- I used to be completely sold
on the standard narrative about the sexual revolution-
that it was an unambiguously good thing.
I started to question that,
I suppose initially at university.
I had those little dominoes starting to tumble
at about that time, although I wouldn't have expected
that it would end with me writing a book called
"The Case Against the Sexual Revolution".
The phrase that I often hear is:
"We don't wanna go back to the 1950s do we?"
Or the "Handmaid's Tale" is obviously hovering
in the background as this fearsome threat
if we question any of the sexual liberation narrative.
I don't think it's a binary choice:
There's a lot of space in-between the two extremes
of complete permissiveness and theocracy.
The problem is that sex-positive feminism,
in practice, gets put to the purpose
of basically excusing all kinds of really quite abusive,
really quite grim sexual practices,
and ends up being this kind of ideology
that's just lying in wait to justify any manner
of power imbalance in sexual relationships.
We're making decisions within an incentive structure
which has a path of least resistance,
and the path of least resistance currently
is all about viewing having sex,
like a man, as aspirational.
It doesn't have to be, though.
It is possible to make different choices,
and I think, increasingly, there are more
and more young women who are doing that,
and are waking up to the downsides of sexual liberation.
I'm Louise Perry.
I'm a journalist and author, and my book is called
"The Case Against the Sexual Revolution:
A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century."
If you look at human history, there does tend to be a bit
of a rollercoaster effect with sexual culture
in that you will have periods of greater permissiveness,
periods of greater restriction, kind of alternating.
The difference, I think, with our sexual revolution
is that ours stuck, and I think the reason
that ours stuck is because of 'the Pill.'
That suspends female fertility and does so
in a way that women can control, and that is invisible.
That was so radical, and it came
along as well with all sorts of changes to the economy.
Things like washing machines, central heating,
microwaves, nappies, tampons,
all the things associated with modern domestic life
that our ancestors didn't have access to.
All of this means that it's now become a lot easier
for modern women to live like men,
to imitate traditionally masculine roles, whether that be
in professional life or in terms of sexuality.
What we've seen, I think,
is that the new social incentives are dragging
that female bell curve towards the male bell curve,
encouraging women to imitate male sexuality
and to be more eager to have casual sex,
to be more interested in watching porn,
to be more sexually experimental, and so on.
For some women, that's fine, that's a good result.
For a lot of women, what you hear
is this sometimes slightly non-specific sense
of dissatisfaction and distress.
We are now in a sexual culture where women feel
like they don't have much option
except to imitate male sexuality;
that it's actually seen as
being a rite of passage
to go through a period of hooking up
and having emotionless sex,
and trying to have sex like a man.
This is the phrase that's used in the first-ever episode
of "Sex and the City" where the protagonist
in the first episode has sex with an ex-boyfriend
and she's complete conscious
of the fact that this is emotion-free.
She says in the voiceover:
- 'I realized that I'd done it.
I just had sex like a man.
I left feeling powerful, potent, and incredibly alive.'
- So this is held up as being aspirational,
and I think that that's a social culture that really
doesn't serve young women's interests.
Right up until the Pill's invention, having sex
is probably the most consequential thing a woman can do.
You have more than nine months of pregnancy,
a dangerous and difficult labor,
many years of infant care, including breastfeeding.
The consequences for women are enormous,
and so of course, it makes sense in that context
that women would've evolved to be much pickier.
A slightly controversial point that I make
in the book is a chapter called
'Men and Women are Different.'
The reality for our species is
that only one half can get pregnant,
the other half can do the impregnating,
and that half the population who can get pregnant is
also smaller and physically weaker than the other half,
which has profound social implications.
Most men can kill most women
with their bare hands, but not vice versa.
Men can, on average, punch with
about twice the amount of force that women can,
and bench press with twice the amount of force.
And then there are also the psychological differences:
There's a trait that psychologists call 'sociosexuality'
which is not quite the same as sex drive;
it's your interest in sexual variety.
So someone who has unrestricted sociosexuality
is going to be more interested in watching porn,
experimenting with kinks, and having casual sex.
So on dating apps, what you'll see is
that women are tending to cluster
toward the most desirable men: the richest, the handsomest.
Those men can have a different date
with a different woman every day of the week,
assemble these kind of digital harems.
In a system where some people are inherently more powerful
than others, if they are granted more freedom,
there is the risk that they will use that greater freedom
to exploit people who are weaker than them.
There's a phrase from the socialist historian, R.H. Tawney,
"Freedom for the pike is death for the minnows."
Now he was talking about economics,
but I think that we should be understanding sexual culture
in the same way.
Someone low in sociosexuality is gonna be much more focused
on monogamy and commitment, is gonna be much more
reluctant to jump into bed with someone they've just met.
I don't think anyone watching will be surprised to hear
that men are higher on average in sociosexuality
than are women, with lots of outliers, obviously.
But you know, if you're talking at the population level
we're talking about millions or billions of people,
you have what I call the 'sociosexuality gap,'
where you have at the population level,
you have a lot more men who are eager
to jump into bed with women and there
aren't enough women who actually want to do it.
How do you bridge that sociosexuality gap?
Various cultures have come up with different solutions.
One solution for this is prostitution,
where you basically have a class of poor women
who are reserved for the purpose of absorbing
all of that excess male sexual energy.
I don't accept that.
It does a terrible wrong to those women
to basically have a class of women
who are reserved for that purpose.
I also think that the current culture where you
see all women being encouraged to sort of be dragged up
towards the male standard,
is also clearly leading to distress.
I think, fundamentally, a feminist claim is that
having unwanted sex is worse than being sexually frustrated.
So I think that a feminist project,
a truly feminist project,
shouldn't try and persuade women to be more like men.
To have sex like men,
it should actually be focused on persuading men
to have sex more like women.
- Get smarter, faster with videos
from the world's biggest thinkers.
To learn even more from the world's biggest thinkers,
get Big Think+ for your business.