The growing alienation between men and women is, to my mind, one of the biggest stories of our time.
It’s warping our politics and culture through the rise of misogynistic influencers on the right and a growing sense of feminist despair on the left.
My guest this week believes that our problems today can be traced back to the sexual revolution. She argues that it reset relations between the sexes in a fundamentally negative way and ultimately benefited men. Louise Perry is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal’s Free Expression section and the author of “The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.”
Below is an edited transcript of an episode of “Interesting Times.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ross Douthat: Louise Perry, welcome to “Interesting Times.”
Louise Perry: Hello. Lovely to be here.
Douthat: I’m going to ask you to start by talking about a book that you wrote several years ago, in the misty days of the early 2020s, that was called “The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.” So, make that case.
Perry: I should probably start by saying what I think the sexual revolution is or was. I think it’s two things. I think it was an ideological revolution.
But I think, at least as importantly, it was also a material revolution, because of the pill. The distinctive thing about the pill compared with other contraception is that women can control it themselves and it’s invisible. You can be walking around temporarily sterile, and in that sense, a different creature from someone who is fertile.
In some sense, it’s difficult for us now to fully imagine what it would be like to live in a world without contraception. It’s the technological basis of so much of contemporary ways of life and politics.
The book was not a refutation of the sexual revolution. I’m a beneficiary of the sexual revolution in loads of ways, and I think that there were upsides. As the title says, it’s the case against.
Douthat: So what is the case against? What is the critique of the new world order?
Perry: That there are important ways in which men and women are different from one another. Which in any other era would be a completely trivial thing to say, but is somewhat provocative right now.
There are obvious physical differences between the sexes. Only women can get pregnant. There’s an inherent asymmetry in terms of physical vulnerability, which is just a fact that we can’t get away from.
More controversially, there are also some ways in which men and women differ on average psychologically. There are obviously outliers in every direction, but in general, when thinking about sexual relationships, men have a stronger drive toward having casual sex and having lots of partners, enjoying all the fruits of the sexual revolution, than do women.
Women also disproportionately suffer the costs of sexual relationships that go awry. In terms of unwanted pregnancies, which still happen even in the age of contraception, I think it’s something like almost half of pregnancies in America, probably the same in Britain, are unplanned. Women on a physical level suffer that entirely, and also women are much more likely to suffer from sexual violence and will always be at a disadvantage when alone with a man, all else being equal.
In that sense, a culture of casual sex is very much worse for women than it is for men. Even if there will be some women who enjoy casual sex, who seek it out — I don’t refute that. I think that a culture where that is the expected way in which one makes one’s sexual debut, say, in college, is bad in general for women.
And to some extent, I’ve written this book as a millennial. When I was a student, that really was the prevailing culture. That really was riding high. That might be less true now. I think we can get onto this.
Douthat: Right. We’re going to talk about how completely the world has changed since you wrote the book.
Perry: [Laughs.] Yes. It’s very different now. And when I wrote this book in, like, 2020.
Douthat: Right. You’re writing about a world in which the norms around sex are at least supposedly defined by hookup culture.
Perry: Yeah.
Douthat: OK. So the case for it is straightforward.
Perry: Yeah.
Douthat: You give women autonomy that they didn’t have before. You enable people to escape from scenarios where they have to marry the first man that they had sex with. And then this feeds into a different kind of material revolution, where women are able to succeed and thrive in the workplace as never before.
Perry: Yeah.
Douthat: How does that fit into your critique of the sexual revolution? Is it just sort of an asterisk? Is it something that’s inseparable from the changing sexual landscape? How do women in the work force fit in?
Perry: It’s somewhat distinct from the technology shock of the pill that we’ve been speaking about, but it’s connected. Women’s mass entry into the labor market is partly an ideological product. I would say that it’s actually more a consequence of the economy changing and the sort of jobs that women can more easily do becoming more plentiful. But also, when it takes less time to keep a household warm, clothed and fed, it becomes more possible for women to participate in public life.
Obviously, women have always worked, but traditionally, the sort of work that women do is the sort of work that can be combined with child care. Typically in agricultural societies, like processing raw materials, because you can do that when children are around.
But anyway, the nature of women’s work does change post-sexual revolution. A lot of that is to do with macro changes in terms of technology. And it does present some serious challenges when it comes to the sexual and reproductive side of things.
Famously, many decades ago now, Elizabeth Warren in “The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Going Broke” points out that when it becomes the norm for both parents to take home a paycheck, you introduce a fragility in the domestic economy where if either parent for any reason stops earning, that’s a problem. And particularly, if the mother stops earning because she’s had a baby, that becomes a real problem. Because if the assumption is that you have two paychecks and you’re competing for, say, housing against other families who also have two paychecks, then families with a single income are at a disadvantage.
There are ways in which this is a very good example, I think, of ways in which a culture which seems to offer endless choice to women in particular can, in a way, restrict choice.
Douthat: In terms of the history of the sexual revolution, I want to tease out how much the sexual transformation of society is separable or not from that economic transformation. When I think about the history, it seems like there is a period that is very distinctively male-driven. I think people sometimes tend to underestimate this because of the narrative around it that folds all good things together and says: We got sexual liberation and we got feminism at the same time, and it was a wonderful package deal.
And in reality, if you go back to the late 1950s, into the ’60s and even into the early 1970s, you would say some of the dominant figures of the sexual revolution at that point are Hugh Hefner, Playboy and the Playboy philosophy.
But then you also very quickly have a feminist reaction, I think, that picks up on at least some of the points you’re offering in critique from the beginning. That focuses on sexual violence and rape and the dangers of those things. That focuses on the vulnerability of women, the need to figure out what consent actually means in these circumstances.
Can you give me your sense of what the feminist critique of the sexual revolution is? And then, I guess, from your perspective, why does it not succeed in dealing with the problems and the fallout?
Perry: Yes, the feminist critique of the sexual revolution emerges almost immediately. Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, these are some of the key figures who are from the get-go saying this is and this isn’t in women’s interests.
And there’s the so-called sex wars of the ’70s and ’80s. It is an intra-feminist argument over exactly this.
Douthat: What was that argument?
Perry: So Dworkin and MacKinnon, among others, were highly critical of pornography in particular — and really very prescient about pornography, because of course, at the time, they were talking about smutty magazines, which now seem to us to be quite tame.
But actually, I don’t think that Dworkin would have been surprised at all by what internet pornography has ended up looking like. I think that they had a better sense, actually, of where the cultural winds were blowing than their critics.
They’re also very critical of the sex industry in general and of the idea of women’s role being as instruments to male sexual pleasure. But they ended up losing the argument. And it was certainly by the ’90s, the sex-positive vision, as it’s sometimes called, was riding high.
And then the emphasis was not so much on women as a class being, because Dworkin and MacKinnon were thinking in Marxist terms about women as a class of people who are affected in these material ways. The feminists who end up winning the day culturally take a more individualistic approach, see it more as a choice that women can make on a personal level to maximize their own autonomy by using whatever tools they want to, et cetera.
Again, I think this is now somewhat consigned to history, but that was the sequence. And then when, say, “Sex and the City” comes along, those kinds of ——
Douthat: Right. By the time you get to the late 1990s and the early 2000s, this is the peak of “Friends” as the most popular American sitcom, and then “Sex and the City,” and there’s an assumption that feminism, sex positivity and a highly individualistic vision have carried the day.
Would you say that a weakness of the sort of Dworkin and MacKinnon perspective was that it was simply too sex-negative? That’s my impression looking back. If you say, “OK, we have this fierce feminist critique of the sexual revolution,” but it goes all the way to saying that, in fact, there’s really no way for men and women to be together at all.
Perry: All sex is rape, supposedly.
Douthat: All sex is — right.
Perry: I think she never precisely said those words, but she obviously meant them.
Douthat: Dworkin?
Perry: Yeah, absolutely. It’s interesting how post-#MeToo there was a resurgence of interest in Dworkin in particular, and a view from some feminists who hadn’t lived through the sex wars that maybe they had it right all along.
I have a lot of respect for Andrea Dworkin in particular. Mostly because she was an extremely good writer. I think that often gets forgotten about. But yeah, also an extremist. Absolutely an extremist. And the hostility toward men is palpable.
But then equally, what comes out of #MeToo is this immense sense, which I think is still with us, of despondency and disappointment around what the sexual revolution seemed to have offered.
The offer was liberation, and it’s fairly obvious to everybody that hasn’t been delivered.
Douthat: Right. I think you have to see #MeToo as a kind of successor to the MacKinnon and Dworkin era. Where, again, you have this reassessment of hookup culture and everything associated with it that does sort of adopt a version of the argument you’re making, that this is a landscape that obviously benefits men, or at least powerful men, exploitative men, predatory men.
But then, where do you think #MeToo ends up? What is the cultural takeaway from #MeToo? Where does it leave us?
Perry: So the solution offered by #MeToo is either, I guess, employing gossip networks to damage male reputations. It’s one of the few tools that women do have at their disposal to deal with predatory men. So it’s that, and then it’s also proposals to re-educate men, things like consent workshops.
I used to teach consent workshops. My first proper job out of university was working for a rape crisis center, and one of my jobs was to go into schools and teach consent workshops. So I’m not completely opposed to consent workshops.
Douthat: What was it like to teach consent workshops?
Perry: Consent workshops do something different from what people think that they do. I think that the purpose of a consent workshop, as typically taught in schools or universities, is to tell students what the law is to protect the institution, ditto, and that we’ve made clear what’s acceptable; and also to tell victims where they can go for help.
What consent workshops don’t do is reprogram young men, which is a typical feminist response to saying that we should teach men not to rape.
I don’t think that the primary driver of sexual violence is ideological. This is one way in which I differ from a lot of feminist thinking. I don’t think that rape or rape culture is an ideological product — I think it’s a biological thing, primarily, which we can respond to in all sorts of societal ways.
One criticism I have of the more individualistic feminist position is that if you think that rape is a product of propaganda, shall we say, consent workshops are no match for pornography. Just think of the hundreds of hours that a typical teenage boy might be exposed to pornography, compared with 30 minutes of a consent workshop. I mean, there’s no match.
Just on that basis, we’re at a disadvantage, and Dworkin and MacKinnon’s position on banning pornography makes a lot more sense. If you think that rape is a product of ideology, that makes so much more sense than any other intervention.
Douthat: And this is why your style of feminism gets labeled “reactionary feminism.” I know that’s a term that ——
Perry: It’s partly a joke. [Laughs.]
Douthat: It’s partly a joke. But like all things, all labels begin as jokes and become realities to some degree. But that’s a term that’s I think most associated with a writer named Mary Harrington, who’s also your fellow Brit.
And so reactionary feminism, as I would describe it, seems to emerge after #MeToo, to some degree, where you have this sense: OK, we had yet another feminist attempt to get to grips with the downsides of the sexual revolution, and it didn’t lead to a stable system. It just ended up leading to more alienation between the sexes.
They also emerge, particularly in the U.K., in debates around transgender issues, where the reactionary feminists sometimes are people who were radical feminists who were insisting on differences — biological differences — between the sexes that they then feel get effaced by the push for transgender rights.
But that’s my description. What’s your description of your own perspective?
Perry: Reactionary feminism starts from the assumption of crucial biological difference.
Douthat: And it thinks that many forms of feminism have underplayed how important that is?
Perry: Yes. An expression that Mary likes to use is that men and women have to find a way of getting along. But that is not necessarily a given in other styles of feminist thought.
I’ve often been accused of being anti-men in my book because I say things boldly, like sexual violence is overwhelmingly committed by men, and sexual violence is a product of male sexual desire, and all this kind of stuff.
A lot of people take that as an indictment of men. I don’t. I just think it’s a fact. But it’s paired obviously with ——
Douthat: Something can be a fact and an indictment.
Perry: I suppose so. But I suppose I forgive men for this because I think it’s also true that there are all sorts of virtues that are found in men and are maybe found more often in men than they are in women.
Douthat: Such as?
Perry: I mean, the challenge of youthful male energy is that this period of maximum danger in terms of violence and aggression is also typically the period of maximum energy. And the risk tolerance that men have, which leads them to do violent things, is often also the same risk tolerance that allows them to be inventive and adventurous and all of these great things.
And I say this as a mother of two boys.
Douthat: You want them to have high risk tolerance.
Perry: Yeah. And in some sense, every society has to try to solve this problem. What do we do about this energy that we find in young men? How do we channel it? Because if you don’t channel it in a good direction, it’s very destructive.
I don’t know, maybe you send them off to war, or you send them to boarding schools or whatever. There are various solutions that we’ve tried. I don’t think that the solution that has been toyed with in our own era of just pretending that men and women are the same psychologically or physically is productive at all. I think that’s a mistake.
So I guess what “reactionary” summons is a different relationship to the recent past. It’s not an attempt to roll back the clock just a little bit by a few decades. It’s more of an attempt to look at the sweep of human history and think: OK, what are men and women like? And how have people in different times and places solved these problems, which we are also grappling with?
My first degree was in anthropology, and then I did a degree in women’s history as well. And I think that my anthropological training has probably done more even than working in rape crisis to shape my view of the contemporary moment.
I think there are so many ways in which our culture is so strange in terms of the long sweep of human history. So strange, and we think such odd things and have a tendency to assume that we are somehow outside of history or somehow completely unlike men and women of the past, and that we don’t need to solve the problems that they did using the tools that they had.
And hey, we have the pill, so we’re not completely wrong about that. There are some ways in which we are outside of history, and we have very different tools at our disposal.
Douthat: Right. We’re in a different technological moment along several dimensions. I want to get to the question of the effects of the digital revolution on relations between men and women. But before I get there, I just want to consider why a nonreactionary feminist might look at your argument or your critique and have some strong doubts.
And so I think one obvious thing that they might say is: OK, look, yes, we have not exactly figured out an ideal way for men and women to get along under feminist conditions. Fair enough.
Was the way that men and women got along in Victorian London or Georgian London or any prior period in this metropolis’s history, was that some ideal model? No. Every era has a non-ideal model because life is non-ideal, and in this particular era, women have received jobs, legal rights, all kinds of forms of independence, and — this is the crucial point — they are choosing that.
Women are more politically liberal or more politically progressive in both the United States and in the U.K. They’ve become still more politically liberal in the last few years, and we’ll get to that in a moment. But generally, they are free actors in a free society making free choices.
And a case against the sexual revolution that starts with the idea that it has been bad for women, isn’t that accusing women of false consciousness, to some degree, of not understanding their own interests?
Perry: So two things I’d say to that. One is I think that what’s sometimes called heteropessimism, this buzzy word, is an indictment of the sexual revolution.
Douthat: What is heteropessimism?
Perry: Heteropessimism is a word sometimes used to describe particularly women’s feeling of antagonism and disappointment toward heterosexual relationships with men and the feeling of just wanting to opt out, which is often a product of being burned by hookup culture.
And I think that a lot of this is downstream of lack of friendships with the opposite sex. I think also it feeds into women not necessarily having had any positive close relationships with men until they are inducted into a sexual culture which assumes that the default initial relationship will be casual.
I think that is a lot of what explains heteropessimism, that if your only experience of men is within a sexual culture that favors their interests, it’s not surprising that women are feeling negative. And it’s not difficult to find women raging against a culture of casual sex.
Douthat: But then also, people are still falling in love and getting married. And they are getting married and falling in love less often than they did 40 or 50 years ago.
But the marriages that are made have tended now to be a bit more durable. The divorce rate is down somewhat. So people who do get married are selecting into marriages that are reasonably long-lasting, are more egalitarian. Men do more housework.
Perry: Loads more.
Douthat: And spend more time taking care of children and so on. And again, there are the compensations of professional success and independence. I mean, how do you weigh those? Like, maybe the price of professional success and education is just a little more heteropessimism.
Perry: And maybe some people will just opt out. And they’re allowed to. That’s fine. And clearly there are people who are, despite all of the ways in which we have redesigned the default life course such that it is no longer the standard sequence to be essentially match-made by your community and then to get married and have children, all this default. There are people who are nonetheless doing that.
One thing that I would say, though, to fellow feminists, is that if we can’t find a way of encouraging a feminist way of having children, like, if feminist cultures turn out to be cultures that cannot reproduce themselves, then the political project dies within a generation.
Douthat: What you were talking about with heteropessimism, there’s just much more hostile discourse between men and women, coming from the feminist left, obviously, coming from a kind of masculinist right. I think it’s the negativity that is really striking to me.
And again, lots of this especially in the States, but I’m sure in the U.K. as well, has focused on men and male alienation. But there was a really good essay in The New Statesman, a sort of left-of-center British publication ——
Perry: My former employer. Yeah.
Douthat: About female alienation, that women are moving left out of a profound cultural alienation and deep pessimism about the whole social structure. Hostility to capitalism and hostility to young men seem to go together.
And then you obviously have something very powerful happening with younger men, who are deep into forms of right-wing politics that are tangled up with misogyny, as well as forms of racism and antisemitism.
How much of this do you think is just digital conditions? Just as the pill was a revolution, how much of it is just that the internet is bad for relations between men and women?
Perry: I think quite a lot. One of the things that the internet does is that it exposes what the other sex is saying about you all the time.
Douthat: OK, go on.
Perry: [Laughs.]
Douthat: Say more about what that means.
Perry: So what would previously have been locker room talk or would have been women gossiping among themselves is now public and exposed in a way that it was never historically. And I think that type of talk ought to be private.
It’s perfectly normal and natural for people to have mostly homosocial kinds of friendships and to say vulgar or unkind things in private. But now, of course, the internet blasts this out into the public domain. I think that is part of the problem. And this has been much commented upon; the extent the internet encourages people to double down on their ideologies is also part of the problem.
I’m sure that this is a big part of what’s going on with young women. Young women are very mimetic — human beings are very mimetic, but young women, I think, are more mimetic.
For instance, young women are often the originators of new slang. They’re very socially sensitive, and fashions and so on often originate among young women. And that ability, which is both good and bad, is turbocharged online because the internet is this remarkable tool for mimesis. Hence why I think you see actually greater political radicalization among young women than among young men.
Obviously, the young male political radicalization is more commented upon because young men are more dangerous. It’s probably the main reason. We’re more worried about violence that they might commit.
I think the manosphere is unlikely to encourage young men to be violent and dangerous. I think it’s quite likely to encourage them to be lonely and sad, and that seems like a problem.
But in terms of who has actually changed politically over the last 10 years, it’s young women who are veering left and young men who’ve actually stayed relatively still — at least the median young man has stayed relatively still.
Douthat: Yes. I’ve seen that. Yeah, you can see that in polls. I think you’ll get a slight rightward tilt for young men.
Perry: Yeah, depending on the country.
Douthat: And you do have some polling that will, say, ask feminist-coded questions about what your expectations are for your wife, and whether working women are good for society, and so on.
I think in some of those, you do see also some rightward movement among Zoomer men.
Perry: Yeah.
Douthat: But if you’re just asking about general questions of political affiliation, it’s a very stark divergence among young women relative to men.
Perry: And this is very bad for relationships. It does seem as though men and women de-radicalize each other through positive intimate exposure, and that’s exactly what’s not happening.
Douthat: What about, though, in addition to misogyny on the right and anti-masculinity on the left, you also have a cultural phenomenon in the last few years that is itself reactionary, which is the tradwife. You have a kind of performative online femininity, where maybe it is maternalist, maybe it is trying to raise the status of motherhood.
Are the tradwives successful reactionary feminists? Are they Louise Perry readers who’ve taken the right point of view?
Perry: [Laughs.] Who’ve found their internet ideology and doubled down?
I mean, yes. Tradwives are an internet phenomenon, obviously.
Douthat: Yes. But what do you make of them?
Perry: I have sympathy with … I think that tradwives are angry and sad for the same reasons that progressive feminists are angry and sad, but they have a different set of solutions which they think will solve it.
Douthat: Churned butter. You churn the butter.
Perry: Everybody notices that not only are relations between the sexes mutually embittered, but also there are certain ways in which women’s lot is just quite tragic. There are ways in which, say, the nature of the female reproductive system is that it causes a lot of suffering, often in a way that just isn’t true for men, because we have more complex reproductive systems.
Pregnancy is difficult. Childbirth is painful. There’s no way of opting out. I can tell from experience, a planned C-section still necessitates a lot of suffering. There’s no way through this that doesn’t necessitate suffering.
And in very traditional cultures, that’s understood as the counterpart to the male burden of waging war and suffering by defending the community. The male warrior and the woman in childbirth are in some sense the counterparts to one another. These are your twin roles.
But of course, men don’t do that anymore in cultures like ours. So men have basically been excused from the suffering that they were traditionally burdened with.
It’s also a strange feature of the modern economy that the jobs that men used to do, including around the home, are quite easy to automate. So we don’t really need men to chop firewood anymore, for instance. But we do need women to do a lot of care work because that hasn’t so far proved to be something that one can automate.
So women look around and they see there are burdens that I am presented with which seem unfair to me. And rather than blame God, which would be one option ——
Douthat: Or Adam and Eve.
Perry: Yes, right. Christians have thought about this. But for many people, they think that maybe this is a product of politics, maybe this is patriarchy or whatever, and there’s an attempt to try and solve the problem.
And I think tradwives, in a sense, are doing that. Like, say, the position on childbirth. A popular view among people in the tradwife online space, which of course isn’t very trad because it’s deeply online, so there’s an inherent contradiction there ——
Douthat: We’re performing everywhere. Yes.
Perry: Right. A popular view is that the reason that childbirth is painful and dangerous and difficult is because modernity has ruined it in some sense. That the hospitals are the problem. And I actually wrote my thesis on this, that male-dominated obstetrics has wrested it from the traditional control of women, and this is why it’s bad.
So you have things like free birthing emerging as a very small subculture, but this is where you give birth not only at home, but without any assistance. You give birth on your own in the hope that maybe this solves the problem. And of course it doesn’t.
These are wicked problems. They are just wicked problems. And I feel very sympathetic to women and men of all of these different online-generated subcultures who are raging against the world and the unfairness.
There are problems that modernity can’t completely solve. We live so much more comfortably and safely than any of our ancestors, but there is still pain; there is still social friction. There’s everything. That can’t really be solved.
Douthat: No, but wait. I’m going to ask you to solve them.
Perry: [Laughs.] To solve them?
Douthat: That’s why you’re here, right? I’m really interested in what you think the models of improvement are.
Is there a different culture that’s imaginable, in a world with the pill and the internet? I’m going to ask you to imagine it. You’re in charge tomorrow. And we can start with: What advice would you give to a young person, let’s say, going to college, as we would say over here — or going to university — with minimal romantic experience, who’s not profoundly religious in a way that sets a script for their sexual life? How should this hypothetical young person approach dating? What is the system that should exist?
I guess those are different questions. You can take it either way.
Perry: I’ll start by offering one concrete view, which is on contraception. I am not completely opposed to contraception. I think, though, that women in particular should behave as if contraception doesn’t exist. If you would not have sex with this man if you weren’t using contraception, then you should not have sex with him at all — I mean, in choosing the man rather than the moment. If this man wouldn’t make a potentially good father to your children, then you shouldn’t have a sexual relationship with him. I would absolutely say that to my sons as well.
But I’m not completely opposed to contraception. And in fact, when the pill first came on the market, it was available exclusively to married women as a means of spacing births. And actually, I think that is the key miraculous thing that hormonal contraception can do, is allow women to safely space births for the sake of their own health, because having a baby every year is bad for your body. Maybe that’s my concrete proposal: that you should use contraception within marriage rather than as a means of seeming to have consequence-free sex. But the problem isn’t actually consequence-free, either. Physically, but also socially and psychologically.
In terms of the rest of it, I tend to think that this might be a problem that kind of solves itself. People are going to find in the post-digital revolution that there will be people and subcultures that emerge who are able to solve these problems, who find solutions to not being completely so deranged by the internet that they can’t form relationships with the opposite sex.
Something that I’m noticing, at least as time goes by, is more and more people making efforts to log off and to reject being excessively online, as a spontaneous recognition that it is deranging. So maybe more people will do that as time goes by, and those will be the people who find spouses and have children and pass on that culture.
Is that too optimistic?
Douthat: No. I want to dig in a little bit, though, on what that culture actually looks like. You’re basically arguing that we should have a culture of greater sexual restraint in which people try to have sex primarily with people who they consider prospective mates.
Perry: Yeah.
Douthat: So in this world, just to imagine it, there is still premarital sex?
Perry: Probably not.
Douthat: There’s no premarital sex?
Perry: I don’t know. I thought in this book about just saying ——
Douthat: So we’re becoming very reactionary here.
Perry: [Laughs.] Well, is it reactionary? It is obviously completely intuitive to say: For a woman, having sex is, in some sense, one of the most consequential things that she can do, because if she gets pregnant by this man, all the options are difficult.
Something I think we forget about abortion: Up until recently, up until the ’60s and ’70s, abortion was not just illegal; it was very dangerous. There wasn’t really a safe way of having an abortion. So for all of our female ancestors, your options if you got pregnant and you didn’t want to be were all very difficult.
Of course, given that, you should take very seriously indeed who you have sex with and when. And of course it makes sense to say that you’ll only cross this line once the man has been approved by your family and community in some sense, and also has made a costly and public declaration of commitment to you.
One way of doing costly and public declarations of commitment is through marriage.
Douthat: I have many questions. First, in our world, this world, where there is contraception, there is the birth control pill, there will be unknowable technologies around in the future surrounding reproduction, there is the internet, there is generally a degree of individualism and social liberalization that’s connected with technological change and economic change and so on, that isn’t going away. In that world, is it imaginable to have that kind of stringent norm outside of, again, an intense religious community?
Perry: Well, I think the religious are going to inherit the earth, for multiple reasons.
Douthat: So then in the future, you’re suggesting that this kind of ethic returns via just the return of religiosity because religiosity is what yields people having children.
Perry: Maybe.
Douthat: But earlier, you were saying that feminists, progressives, people who are, if they are religious, are not religious traditionalists, should wish for a world where their own ideas flourish and continue. So someone who’s listening to this conversation, who considers themself a liberal feminist and wants to have an ethic around sex that leads to good relations, are you just saying to learn from the conservative Christians?
Perry: I’m going to draw a distinction between feminist and progressive.
Douthat: That’s fine.
Perry: So I favor a very broad definition of feminism — politics for women qua women. And specifically, I think a politics that recognizes the inherent vulnerability of women, and therefore the fact that there needs to be a rebalancing in some sense to account for that vulnerability. That’s not at odds with being religious, I don’t think. But obviously, some religions are better or worse for women in that sense.
And where the liberal feminists watching and I completely agree is that I don’t want Gilead, or various real world examples of this. I don’t want a world in which women are completely subservient to men and have no … it’s not even just the ability to work, although that’s important. It’s the ability to do things like … One thing that I really appreciate about living in the modern feminist society that I do is things as basic as the ability to swim in public.
I’m also Australian, and Australia has a real swimming culture. And it occurred to me recently that the beach culture that Australia has is so modern and so fragile because it specifically relies on the ability to share common space without conflict, but also the right of women to wear scanty swimsuits, to go into the sea safely without being harassed.
That’s the sort of thing that is potentially imperiled by the failure of feminist societies to reproduce themselves — and I’m using “feminist” in the most expansive way possible.
Douthat: Yes. But that culture is itself connected to permissive norms around sexuality that allow people who are in their teens and early 20s, to say nothing of older people. But they’re not married, and if they want to have sex with someone, they have sex with them. I think those norms are in the same spirit that you might wear a string bikini to an Australian beach.
It seems to me very hard to say we’re going to have a society where there’s an ideal of sexual chastity that is at least somewhat equivalent to the ideals in the traditional past, and also have Australian beaches.
Perry: Yeah. I’m trying to be a centrist, Ross. But it’s genuinely difficult.
Douthat: Or, to take another example, I think that it is plausible to imagine a world that had an ethic of chastity around sex that was also comfortable with women succeeding in the work force. I think you can separate those things.
I think it’s understandable that historically feminists look and say: We had the ethic of chastity in a society that used it to control women, tell them that they shouldn’t go to college, or they should only go to college to meet a husband.
And the fact that two things came in together historically doesn’t prove that they go together, but it’s an indicator. Can you separate those things?
Perry: I don’t know. And also, another strong argument against the reactionary feminist position is to say that we might like it if everyone spontaneously realized, particularly in a world with the pill, that it is better for you if you basically adopt soft, trad norms of your own volition.
But realistically, if you look at every period of the past, the way that this actually gets enforced is through something like slut-shaming and through sexual double standards.
And I don’t like those things. I would rather women not suffer like that. Is that possible? I don’t really know. I can offer critique, but I’m not sure if I can be the architect of an entirely new sexual culture.
Douthat: OK. But in terms of evolutions, this is why, I guess, you went straight to very strict norms when I asked you.
Perry: I don’t think that ——
Douthat: And when you go straight to strict norms, it immediately raises all of the questions that I’ve just pushed at you, including questions about what happens to gay and lesbian people under these conditions, where the sexual landscape and incentive structure is very different. And again, where an ethic of chastity was associated with profound hostility to homosexuality. All of these questions immediately come up.
And if you don’t have an answer for them, is there a gradualist position where you would say: Look, you could have a society where people were understood to have sex before marriage, but there was an ethic around it that said casual sex is bad.
Perry: I hope so. One thing I’d quibble with is strict norms. I don’t think that a social disapproval of premarital sex counts as strict.
Historically, for instance, it was quite common for brides to be pregnant on their wedding day because often they would have sex once they got engaged. History is messy in this sense.
The problem, though, of course — and this is the challenge always of the conservative — with trying to defend any kind of historical society is that people will always point to the trade-offs of that model and the bad things about that society, which are absolutely true.
Douthat: But that’s why I’m pushing you on the extent to which post-1950s norms can be preserved. The list is just extremely long of things that you could throw in — questions around consent in marriage and marital rape.
How much of that is, in the end, compatible in some near future or far future with an ethic of sexual restraint? And to what extent is there just this fundamental tension that we’re dealing with where you can have female emancipation or you can have sexual restraint, but you can’t have both?
Perry: Well, I hope that’s not true. And I would say that female emancipation is on a spectrum. So one can imagine, because they have existed, societies where women have, say, the right to vote, but also there are clear default templates for having children, and it’s considered eccentric not to, for instance.
That seems to be possible. Whether or not that’s possible long term, I guess, is the bigger question because it does seem as if there’s a tendency to have a ricocheting between more permissive and more restrictive sexual cultures. And maybe that’s where we are right now.
When I wrote the book in 2021, I wrote at the end that at the moment, millennial liberal feminism was riding high, but I wondered if there might be a reaction. You hear these tradwives, et cetera, on the internet. Maybe this is going to be something more substantive. And I think that has happened, and there has been a significant rebellion against the liberal feminist assumptions of, say, the #MeToo moment.
Douthat: But it seems to me that both in the tradwife phenomenon and in the more male, masculinist parts of that rebellion, there is just a kind of fundamental unrealism about the kind of society that we live in and how it could plausibly evolve. You’re not just going to say, “Now it’s 1955 again.” That’s not going to happen.
So what would be your argument, from a feminist perspective, to the people who are like, “What’s she doing calling herself a feminist?” Right? “Feminism is terrible and responsible for every evil in society, and we just need to bring back patriarchal authority.”
Why should they care to preserve things that feminism has won?
Perry: I think it is good for women to be educated and to have minds of their own. One of the things that we have learned from the sexual revolution is that women actually do have remarkable capacities to actually outshine men in some professional contexts. Women are actually just as capable as men are of using their intellectual capacities.
Aside from the interests of those women, it’s a real shame for society to lose that. I would say that’s true. It’s also the case that professional life is at odds at certain crucial moments with motherhood, and that for women to entirely imitate the male life course will often be at odds with having children at all. So there has to be a point at which that kind of gives way, and there has to be some site of compromise.
Douthat: But why is it good for the man to help figure out those balances? That’s what I try to do in my own marriage.
As a man in the 21st century — a conservative man, but not a masculinist influencer — you are trying to find a balance that enables my own wife to be professionally fulfilled while also having kids.
And it is a balance. There’s no simple solution. But why is that good?
Perry: “Happy wife, happy life.” Is that an expression that Americans use?
Douthat: Sometimes. I’ve heard it, yes.
Perry: That seems compelling to me. Do you want, as a man, to have to manage an unhappy, subservient wife? I think probably not.
Douthat: And if you did, that would be itself bad, right?
Perry: It would betray your lack of virtue, yeah. So I think that is one reason, too.
I am pro-marriage, not only because it’s a means for having children and so on, but also because I think one remedy potentially, or the remedy that I take in my own life, at least, to the battle of the sexes is to look at the differences that clearly exist between men and women, and rather than read them as antagonistic, read them as charming and interesting and funny. There is no better arena in which to learn that than in marriage, and to become genuinely fond of the opposite sex.
That seems a very important step on the road toward men and women getting along. And again, that seems to be obviously in the interest of both men and women, to have good marriages.
Douthat: And you probably can’t achieve that to the necessary and proper degree if you start with an assumption of fundamental inequality, right?
Perry: Yeah, with the man as tyrant. Yeah.
Douthat: Right. That this is the key insight of feminism is to say that all good things flow from some assumption, not of interchangeability, but of male and female equality. That you are marrying an equal.
Perry: I think that’s true. Yeah.
I guess the reason why reactionary feminism may never find a large popular audience is that I think I just have quite a tragic outlook on these questions. Maybe this is my instinctive conservatism, my temperamental conservatism. I don’t think that there are, at scale, clear solutions. But I think at the individual level there can be.
One good thing to say for our current era is that if you have sufficient agency and strength of will, you can almost have it all, pretty much. We all have the capacity actually to resist all of the negative trends that we’ve spoken about today, which maybe wasn’t so true for our ancestors. So in that sense, maybe the modern choices available to us are a good thing.
Douthat: All right, on that note, Louise Perry, thank you for joining me.
Perry: Thank you.
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