect on people who use it, yeah, I mean, it does seem to have this... F-grip syndrome. Yeah. Death grip syndrome. So death grip syndrome, to be delicate about it, is basically when a man masturbates so much that it decreases his sensitivity and it makes it hard for him to then have proper sex.
How do they know this? Is that... It's like a colloquial expression. I've not done like science on it. No, I think it probably emerged on Reddit or something. Okay, fine. And anecdotally, if you stop using porn, death grip syndrome tends to alleviate. So like, you're familiar with NoFap? No. Which is like a movement to not masturbate. Yeah, yeah. And there's various, I don't know if there's been proper studies, but there's anecdotal evidence that stopping using porn reduces erectile dysfunction and improves sexual health in various ways, right?
I think there's also, as I coined this term, cultural death grip syndrome, where I think you end up with... When sexual stimuli are so ever-present and it's so easy to access, like, anything you can imagine at the click of a button with a phone in your pocket, there's this, like, hyper-abundance of sexual stimuli. I think it affects people psychologically and I think it actually reduces people's drive to form relationships because it's like sex loses the mystique.
100%. Yeah. 100%. I'm thinking about a lot of scenarios in my own life where I was many, many years ago when I was single, I was set to go on a date with somebody, but then I might have masturbated and my desire to go on the date just evaporates. Yeah. And I know a lot of people can relate. So if you're pretending you're somewhat different, you're bullshitting. But I can, I mean, me and my friends always used to talk about it, that you could be like making plans with somebody and then you masturbate and your desire as a man can often just like that.
Yeah. In a way that I don't think a lot of people understand. I think it's also going back to this premarital sex thing as well. I think it also applies to other areas of life. We call it post-nucularity. That was the name I was looking for. Yeah. If you live in a society where you can't have sex unless you're married or you can't have sex legitimately, you might be able to have sex with a prostitute or something, but basically your sexual options are massively restricted.
until you get married. And in order to get married, you have to have a job, you have to, like, not commit crime, you have to have a house, you have to do all these grown-up things. you are going to be so motivated to do those things. It's so motivating. And I think one of the problems that does come with allowing premarital sex and allowing porn and basically like not inducing any kind of drive in young men is that they are less motivated to do those things.
They're like, why would I, you know, why would I work harder? Why would I Why would I prioritise any of these things when I've got Pornhub? Or soon enough, sex robots, right? It kind of kills that natural drive. It kills that natural motivating force, which is very, very compelling for young men. Do you think reproduction is at the very heart of male motivation? Well, I mean, yeah. Sex is. For most men, outliers, yada yada. So if we solve for that problem using technology, then one would then deduce from that, that we conclude from that, that we then will take away human male motivation to like climb and build and be strong and...
Yeah, I think so. I mean, there might be some upsides in terms of... One of the arguments that people use in favour of porn is that it reduces sexual violence. Now, I don't really know if that's true. It's very hard to measure. And I'm sceptical about it because I think that it... Something like choking is now so, so much more common among young people. like the proportion of, I can't remember off the top of my head, but the proportion of young women who say they've ever been choked in bed is so much higher than the proportion of older women.
It just goes up. It's from your charity, right? The charity you're involved in. We can't consent to this, yeah. Estimated that 2 million UK women have experienced unwanted choking by strangling during sex. 3.5 million experiencing these and also slapping and spitting and gagging. Right. That was unwanted. And this has all been very normalised by porn. So I think that the most likely explanation for why this is more of a phenomenon among younger generations is because of porn, is because it's become sort of part of the normal sexual script through porn.
A tenfold increase in rough sex between 1996 and 2016. Right. And I think that, and the reason that we can't consent to this exists is because it was, I mean, we've successfully changed the law on this, so hopefully this is happening much less often than it was in the UK. But it is a global phenomenon as well, where men will kill their girlfriends or their wives and claim that she died as a result of consensual rough sex. when actually we think it's much, much more likely that she died as a result of domestic violence and deliberate murder.
Yeah, or get convicted of manslaughter instead of murder, things like that. So this is, you know, that's like a specific, that's like the extreme end of this phenomenon. The other end of this phenomenon is more like just the sexual script becoming more violent and becoming more aggressive. And yeah, and a lot of young women in particular having like, It's absolutely terrifying to be choked out of nowhere by some man you actually don't know very well.
That's a really distressing experience. There are also, what people always say to this, is there are also women who ask for it. And there are also women who like choking. I think what's going on there is partly the mimetic thing. It's partly like, this is cool and this is what everyone's doing. So I want to do it too. So that's part of it. I think to some extent, one difference between male and female sexuality is that women like to be dominated more than men do.
And that's not necessarily a bad thing, as long as it's done in a safe way and in a trusting relationship. It is a problem, though, when that's translated into like... seeking out risky sex acts with someone who you basically don't know. I think men know that porn is letting them down. Yeah. I say men, I know that there's a significant proportion of women that listen and watch porn as well, but I have come to learn from doing this podcast and having conversations about dating apps and pornography.
And when I look at the comments section... Men are very angry, it seems, or at least the men that are in my YouTube comments that are on YouTube, at dating apps. And they're very, very angry and think the industry of porn, again, this is the subset of people in my comments, they hate it. They think it's evil. They think it's disgusting. And I actually looked at Google search data before our conversation today to see what people are searching. And one of the most frequently searched terms as it relates to the subject of porn on a tool we use to analyze Google search data was, how do I stop watching porn?
Yeah. And it almost seems like you think, you know, that was one of the most frequently searched terms that people are going to and saying, how do I stop this? Yeah. There's a certain lack of control and a certain... It's really addictive. Insidious, yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's really, really addictive. So you should be ban it. If you were Prime Minister of the UK, would you ban porn? You can press the button now, ban it. Yeah. There you go. Because I don't think, I mean, I just, the only downside of banning it is basically the, it's sort of like during COVID when people were banned from doing things which everyone was doing, right?
Banned from socialising, banned from seeing their families and people were banned. in a lot of cases, kept doing it and just broke the law. And I think that that had a sort of destructive effect on attitudes towards the law. This also was one of the reasoning, this is one piece of reasoning behind legalising gambling back in the mid-20th century, that there was statistics showing that like an enormous number of people were gambling. And so it just seemed ridiculous to ban something that everyone was doing.
So that's one argument against banning porn that like people would keep doing it. It would be quite hard with the internet, like realistically. And so it would sort of undermine faith in the legal system in general. And I take that seriously. But I don't think it makes anyone's life better. Sex workers would have a big rebuttal to you there and say, you know, it's a much better career for me than working some horrible job in some... There might be a small number of women for whom that's really true.
But in general, I think, and this applies to other areas of sex industry, not just porn, the people you tend to hear from are the people who are doing best by it. And you also tend to hear from them at the point in their lives when they're in the middle of it and they either haven't yet suffered the cost of it or are gone. I kind of have a self-protective narrative that they're telling themselves. And I've spoken to a lot of women who've been in the sex industry, including on my podcast, who will talk about this exact feeling of like, when you're in it, it's, you just need to get through the day and telling yourself I'm empowered and this, this is okay.
And I'm in charge of this and whatever is a way of getting through the day. It's quite common for them to compare it to being in an abusive relationship when, when you're in it, like I love him. It's fine. You know, And then it's only afterwards, after you've left the relationship and the emotional connection is gone, that you can realise how bad it was for you. And there are some quite high profile examples of this, like Jenna Jameson. She was one of the most famous porn stars in the world in the 90s.
She's now a campaigner against the porn industry because she says it's just so, it's so exploitative. It causes so much psychological harm and physical harm. I mean, just things like... um, STDs and injuries during. You're 18 times more likely to be murdered. Um, if you're a, uh, female porn star. Yeah. According to a study by Stuart Cunningham et al. Yeah. Yeah. And that, and that danger is even more acute in other areas of the sex industry. Um, There might be some people who really don't suffer those psychological effects and who find a way of doing it in the sort of safest possible way and it's okay for them.
§04Transcript — part 4
I've spoken to those people. I trust that they exist, but I think they're very unrepresentative. And to say that we should... basically design the law around those exceptions, rather than around what would be better for the people who are suffering most, I think is wrongheaded. I mean, in terms of the sex industry in general, I would favour what the law as it is in places like Ireland and Sweden and France and quite a lot of other countries, where basically buying sex is against the law, but selling sex isn't against the law, which I know seems kind of counterintuitive, but basically you say that the punters are criminalised.
I'm talking about like on street sex work and brothels and stuff. The punters are criminalised, but the prostituted women are not. So they don't have anything to fear from the police. And they can get support from social services and they can get help with addiction and they can get, you know, all the various issues that are so much more likely to, they're so much more likely to confront. But the punters are disincentivised from, because it's all fuelled by demand, right?
If there weren't men who wanted to buy sex, if there weren't men watching porn, and women too, if there weren't people watching porn, the industry would collapse. Like, it all depends on demand. This young generation are going to grow up with pornography on their phones since birth. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, your kids are going to be able to access pornography immediately. Sometimes accidentally, if you scroll Twitter. I know, it's terrifying.
From the minute, while their brains are forming. Yeah. And that's the first real generation that have had pornography from birth. Yeah. Yeah, it's really bad. I mean, this is why smartphones, it's why I worry about smartphones. I mean, there are other reasons... There are other problems with smartphones, like in terms of things like bullying through social media, whatever. But porn one is really bad. It's very addictive. It really damages your real world relationships.
It affects your sexual taste as well. Like it's you're more likely to. It's not like porn invents these things. Like there's something like the choking phenomenon. It hasn't like invented it out of thin air. It's feeding on an existing dynamic where women tend to want to be dominated and men tend to want to dominate. But it exaggerates it and it like, it turns neural pathways in your brain into motorways, you know, because you're constantly reinforcing this positive response to the stimulus with orgasm, which is like a very, like you're training your brain, basically.
And that's... point of choking the other thing that um pornography does is it kind of resets your expectations of people's bodies and how people should look not just how they should perform in bed etc and yeah the way sex should be but how they should look and obviously there's been this huge rise in plastic surgery driven by social media but also probably by pornography and expectations of how the body should look yeah which seems to be playing into all of this Yeah, and seems to be bad for self-esteem, bad for your sort of realistic sense of...
So it's that funny phenomenon, isn't it, where what looks good in 2D doesn't necessarily look good in 3D? You ever notice how sometimes women who have had a lot of work done will look really good in photos and then look a bit weird in person, like Uncanny Valley in person? Because actually in 3D it looks a bit odd. Yeah, yeah, of course. So it's like the wrong motivations as well. On that subject of attraction, though, the conversation around attraction itself is quite confused because, again, there's sort of a political correctness around what you can and can't say about attraction.
What men are attracted to and what women are attracted to. I think we can agree from an evolutionary perspective is different. And what is that? What are we not saying? I mean, there's lots of really interesting little data points about that, like perfect waist-hip ratio that men like is 0.7. 0.7, which is, just for anybody that doesn't know, that they want the waist to be 0.7. So it's the waist measurement divided by the hip measurement. Okay. Should be 0.7, I think that's right.
Okay. Um, and, uh, like men having like upper body strength is just straightforwardly, like basically the more the better. There is this interesting thing with women where too masculine is off-putting. Oh, interesting. Women want like eight or nine out of 10, right? Masculinity. Yeah. But they don't want bodybuilder. Exactly. They don't want too much or like the super, super square jawed, like intense look. And the reason for that is an interesting one.
It seems to be because... Women have this balance in choosing a partner where you want someone who's strong and will protect you and will provide for you. And being masculine is an indication of that, which is good. But you don't want someone who's so macho that he has out of control aggression and might hurt you. So the 10 out of 10 is a bit risky. You want your 8 or 9 out of 10. That's the sweet spot. It becomes an egg. I guess so. Your radar.
Or scary. Okay. Yeah. I don't think that men have that in reverse. As far as I can tell, the more feminine, the better. Like men just really like, you know, all the signs of adult female fertility are attractive. You said that women like upper body strength. Yeah. You didn't say lower body strength. Is this why men don't do leg day? I mean, that's the point where there's the most divergence between the sexes, like lower body strength, um, between the sexes is, you know, I, I, I don't at the moment obviously, but I normally do powerlifting.
And, um, the difference between squat for men and women is much less than the difference between bench. Um, so it may be that, uh, everyone's trying to exaggerate the dimorphism. I think that that, I mean, and it's also an interesting point around the way our society is less, is less polarized. Like we do the same jobs. We, men and women are friends with each other. Like there are lots of ways in which we are much more sexually egalitarian and like mix more with the opposite sex than did our grandparents say.
And I think to some extent people actually really crave polarity. They actually crave sexual difference maybe more than what they... That's one theory as well as to why BDSM is popular. That people are like really drawn towards like hyper-macho, hyper-feminine behaviours. If sex is hierarchical in the sense that if I'm a high status, strong male, I'm going to attract more mates. Isn't it sort of innate then that there's always going to be this group of men at the bottom of that spectrum who are sexless?
Yeah. And that are struggling because there is a lot of men that are really, really struggling at the moment. And the suicidality amongst that group of men is... shocking. The incel community, the, you know, the purposelessness, the addiction, the gambling addiction is really almost exclusive amongst men in that regard. Yeah, maybe Mother Nature's a misandrist as well. But I think there is, it's one of the reasons why talking about things like attractiveness is not very, I don't know if politically correct is quite the word, but it's a bit like awkward and painful because it is quite hard not to just say, look, there's a hierarchy.
Like there is an extent to which some people are more attractive than others. And lookism actually is like a massive form of social inequality that no one ever talks about. Lookism. So people who are better looking basically do better in every way. People are nicer to them. They do better in their careers. There was this study of tipping during COVID because during COVID people working in restaurants, they had to wear masks. And so to some extent it hid people's faces.
And... Normally, better looking waiters get more tips and waitresses. And then during COVID, that was just some extent equalised. I know, it's kind of horrible. I know, I know. But it's like, and that's why I think we don't really talk about it. I mean, people clearly know this because they work so hard to be good looking. Think of the size of the beauty industry and like gym culture and whatever. Like people are desperate to be better looking. So we kind of know this is important, but it seems a bit, I don't know, a bit horrible to talk about it.
Mother Nature is unfair. Yeah. And there's trade-offs that go both ways. Yeah. I'm not, you know, Kim Kardashian is gorgeous, but if I was a woman, I wouldn't necessarily want to be Kim Kardashian because there are trade-offs that I wouldn't be happy with. And I think that's much of what this conversation has really been. It's just highlighting some of those disparities and unfairnesses, but also the trade-offs and the opportunities that Mother Nature presents us with in all facets of our lives.
And these are difficult conversations for all of the reasons you've described. They're difficult, they're painful. I think it's better to know. I think it's better to know. I think that you can make an informed choice if you know. Right? I agree. Yeah. A lot of people don't want to know. And you learn that as a podcaster. Yeah. You learn that. There's a lot of things that some people, it's fingers in the ear. It causes too much dissonance and pain and uncomfort to look in the mirror at the nature of the way that the world is or is going to be.
So some people would rather avoid it. And you know what? Fine. yeah that's they've they're coping yeah hope is a very powerful we're all trying to find ways to cope like we all are you know so i have empathy for that um thank you so much thank you so much for being uh willing to have the uncomfortable conversation and willing to say the uncomfortable thing out loud because a lot of people aren't willing to say that and You know, I think that's how progress happens.
I think ideas that are opposing sometimes need to collide for us to make progress. And I think your book is very much a case of that. If anybody hasn't read it, I think it's one of the most important books on the subject. It's called The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century. um highly highly recommend it everyone that i know that's read it has absolutely raved about it and passed it around so i'm sure you will do too so i'll link it below in the description so you guys can all read the book i have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for and the question that's been left for you is what a question When was the last time you lied to yourself?
This morning. I think we do it constantly. I mean, on the cope thing, like I think actually too much truth is probably a little bit too much to bear. Right. Yeah. All at once. Yeah. Yeah. We have to lie to get through life, I think. Yeah. Little white lies that have us cope with today, which is kind of related to what we were just saying. Yeah. Thank you so much. Really, really appreciate it. And congratulations on the small boy on the way. And everything goes well.
And I'll see you again soon in the future, I'm sure, to continue this conversation. So thank you, Louise. Thank you so much.