The Sex Expert: "Casual Sex Is Almost Always Dangerous For Women!" - Louise Perry

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 we have a culture that prioritizes male preferences for casual assets 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 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 one woman and remove yourself from the dating po so what is the uncomfortable advice that both men and women need to hear on this subject for their best interest 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 we've just hit 6 million subscribers on the dire of a CO um so me and my team would like to do something we've never done before as little thank you and we're calling it The dire of a CO subscriber raffle and here is how it works every episode this month we're going to pick three current subscribers at random and we'll send one of you a 1,000 voucher one of you tickets to come and watch the D SE behind the scenes live with our team and one of you will have a 10-minute phone call with me to discuss whatever you want to talk about if you're a subscriber you're in the raffle thank you from the bot of my heart for allowing me to do something that me and my team love doing so much it is the greatest honor of my lifetime and I hope it I hope it continues uh off into the Future Let's get to the [Music] episode 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 being living the the the exact um sort of social phenomena that I saw often write and talk about which is basically the role of women in participating in public life and the the inherent ways in which the fact that women be children comes into conflict with that which is very much the you know the subject to my first book this this question of like if you can artificially suspend that if you can if the pill arrives in 1960s and suddenly women can go from being constantly I don't want to say at risk of pregnancy because that's not about the right word like pregnancy is 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 um and my argument is it's had so much more of a profound effect than we tend to acknowledge um 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 uh vulner abilities um our ability to participate in politics all of this and the pill is just this like enormous Game Changer where Suddenly It's a choice and I'm in the season of my life where I where I've chosen it for anybody that is um 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 is has been an unambiguously good thing and there's been no tradeoffs and I think there is ambiguity and that there have been tradeoffs that's basically the disagreement and I think they're pretty much I think they're 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 at the pill another 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 serious effect on the body so on that front fantastic and on a personal level fantastic um the the tradeoffs 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 culturing uh has changed in what Regard in that I think that it is shifted towards uh and you be careful here because I don't want to I don't what I don't want to say is that um 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 heers 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 um 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 center of gravity has moved more toward their preferences and some women are okay with that you know some women genuinely enjoy the sort of being the Playgirl right um but most don't I think that there is some important average 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 culture that prioritizes male preferences when it comes to sexuality is going to be more costly to women so who are you Lise and what's some 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 very kind of conventional in my thinking I went to a very a very very Progressive University um School of Oriental and African studies in London and when I left University I um I worked for Charities including working at a Rape Crisis Center which was um 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 spit whatever who cares um and that sexual violence rape is not about sexual desire it's about power it's it's you know it's a power play thing it's all could 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 uh of sexual violence is 15 it's really young right really young and also the age of um um perpetrators is also skewed quite young like teens and 20s is the most common age group and one of the things I noticed or couldn't couldn't help but notice is it perpetrators um basically the peak age of perpetration for men young men is the same as testosterone Peak oh really yeah it's the same curve it's also the same curve you see in other kinds of violent crime there's basically just um testosterone Rises a lot in your mid- teens and then drops in your 30s and it's basically during that period that um I mean there's there's a massive upside to this as well like you know testosterone is also the drug of um the hormone of uh being adventurous and risk-taking and there's there's a lot of upsides to having that sort of youthful male energy the downside is um things like rape and ditto the peak age of female victimization 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 yeah so there clearly is an element of people are sort of um making decisions based on Social Power structures and so on but I know when it comes down to it um 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 like how do we how do we Channel male aggression in the right directions how do we protect young women during these um vulnerable years this is a profound problem and it's a 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 differen between men and women male and female sexuality is basically the Fame 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 I people people say these things with the best will in the world um 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 15y old girls and I say this is someone who used to be a 15-y old girl and has also spoken to lots of 15-y 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 and things like that I think that we I think we should be more honest with these young women then that was my motivation for writing the book and also why I ended up partly as a consequence of working R crisis ended up moving politically and becoming more skep C of a lot of sort of um dominant political ideas so if we um if we think the understanding of the physical and um 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 um we should probably talk about what those differences are you mentioned physical differences between men and women so strength being one of them y um are there any other physical different differ that are really pertinent to this subject so strength sports are the biggest gap between men and women yeah um 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 women in the world they're not that different um but if women did not have their own reserved sporting categories there would be no women in Elite Sport because like the fastest woman in the world would be like the thousandth fastest man in the world or something like that because once you're getting to 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 very most accomplished Elite male athlete there's always this Gap so anyway so cardio differences are not massive the strength differences are pretty big um 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 for women just because that physical asymmetry two because women are the on who get pregnant like even with the pill even with the most reliable contraception you've still got that small chance um and so that either means that you carry 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 born by the woman the man might have no idea this is even a occurred right so there's this kind of essential asymmetry 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 um sexuality are are are are also important they're not as massive as say upper body strength but on average that 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 um 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 on to 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 um in 0% of cases to women say yes 0% and this is consistent um 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 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 you know there's been surveys done of like 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 of casual sex than men do in no country do women buy sex more than men do like 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 head heads every time is that ploss 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 um aggressor or the so yes but not animals that are similar to us so like spiders or something like that um in terms of other primates I mean there are there is variation with other primates um Bobo are quite into casual sex forance Bob 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 they aren't as um 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 and there are they're always outliers of course I mean you're talking about overlapping bell curves right yeah so the average is a difference but the thing with overlapping boves is it's more obious at the tales MH so for instance like people who people who buyx or people who become addicted to porn or something they're basically entirely male because you're talking about this sort of tippy tippy tale of people who really really desire sexual variety 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 what would a what does a culture of casualx 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 an eight 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 sort of proclivity towards sex casual sex um 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 cly 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 um child birth which is very risky in the ancestral environment less so now fortunately and then you've got um maybe 15 years or something of having to look after a child until it's capable of being e economically self-sufficient that's an enormous right thing to happen in your life whereas and and it also means that women can only 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 their children 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 what we're I think the the reason that young women Express so much unhappiness at the moment with the sexual culture is that a lot of young women kind of go along with it that they they I know this is this is kind of surprising to men right and I've spoken to men about this who who find this completely amusing they're like why would if you don't want to have sex you don't have sex it's fine like what's 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 um 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 amazing and women are like but I don't want that that's that's like horrible I don't want to Shag some random man on the street right um so there's that Gap in sort of uh there's that empathy Gap um and similarly I think women have an empathy Gap like they probably don't realize how they don't realize 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 want to be approved 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 um the saale and Witch Trials um apparently girls are now giving like getting tourettes from Tik Tok because it's like a viral thing on Tik Tok um uh hysteria in the 19th century anorexia there's a lot of examples of these right where um mental illnesses which are seem 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 um 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 um this very mtic group right and that's fine like 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 approved is incredibly cringe has taken hold really really effectively among this group of girls and so you know I'll I'll talk to girls or 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 it's and I think that's something that I think that's something that a lot of a lot of people find difficult to empathize with and we and will say and some men do say in criticism of my position like why don't these why don't these girls just sort of Get Grip when you say that um there's young girls and women going along with it yeah are you talking about both the type and the frequency of sex or 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 I mean I think particularly it's the um BDSM is a bit of a complicated one um we'll get to that then um in terms of the the casual sex thing so like having sex sex on a first date okay kind of thing um historically very very very rare like such a weird cultural convention right and you think that happened because because the pill number one yeah because it means you can do it without it being without pregnancy being at high risk um and I think it's 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 um who were who were in their 20 say at the time when the pill came along and they'll say I used to um it used to be the case you 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 um on engagement or when you get married or um maybe when you're going steady you 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 you 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 um there's this evolu psychologist um David bus who specializes in human sexuality um 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 voling back and forth like who is going who's going to who's going to win basically right and the pill massively shifts it in the have sex sooner Direction and so yeah you say women who you know 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 what actually is happening in me two kind of cases I mean obviously me too cases is a lot of range you've got straightforward really criminal Behavior like Harvey wiste or whatever but you also quite often what you what what's going on is it's not even it's so much more subtle than that it's like like the aiz zanzari case do you remember that quite an interesting case because he in terms of the response say Z anzari 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 um 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 be a like 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 like 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 to cases there's like there 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 mean adding alcohol is really bad you know there's this bias that men have it's like a de like a like a deep-seated bias where men will tend to see sexual interest where there isn't they're more likely to see sexual interest where there is none they kind of overestimate how much women fancy them basically I know talking about and alcohol makes it worse oh really yeah alcohol exaggerates that effects so if a man's drunk he's more likely to see seual 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 it justes just feel like where the 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 um these I guess tragedies right of people not understanding one another so sex becoming a negotiation now at when historically it wasn't such a negotiation and therefore sex happening much sooner in the interaction between women men and women often on the first date maybe the second date um 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 is emo 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 survey data oh really yeah yeah you just ask women like how do you feel after um different kinds of sexual encounter like a one night stand 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 for men and women like basically um for people who had had casual sex of 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 um and uh so many women say yes to that and one of the reasons for that is that um women have a much lower disgust threshold than men do so like women feel women feel discusted more easily than men do um in response to all sorts of things but including in response to um 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 um how icks are more prevalent amongst women essentially yeah the it yeah it's a really interesting expression isn't it it's the uh women use it to mean when they're like they like man and then suddenly something s switches and they get the yck and all of a sudden they're like oh no yeah I had um I've got a friend who I sh name um who met this really great guy on a dating app and I was I was looking because she was asking me for some advice on her dating profile or whatever and not that I could give anyone advice because I've basically never been on any dating app but um she showed me this photo of this guy and this guy was like really goodlooking 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 the Wardrobe behind him oh she was like he's got like cardboard boxes on the Wardrobe behind him she was like G 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 cboard boxes on the Wardrobe behind him in the profile picture she was like G interesting bizarre I thought you you know is that a cultural thing or is that innate this cuz there's no guy that I know that would look at a profile of a stunning woman and go she's got cardboard boxes on the although might they do think for a woman they were like deciding whether to marry do you know what I mean because men do tend to have sort of two there are kind of two tracks like like there's the woman I'd have sex with and there's a woman I'd marry and they're and they're different they're different categories and maybe the I don't know about cble boxes necessarily but maybe what it's showing is um 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 and that's maybe you're move don't have much money she I guess she's looking for cues of like being a really longterm yeah good bet which goes back to your evolutionary principle exactly yeah that's a sensible thing to be doing really I think I 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 egg for you I I I'm not sure if it would be a personal I okay but I guess maybe we should respect it as a as a as an idiosyncratic I I don't know I think in general it's goes for men as well I think it's go for people I think it's um you ever read the gift of Fear gav De Becca book really great book it was published like 30 years ago or something I think Oprah made it quite a big deal and uh it's about it's by a um I think you 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 um where women basically ended up getting um attacked by men who they did actually have bad vibes about in some way but they ignored those and it cost them right and his argument is that um fear is a gift and that you should listen to your instincts because often again highly you know very uh evolv to be very very attuned these instincts right there's a reason why we are descended from people who listen to their instincts in this regard um 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 um 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 she said later that it it was weird it he like he it didn't feel like he was just being nice she got she got bad vibes from him she got the ick whatever there was something like 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 right which women carry and men don't as much I mean men certainly don't carry it from women if men get sexually assaulted it will be by other men almost always um 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 like local police statistics or whatever it's just Vibes they just feel unsafe in these areas they're actually those vibes are actually really accurate surprisingly so and I guess because yeah it's this evolved thing that um like to put it really bluntly rape is a very bad outcome for women evolutionarily right it's something you really want to avoid and so we have these inbuilt systems right well sometimes but it it's also just that the the well there are several costs there's the there's the carrying a bait the rapist baby and all the downsides of that right there's the risk of being ostracized by your community maybe your husband like casts you out there are so many downsides even aside from the physical threat um we've evolved some very good systems to try and protect ourselves against that I also think that to some extent you know you know the 15-year-old girls they do have these instincts so they they have some degree of like inbuilt protective instincts but they also they do also lack life experience um which is I think why we have or ought to have social conventions that also protect them do you know what's interesting as a you know this is called the Dio podcast and although we've straight quite far from business and people tell me that all the time um my My Lens because I run businesses when I'm not doing this is always to think about how a lot of this supplies 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 um 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 that regard 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 often times to me and that's kind of what makes the relationship work my husband says I'm a witch yeah I think my partner's a witch if we can if we making it a safe space my partner is a witch but she's a she's a white witch and she knows she is but she can just it's like she can see things that I can't see yeah yeah I mean h there's a great book to be written um about like 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 uh overplay these psychological differences between men and women is because historically they have been used to discriminate against women right the women are too irrational to do XY um so and that's a completely reasonable concern but I also think that just pretending therefore that they don't that they don't exist doesn't really do anyone any favors because they do um and I think we should just be honest and like say simultan be honest but also simultaneously be like you know this doesn't mean that women are inferior is um 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 exactly exactly I think there are probably some roles where or indeed things like like in policing for instance um you know to be really direct I don't think the women should be in Frontline policing roles because I think that the physical differences are too profound particularly in the UK where women don't carry where police officers don't carry guns the 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 to re that I'd say you know what what what happens if you have a crime where um 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 this so I think women should be involved in criminal justice but for instance probably women are better at interviewing yeah I wouldn't be surprised an 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 B cures 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 being out and having physical confrontations with people role and I think that's fine I don't think that we should that this's this very frustrating tendency um in policing in for fire service as well to for people to notice the fact that there are fewer say female firefighters and therefore to lower the the physical demands to get more female firefighters in what if the what if the physical demands what if the test was is the test the same for both I 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 they changed the standards so they've um say reduce the upper body strength component or they've made the like in policing and in firefighting all these and and Military you have to a bleep test stuff like that um they've lowered the standards necessary in a lot of that's really the issue then versus the yeah yeah that's what yeah because there's I mean several of the women upstairs would whoop my ass in and bleep test they will they like run marathons and stuff all of them at the bloody office they' all whoop my ass so really the issue is about making sure the standards are sufficient for for the requirement 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 F on firefighter that I know personally from Jiu-Jitsu she's so strong she's so fit she passed very very high standard great you know you will get that woman in a thousands who can and in which case fine you know but what I 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 um you don't think women should be involved in Frontline policing I if they can meet the very high standards I think that one woman in a thousand yes but I but I one woman in a thousand is that yeah you think that's it yeah and you is that because of upper body strength you're talking about that's the big one it's also aggression okay like you do need a certain level of you can watch a lot of um body cam of um police having um physical altercations and uh it's quite common forence to see female police hesitate more than male police do because ibly not always a bad thing if you think about the amount of people just being killed depends it depends doesn't it I mean yeah there's also yeah policing is a complicated one because also in America say whether police are have guns female police are less likely to shoot the male police are so you know maybe that's good right like but if it's something like I don't know there 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 um these are quite deep seated deep-seated instincts to be more to be less physically aggressive and this is a thing I mean we talked about right at the beginning this thing like you know 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 we 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 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 like how do we do that it's so complicated because um I understand and I understand that there's physical differences but policing is so so complicated because you're policing both men and women so women have a different testosterone curve for example so 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 commit very much violent crime at all so if you're talking about like physical ocations 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'd had a few conversations about the subject with people um and then I remember saying 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 there woman that showed up with a gun shot the terrorist and there was also that man did you see who like barricaded the escalator yes and he was holding still member of the public yeah yeah was 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 it does the article goes to highlight these instances where the man runs in the building 911 I think it was like 98% of the people that died in 9/11 firefighters were were men it was a couple of women as well yeah and then I saw that video of the terorist attack in Australia and you have again you have the guy on this 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 M and so you know it's new it's super nuanced isn't it this yeah what's really interesting about this physical courage thing is um so often people say later that they didn't even think about it it wasn't there was no conscious process there was no like should I oh should I they just do it do it yeah yeah 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 yeah and then and you do read amazing accounts of women driving 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 mhm so yeah something on we're talking about I and I just wanted to cover it off because um 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 ticktock ification of the ick which is probably causing people not to get in relationships I've got a friend that um she's been on about she goes on about 100 dates a year and she's she's like I think she's actually starting a dating podcast because she's that unsuc sucessful 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 um social status signs which are very mtic like one of the things that some women will do for instance is they'll like say I will only date a man over 6 foot and actually and just set that cut off and you can be very objective about that on the app because they say h toia i mean I'm sure everyone's exaggerating but like they say how toia and it's it's 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 wouldn't you wouldn't even notice probably so sometimes I think that um modern technology can encourage a level of pickiness which is actually really counterproductive and probably actually and and again it's like I think so much of um Mutual sexual attraction is about the uh about pheromones about Vibe about being in person and daing apps don't capture that at all so I'm sure that definitely works again um yeah there are 100% women who are way too picky definitely definitely we we talked a second ago about how the introduction of the pill and how that caused negotiation in this first sort of encounter yeah impacts women um we didn't cover how it impacts men Downstream I would would it be better for men if there were you know we waited longer before we had sex with a woman you know in your book you talk about waiting 3 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 you nervous I'm saying that because there are tradeoffs 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 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 um quite a weird thing to demand which is why I said three months in the book because it seemed like more reasonable um and more achievable and also because my mom said to me when I was 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 it'll be you you'll get more of a hearing you know if you're more reasonable able the thing is we're a really weird culture in this regard like basically every other culture there is obviously variation you know my so my first degree is anthropology and one of the things about anthropology which is so um powerful and interesting when you're interested in contemporary social issues is that um 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 um 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 um everyone has marriage customs of some kind they can look different from ours I mean the most common way in which cultures differ from from our culture or at least our culture up until recently is um permitting polygamous marriage so about 80% of cultures permit polygamous marriage only permitting monogamous marriage is more unusual I think we're dri drifting back towards permitting polygamous marriage through polyamory but that's we can get onto that that the thing is I just think the thinking that went for for 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 ideological thing it was also people wanting to completely reject 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 um 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 um 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 sure commitment from them and of course there's this whole game about how like men might want to have sex with more people woman wants to tie a man down like it's really complicated game and what um 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 you know we had the like you can't have sex outside of marriage marriage has to be monogamous all these 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 uh now half of children will reach age of 15 without their biological father in the home there are 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 downsides 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 uh and templates you know and those will sometimes feel restrictive and there will sometimes be people for whom they don't work very well um 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 one of the sometimes people exaggerate this effect a little bit right but there is a tendency for basically very attractive men High status men the the hu heers right to um to do really well on dating apps to get a lot of uh 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 so 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 um and uh 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 um that is basically what people do and the problem you end up with is that um when you don't have a system of monogamous marriage and you don't have the expectation that people wait um there's really nothing stopping those men from just having loads of girlfriends maybe having them at the same time like having little harim right you know not not calling them that but having basically play the field and not being forced to commit because like 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 they're 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 a inbuilt inequality s 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 VII okay you can't 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 women um and so I've heard it described as sexual socialism monogamous marriage because it does sort of encourage like an like a equalizing effect um one each yeah whereas in a polygamous system obviously that's completely permissible and you know in extreme circumstances you'll have high status men having you know 100 women or something like that in historical examples um and then low status men just have none and it's 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 it's 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 um one downside of it is having a lot of unmarried or like having a lot of sexless Ben 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 um have children and get married their testosterone levels drop they become less aggressive like in the year after baby's born men commit less crime they're less promiscuous like there's a real sort of um 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 less High te and that has a sort of taming effect right or it's like or 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 um there's also there's more um domestic violence in pelist societies there's more conflict within households like 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 as their Norm um and have been successful partly because of that if you um 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 um let's say 18 years old and says Mom I heard on that podcast you did ages ago 20 years ago that that you said I shouldn't have sex with the guy I'm dating until engagement yeah Mom can you just confirm why what what would you say to your daughter there's 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 um things like oxytocin okay and um there's actually I wrote about this in the book there's this whole like horrible genre of journalistic Articles um basically advising women on how to have casual sex without being miserable and um sort of what what can you do to like hack your brain so you can have casual sex without feeling Dreadful afterwards this is like public acknowledgement this is a thing and one of the ADV one of the pieces of advice is things like um take ecstasy while you're having sex because it will like dull your emotional bonding response things like that which I just find so dystopian I'm like or you could just not yeah or you know you don't have to like try and biohack your brain to uh endure something you don't really want to do but anyway um women get more emotionally bonded from sex than men do and then you do end up with this um kind of asymmetry which comes up in in the group chat right of like she basically is more into him than he is into her um and if there's no commitment not even any necessarily social acknowledgement of the relationship it might be just uh friends with benefits or something that can be really painful um 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 eye decisions if you see red flags you're more likely to respond to them properly if you're not like the fuddled by oxytocin basically the other thing is it's like it's just a really really good demonstration of commitment if you 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 how can you 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 genen Z think it's justifiable to have casual sex compared to 12% of the pre-war generation yeah and you know when we you talk about the diamond ring being a good way to get commitment yeah but I I had a divorce lawyer on the podcast the other day and um 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 yeah after that yeah so there's some but but yes I mean the principle is true so do you think marriage as a system or a technology is good do you just think it's cuz 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 the 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 labor market right where you're too pregnant you've got a newborn whatever I mean I when I had my first baby I I calculated that in the first um 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 um she said that she this really like um she realized this for the first time when she had her daughter and um her baby was crying to be fed in the middle of the night and she realized that in a sort of if you if you uh looked at their relationship in an individualist way you were like okay you've got one human being who like wants to be fed and another human being who can provide the feeding um 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 every cell in your body is saying I must go feed my baby it completely changes you you physically psychologically it's like complete transformative experience because you your biological goal becomes keep this baby alive and the baby is completely dependent on you there's this uh the child psychotherapist um Donald winot said there's no such thing as a baby there's only a baby and someone right babies can't survive on their own and normally that's 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 moms 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 uh something that one can ex people have experimented with right like attempts of communal child rearing say or I mean what to some extent you can do is depend on the state yeah right depend on the welfare state depend on um say um state provided child care 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 then on this subject of marriage just to really interrogate this further because I feel like I'm in two minds about it a okay a because of the stats show that 56% you know ended marriage of divorce and you've kind of rebutted 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 M which is not always in the interest of the kids because if that home becomes toxic in any regard the trauma has passed down sufficiently to the kids okay I take all of that yeah 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 money there are money pressures Etc Etc 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 Etc so to some extent a divorce culture will sometimes encourage people to make um permanent decisions which they they will regret and there is there are stats showing that quite a lot of people do regret getting divorced something like a third if people regret getting divorced so there's that the other thing is that there is a lot of uh 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 um it's also you know there's a massive skew with uh class and education so only about 10% of graduates who get married will get divorced interesting yeah and that's it is interesting isn't it and it does suggest that to some extent marriage is becoming a luxury good and and there's this there's this phenomenon right where a lot of people who are from those kind of elite graduate classes will um 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 Etc and be very um actually be very conservative in their own choices even if they don't necessarily promote those choices so so you know there's that and and actually I think 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 of uh 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 stepparents 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 stepparent in the home are aund times more at risk of child abuse than children who don't have a step parent in the home hundred times I know and obviously I you have to be careful I'm not I'm obviously not saying that all stepar parents are abusive by any means we're just talking about risk yeah but it does go up by a lot and what was I mean when this was discovered um it was taken as proof of the fact that parents having a genetic investment in their children is one of the re I mean like children are very um 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 favored and do better unconsciously right but there will be there will be kind of a playing of favorites game 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 seat Bel on their stepchildren things like that it's like it's like subtle but small ways in which stepchildren are disfavored compared with biological children and of course some people will surmount that and be amazing step parents disol adoptive parents plenty of people will do a wonderful job but it is a really significant risk thing I had this woman called Katie F on my podcast a little while ago who um is a uh 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 mom's boyfriend touch me my mom's boyfriend looks me weird my mom'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 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 to kid yourself and to be like I'm not very happy with my partner my husband my wife um you know sex's not as good as it used to be we like he doesn't understand me like that kind of level of dissatisfaction um if only I was with someone else everything would be so much better I asked that in part because I was just thinking as you're saying it about adoption and implications is is it adopted child being with a family better than than being I think definitely but I mean this is one of the reasons why adopt adoption agencies are so careful and screen so thoroughly and like the criteria to be an adoptive parent are really really stringent is 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 uh issues and like to be more difficult in some ways so I think there's a recognition that this is a this is a more difficult setup it's more risky setup and so you have to be careful the things you saying you know that they're unpopular yes especially in 2024 yeah but you're saying them anyway yeah why cuz I think it's true did you care about the consequence of people being annoyed about it uh yeah although you know what since this book since this book was published two years ago um I have had and I really did feel a little bit when I was writing it like oh no have I just completely like ruined my life am I going to just constantly face like um uh 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 is 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 um 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 um 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 um I had so many people saying like 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 um and so we did a young out audition for exactly that purpose and often it is dads who are feeling moms too but dads are are feeling really anxious about this what 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 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 like completely imitate the masculine template and that's that's good for me and have had this deep sense of cognitive dissonance which they've only belatedly realized was needless like it they didn't have to actually put themselves through what they did but they felt what they did you know they they had this process of uh conforming to something that was bad for them I hear from a lot of those women um and and you know in many cases like I have had two women in me recently to say that they uh are having a baby because of me is that 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 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 to say that being just a mom 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 podcas and everything is actually Elevate some of the feminine stuff which is needlessly marginalized you know being a mother 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 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 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 mom is worse at a societal level there's been a big decline in birth rates which is quite um quite interesting are you concerned about the decline in birth rates um 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 um 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 2,100 and the last one I'll read is Japan's population was 124.32607 countries are taking drastic measures to give 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 and it and it it's partly the pill the big the people um 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 um not just Europe and America but Northeast Asia as you were saying and also actually lots of like the Middle East has quite low birth rates Indian subcontinent has quite low birth rates Ates basically the only place in the world that still has high birth rates is subsaharan Africa so this is basically a global phenomenon um the 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 $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 because often people will say in an expensive city like London people will say I can't afford to have kids and they're sort of right I mean it is true that it's harder to afford it's 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 disincentivize 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 you all of this whatever yeah I mean we're all descended from people who had 10 kids and a two-bedroom heart you know like so our ancestors of all had children in much more difficult circumstances than we have and I think that it's a really I mean 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 um this seems to be why there are postwar baby booms it's not actually because all the soldiers come home and they're really horny right it's because um 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 deaths 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 uh and and comfortable ways of life affluent societies that actually discourages people from reproducing which it does seem C inot doesn't it but that's a that's probably quite likely I mean what's probably going to happen therefore is that people who really want to have kids will will be selected for because historically um 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 less a lot less true so probably right now um I mean we 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 per woman is how it's calculated so in order to have replacement you'd need 2.1 in a culture of low child mortality okay um 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 do no one have it's a really good question 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 urbanized and like they're 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 we touched on it briefly the idea that porn might be playing a role in people having less sex um I read an interesting study from 2014 from Jammer 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 gray 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 10 pornh Hub users were female the role that porn is playing in all of this and what's your view on pornography good thing bad thing uh net negative thing net negative yeah yeah I mean um 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 it's the the the 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 ratios 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 the camera in the room so it has the same issues as the sex industry Tes in general in terms of um 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 uh death grip syndrome death grip syndrome so death grip syndrome to be um to be delicate about it is basically when a man masturbates so much that it like 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 APR they've not done like science on it no I think it really emerged on Reddit um and anecdotally if you stop using porp syndrome tends to alleviate so like you familiar with noap which is like a movement to not not masturbate or yeah and there's various an I don't know if there's been proper studies but there's there's anecdotal evidence that um stopping using porn reduces erectile dysfunction and improves Sexual Health in various ways right um I think there's also I coin this term cultural death group syndrome where I think you end up with um when sexual stimuli are so everpresent and it's so easy to access like anything you can imagine at the click of a button with the phone in your pocket there's like this is like hyper abundance of sexual stimuli um I think it affects people psychologically and I think it I think it actually reduces people's drive to form relationships because it's like sex loses a Mystique 100% yeah 100% I'm thinking about a lot of um scenarios in my own life where I was many many years ago when I was 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 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 m debate 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 Al going back to this premarital sex thing as well I think it also applies to other areas of life we call it postn Clarity that was the name I was looking for yeah if you if you live in a society where you can't have sex unless you're married or you can't have like sex legitimately you might be able to have sex to prostitute or something but basically your sexual options are massively restricted until you 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 that is so motivating and I think one of the problems that 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 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 prioritize any of these things when I've got pornhub or soon enough sex robots right it kind of kills that natural um it kills that natural drive it kills that natural motivating force which um is very very compelling for young men you think reproduction is at the very heart of men motivation well I mean yeah sex is yeah for most event outliers other 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 you know I think so and I mean there might be some upsides in terms of um one of the aru arguments that people use in favor of porn is that it reduces sexual violence MH now I don't really know if that's true it's very hard to measure um and I'm I'm skeptical about it because I think that it uh something like choking is now so so much more common among young people um like the proportion of I can't remember off top of my head but the proportion of young women who say they've ever been choked in beds is so much higher than the proportion of older women it just go up it's from your charity right the charity you're involved in cons 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 normalized 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 10-fold increase in rough sex between 19 6 and 2016 right and I think that and the reason that the reason that we con cons sense this exists is because it it was I mean we've we've we 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 deliberate murder yeah or or get convicted of man's lation instead of murder and things like that um so this is you know that's like a specific that's like the extreme end of this phenomenon um 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 absolutely terrifying to be choked out of nowhere by some man you actually don't know very well right that's a really distressing experience there are also what people always say to this is there also women who ask for it and there are also women who who like choking I think what's going on there is partly the mtic 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 like 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 you know I say men I know that there's a significant proportion of women that listen watch porn as well but I have come to learn from doing this podcast and having conversations about dating apps and pornography when I look at the comment 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 used to analyze Google search data was how do I stop watching porn yeah and it almost seems like you think you know that that was one of the most frequently searched terms that people are going to Google and saying how do I stop this yeah there's a certain lack of control in a certain it's really addictive Insidious yeah yeah yeah it's really really addictive so you should we ban it if you were prime minister of the UK would you ban porn you could press a button now ban it yeah there we go because I don't think I mean I just the down the only downside of banning it is basically the um it's sort of like during Co when people were banned from doing things which everyone was doing right banned from socializing banned from seeing their families and people 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 one piece of reasoning behind um legalizing 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 really with the internet like realistically um 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 uh 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 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 um 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 um they're in the middle of it and they are either haven't yet suffered the cost of it or are kind of have a self-protective narrative that they're 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 is quite common for them to compare it to being an abusive relationship when when you're in it like I love him it's fine you know and then it's only afterwards you've after you've left relationship and the emotional connection is gone that you can realize 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 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 STDs and injuries during you're 18 times more likely to be murdered um if you're a female porn according to a study by Stuart Cunningham at Hell 2018 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 I I try like I've spoken to these 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 the people who are suffering most I think is wrongheaded I mean in terms of the sex industry in general I would favor what um 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 the punters are criminalized I'm talking about like on Street sex work and brothels and stuff the punters are criminalized 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 all the various issues that are so much more likely to they're so much more likely to confront but the punters are disincentivized from because it's all fueled by Demand right if there weren't if there weren't men who wanted to buy sex if weren't men watching porn and women too if there weren't people watching porn the industry would collapse like it's 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 your kids are going to be able to access pornography sometimes accidentally if you scroll Twitter I know it's terrifying um 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 the porn one is really bad it's very addictive it 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 something like the choking phenomenon it hasn't like invented out of thin air it's it's feeding on um 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 neurop Pathways into in your brain into most ways you know because you're constantly reinforcing this stim this positive response to the stimulus with orgasm which is like a very like you're training your brain basically on that 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 how they should perform in bed etc and 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 yeah bad for self-esteem bad for your sort of realistic sense of it's it's that funny phenomenon isn't it where um what looks good in 2D doesn't necessarily look good in 3D you ever noticed 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 CU actually in 3D it looks a bit odd yeah yeah yeah of course so it's like the wrong motivations as well on that subject of Attraction though there were the 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 um I mean there's lots of really interesting little data points about that like perfect waste hip ratio that men like is .77 which is just for anybody that doesn't know that they want the waste the the waste to be S it's so it's the waste measurement divided by the hit measurement should be 0.7 I think that's right um and uh like men having like upper body strength just straightforwardly like basically the more the better there is this interesting thing with women where two masculine is offputting 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 Jord like intense look um and the reason for that is an interesting one it seems to be because um women have this balance in choosing a partner where you want someone who's strong and will protect you and will uh provide for you and you know like and and being masculine is an indication of that which is good but you don't want someone who's so Macho that he has like out of control aggression and might hurt you okay so the 10 out of 10 is a bit risky you want your eight or nine out of 10 like that's The Sweet Spot Nick I guess so radar or scary okay yeah 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 about adult adult Dem fertility are attractive you said that women like upper body strength yeah 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 no I I I 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 MH um so it may be that uh everyone's trying to like exaggerate the dimorphism I think that that I mean and it's also an interesting point around the way our society is less um is less polarized like we we we do the same jobs we um men and women are friends with each other like there are lotss of ways in which we are much more sexually egalitarian and like mix more with the opposite sex than did our grandparents say um and I think to some extent people actually really crave polarity they actually crave sexual difference um maybe more than what they that's one Theory as well as to why BDSM is popular the people are like really drawn towards like hyper matro hyper feminine behaviors 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 um 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 yeah the incel community the you know the purposelessness the addiction the gambling addiction is really almost exclusive amongst men yeah in that regard yeah maybe Mother Nature is a Mis andjust as well that I think there is it's one of the reasons why talking about things like attractiveness is um not very I don't know if politically correct is correctly where it were but is a bit like awkward and painful because it is quite hard not to just say look there kind of is a hierarchy like there is an extent to which some people are more attractive than others and um and lookism actually is like a massive form of social inquality 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 um tipping during Co because during Co um people working in restaurants they had to wear masks and so to some extent it hid people's faces and um normally better looking waiters get more tips and waitresses and then during Co that was to some equalized I know it's kind of horrible I know I know but it's like and 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-look 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 um I don't know bit horrible to talk about it mother nature is unfair yeah and there's trade-offs that go both ways yeah you know I'm not you know in Kash 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 I wouldn't be happy with um 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 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 described they're difficult they're painful but um 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's 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 that's they've they're coping yeah cope is a very powerful we're all trying to find ways to cope like we all are so I have empathy for that 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 um Collide for us to make progress and I think your your book is very much a case of that if anybody hasn't read it I I 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 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 we have to lie to get through life I think yeah little white lies that help us cope with the day which is kind of related to what we were just saying yeah thank you so much really really appreciate it and um um 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 thank you so much [Music]