"Casual Sex Is Almost Always Dangerous For Women!" This Is What Casual Sex Is Really Doing To Women - Louise Perry

27:40There's like 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 deep, 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. I think they're talking about that. And alcohol makes it worse. Oh, really? Yeah, alcohol exaggerates that effect. So if a man's drunk, he's more likely to see such an interest when it isn't there.

28:20And then if she's drunk as well, she's less able to successfully navigate this difficult social situation. You know what I mean? It just just feel like where 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, I guess tragedies, right? Are people not understanding one another? So sex becoming a negotiation out when historically it wasn't such a negotiation. And therefore sex happening much sooner in the interaction between women and women, often on the first date, maybe the second day. You're kind of alluding to it there, but I just want to get clarity on.

29:05You're saying it harms both men and women in the long term. I think in different ways. So I think the harm that's done to women is feeling... is a much... well, no. There are obviously some situations where the worst possible thing happens. 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... Is there a data? Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. You just ask women like, how do you feel after different kinds of sexual encounter? Like, go on nice stand. Yeah. And then you ask men the same thing. Women feel disgusting, basically, to some degree.

29:51It's sort of the dominant... I included this quiz in my book, right, for men and women. Like, basically, for people who had... had sexual sex with some kind or another, right? Who'd participate in this culture. And I sort of pulled the questions from my male and female friends.

30:11And one of the questions for women was, have you ever had a consensual sexual experience, which now makes thinking about it in retrospect, makes you feel like kind of physically uncomfortable, that gives you a disgust response. And so many women say yes to that. And one of the reasons for that is that women have a much lower disgust threshold than men do. So let women feel... women feel disgust more easily than men do. It responds to all sorts of things, but including in response to... not non -consensual, but unwanted sex. You see, like, the kind of subtle distinction, like legal, but not really desired sex.

30:55We're more likely to find that just makes them feel disgusted. Because... We're probably because of this evolutionary thing, right, where having sex with a man who you don't want to get pregnant by is a bad decision. And a big risk. And a big risk. Yeah. So you talk about in the book about how... X is more prevalent amongst women, essentially. Yeah, the X. Yeah, it's a really interesting expression, doesn't it? The women use it to mean when they're like, they like men, and then suddenly something switches, and they get the X, and all of a sudden they're like, oh no. Yeah, I had... I've got a friend who I shot, no.

31:37Who met this really great guy on a dating app. And I was looking at... She was asking me for some advice on her dating profile or whatever, not that I could give anyone advice, because I've basically never been on it in a dating app. But she showed me this photo of this guy. And this guy was like, really good looking. He looked like he played rugby or something. He was just like, I was like, what a great guy. And she was like, no, he's got boxes on the wardrobe behind him. He's got cardboard boxes on the wardrobe behind him. And she was like, oh, I was like, this guy is like perfect. He's like an action figure.

32:11But because he had boxes, cardboard boxes on the wardrobe behind him in the profile picture, she was like, oh, are you just saying? Bazaar, I thought, you know, is that a cultural thing or is that innate? Because there's no guy that I know that would look at a profile of a stunning woman and go, oh, she's got cardboard boxes on there. Although, might they do you think for a woman they were like deciding whether to marry, do you know what I mean? Because men do tend to have sort of two, there are kind of two tracks like, there's the women I'd have sex with and there's a woman I'd marry. And they're different categories.

32:45And maybe the couple, I don't know about cardboard boxes necessarily. Or maybe what it's showing is you're like messy to organize, not very grown up. Yeah, or maybe you don't have, maybe you're living at someone else's house, maybe. Yeah. Don't have much money. Yeah. I guess she's looking for cues of like doing a really long term. Yeah. Good bet. Which goes back to your evolutionary principle. Exactly. Yeah, that's a sensible thing to be doing really. I think X should be listened to generally. Do you think? Like our, I think our bodies are often sensitive to like little cues. That we might miss consciously.

33:24So you think women should listen to their X? Yeah. But some of them are getting a little, the one that 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 felt career wallet. Right.

33:43Is that an X for you? Mm. Right. I know she'll be a personal egg. But I guess maybe we should respect it as an idiosyncratic. I think in general, it's going to men as well. I think it's going for people. I think it's, you ever had the gift of fear that happens at Beckerbrook? A really great book. It was published like 30 years ago. Something I think opra made it quite a big deal. And it's about, it's by, I think he used to be a bodyguard. He's like a personal security expert. And he tells all these stories. It's mostly about women. And maybe a Supply's to men too, where women basically ended up getting attacked by men who they did actually have bad vibes about in some way.

34:36But they ignored those. And it cost them. Right. And his argument is that fear is a gift. And that you should listen to your instincts. Because often, again, highly of, you know, very evolved to be very, very assumed to these instincts. Right. There's a reason why we are descended from people who listen to their instincts in this regard. And often your unconscious will spot things that your conscious brain hasn't spotted. And maybe you'll be worried about being impolite or being weird or whatever. You know, so I can't remember all of the stories. But I remember there's one of the women who, a man, offered to help her carry her shopping up to her flat.

35:22And 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 shot the door and attacked her. And she was lucky to survive.

35:35She said later that it was weird. Like he didn't feel like he was just being nice. She got bad eyes from him. She got the yick, 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 a 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. Interesting question. I would guess probably yes, because particularly in relation to the sexual violence threat, right? Which women carry and men don't ask much.

36:16I mean, men certainly don't carry it from women. If men get sexually assaulted, it will be a brother man, almost always. Like again, really interestingly, if you show women, I think this is true for women, 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 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.

36:53They're actually, those vibes are actually really accurate. Surprisingly so. And I guess because yes, it's a whole thing that... 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. H, right? Well sometimes, but it's also just that the... Well, there are several costs. There's the carrying a bait, the rapist baby, and all the downsides of that. Right? There's the risk of being ostracized by our community. Maybe your husband like casts you out. There are so many downsides, even a side from the physical threat.

37:35And we've evolved some very good systems to try and protect ourselves against that. I also think that to some extent, you know, the 15 year old girls, they do have these instincts. So they have some degree of like inbuilt protective instincts. But they also... They do also lack life experience, which is I think why we have... Or ought to have social conventions that also protect them. Do you know what's interesting? As a... You know, this is called the Dioreversea podcast. Another extreme, quite far from business. And people tell me that all the time. My lens, because I run businesses when I'm not doing this, is always to think about how a lot of this supplies to business.

38:18As you were talking about, the way that I heard it is that women have a different sort of radar. Sort of like then 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 some candidates that there wasn't abundantly clear to me. And often, again, this is anecdotal, one candidate who all the men in the interview process are good with, fine with, all of the women in the interview process have a problem with.

39:03And a problem they almost can't explain. Interesting. It's a vibe, they're good. 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 learnt 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 difference, sort of, sixth sense, in my regard. I see it in my partner. Obviously, I can't give an anecdotal example because it's my partner, but it's like she's operating on a different frequency, often times to me.

39:40And 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're making it a safe space, my partner is a witch. But she's a white witch, she does years. But she can just, it's like she can see some things that I can't see. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a great book to be written 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 overplay these psychological differences between men and women is because historically they have been used to discriminate against women.

40:26The women are too irrational to do exercise, I do. And that's a completely reasonable concern. But I also think that just pretending they're full of that they don't, that don't exist, doesn't really do anyone any favors because they do. And I think we should just be honest. And I say simultaneously, be honest, but also simultaneously be like, you know, this doesn't mean that women are inferior, doesn't mean that. For me, it's a case of diversity. In some places, I mean, I think there probably is an argument for... In like the hiring process, for example. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I think there are probably some roles where or indeed things like, like in policing, for instance, you know, to be really direct, I don't think the women should be in front of my policing roles because I think that the physical differences are too profound.

41:14Particularly in the UK where women don't carry, where police officers don't carry guns. The average woman, even a really strong fit woman, is going to really struggle in a direct confrontation with the average male. But if I was to rebut that, I'd say, you know, what happens if you have a crime where involving several women, and a man shows up without the empathy, or without the ability to sort of resonate or to relate... So, yeah, so this... So I think women should be involved in criminal justice, but for instance, probably women are better interviewing. Yeah. I wouldn't be surprised, an interrogation, you know?

41:54So there are probably some roles where women are going to outperform men. Again, it's, you know, it's the overlocking bulk of, 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 conversations with people role. And I think that's fine. I don't think that we should... This is very frustrating tendency in policing, in fire service as well, for people to notice the fact that there are fewer safe female firefighters, and therefore to lower the physical demands to get more female firefighters in.

42:33What if the physical demands, what if the test was... is the test the same for both? If I were 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... are they changed the standards? So they've, say, reduced the upper body strength component, or they've made the... like in policing and in firefighting all these and military, you have to oblique tests, stuff like that. They blow at the standards necessary. That's really the issue then.

43:10Yeah, yeah, that's... Because there's... I mean, several of the women upstairs with what my ass in a bleep test. They like run marathons and stuff, all of them in the bloody office. They're all what my ass. So the really issue is about making sure the standards are sufficient... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't lower the standards so that you can get more women into these physical roles. Just accept the fact that... there will be... I mean, I do know, actually, I like one feel firefighter that I know personally from Jiu Jitsu. She's so strong, she's so fair, she passed a very, very high standard.

43:41Great. You know, you will get that woman in the thousands. He 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 the recipe for disaster. So, but just to be clear on this point, because you said you don't think women should be involved in frontline policing. If they can meet the... Yes, the very high standards. I think that women in a thousand, yes. But I... One woman in a thousand? Yeah. You think that's it? Yeah. Is that because of upper body strength you were talking about?

44:17That's the big one. It's also aggression. Okay. You do need a certain level of... I watch a lot of body cam of police having physical altercations. And it's quite common for us to see female police hesitate more than male police do. Because I think... A woman is not always a bad thing if you think about the male people, but just being killed. It 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 have guns, female police are less likely to shoot the male police are. So, you know, maybe that's good, right?

44:55But if it's something like...

45:00There's a lot of body cam footage you can watch, I say, a female and a male police partnership, confronting someone, the man goes right in. And the woman is like... Because these are quite... These are quite 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're actually having physical courage.

45:38It's so important if you're running into a burning building or whatever, you know. So, again, it's just like a tonal problem that societies have to try and solve. Like, we have this youthful male energy and we want to put it to the best possible purposes and we don't want it put to dangerous purposes. Like, how do we do that? It's so complicated because I understand... And I understand that there's physical differences, but policing is so complicated because you're policing both men and women. So women have a different testosterone curve, for example. So, would it therefore be better for a woman to show up in that scenario who is going to match that person's...

46:15Maybe, although women really don't commit very much violent crime at all. So, if you're talking about physical altercations, the chances of it being a woman are not high. But if a man shows up then, when... Maybe you would escalate more. I've had a few conversations about this subject with people. And then I remember seeing, obviously, it's a particular front of mind story what happened in Australia recently with the terrorist attack in the mall. And we were in Australia at the time and was watching the footage. And there was a woman that showed up with a gun, shot the terrorist. And there was also that man that you see who barricaded the escalator.

46:48Yes, and he was holding... It was just a murderous public. So, that was really interesting because this idea of a rather article about heroic masculinity in the New York Times written by a woman, and the article goes to highlight these instances where the man runs in the building, 9 -11, I think it was like 98 % of the people that died in 9 -11, firefighters were men. And then I saw that video of the terrorist attack in Australia. And you have the guy on the escalator holding a chair, threatening this terrorist that he's going to smash in with a chair if he comes closer. And then the person that ultimately ended the terrorist attack was a woman with a gun.

47:24And so, you know, it's super nuanced, isn't it? What's really interesting about this physical courage thing is so often people say later that they didn't even think about it. There was no contrast process, there was no like, should I... Oh, should I? They 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. And you're saying... You know when women will definitely do that? That absolutely not thinking. It's protecting their kids, yeah. Yeah. And then you do read amazing accounts of women... Driving on their children and taking...

47:57Lifting cars... Because, like, their child is stuck under it, and there's just this like all mighty surge of strength. Like, there are... And actually, that's an interesting situation where women can be very aggressive in defending their children. And that's true in other species as well, that you can have this just... The red mist descends... In that set of circumstances. So, yeah. Something we're talking about Ix, and I just wanted to hover it off, because there's kind of two sides to this Ick argument. I've got this radar, which is useful, and it's protecting me. And then there's this other sort of more newer social...

48:31Tick tockification of the Ick, which is probably causing people not to get in relationships. I've got a friend that... She's been on about... She goes on about 100 dates a year, and she's like... I think she's actually starting a dating podcast, because she's that unsuccessful at dating. And in my head, I go... I think this might be part of like a broader social issue that the reason we're coming together, we're having less sex, all these things is because, in part, because of these Ix, we think everything is a problem, because social media told us it was. Yes, and yeah, and I think it's probably true...

49:04Going back to this memetic thing, right? There are probably some...

49:13Social status signs, which are very memetic. Like one of the things that some women will do for instance, is they'll like say, I will only date a man over six foot, and actually, and just set that cut off. And you can be very objective about that on the app, because they say, hold all the up. I mean, I'm sure everyone's exaggerating, but they say, hold all the up. And it's a really silly thing to do actually, because you're cutting off, like, I don't know, 80 % of men, more, depending on the group of men, you're just cutting them out. And actually, if you were to meet this person in real life, the fact that they were five -nine, you wouldn't even notice, probably.

49:51So sometimes I think that modern technology can encourage a level of pickiness, which is actually really counterproductive. And probably actually, and again, it's like, I think so much of mutual sexual attraction is about the... about pheromones, about vibe, about being in person, and dating apps don't capture that at all. So I'm sure that definitely works against... Yeah, there are 100 % women who are way too picky, definitely, definitely. We talked a second ago about how the introduction of the pill and how that caused negotiation in this first sort of encounter... Yeah. ...impacts women. We didn't cover how it impacts men downstream.

50:36Would it be better for men if... we waited longer before we had sex with a woman? In your book, you talk about waiting three months, but then you whispered something to me, which I'll let you say just in case you want to say it. I think probably actually wasting until engagement is a better call. So you think we should wait until we are engaged with someone before we have sex? Yeah. But you let me say that you're not... I'm saying that because there are trade -offs, and I acknowledge them. And also, it's more difficult to do that in a culture where that's weird. Yeah. Because what you end up doing is cutting out anyone who...

51:10for whom that's too weird. Right, like you basically cut out a big chunk of your possible matches by insisting on that. And let's 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 a weird thing to demand, which is why I said three months in the book, because it seemed like more reasonable and more achievable. Also, because my mom said to me when I was... she read the draft, she was like, if you say this, if you say wait until engagement or marriage, that's the first thing every reviewer is going to notice about the book.

51:42It's going to be a big deal. So you'll get more of a hearing, you know, if you're more reasonable. The thing is, we're a really weird culture in this regard. Like basically every other culture. There is obviously variation, you know, my first to go is anthropology. And one of the things about anthropology, which is so powerful and interesting when you're interested in contemporary social issues, is that there are a lot of differences between cultures, of course there are, and that's what's interesting for other polygists. 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.

52:21It's called the anthropologist veto. If you find a culture that doesn't have this, then you can kind of strike it off the universals list. But the universals list is pretty long, and it includes things like every culture has religion in some fashion. Every culture has gender roles in some fashion. Every culture has wages war in some fashion. There are things that everyone does. And everyone has marriage customs of some kind. They can look different from ours. I mean, the most common way in which culture is different from our culture, or at least our culture up until recently, is permitting polygamous marriage.

52:57So about 80 % of cultures permit polygamous marriage. Only permitting winogamous marriage is more unusual. I think we're drifting back towards permitting polygamous marriage through polyamory, but that's what we can get onto that. The thing is, I just think the thinking that went for sort of radicals of the 1960s, is 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, rejects, conservatives, and whatever. And what a lot of people said at the time was, why are we needlessly restricting people?

53:38Why are we, you know, limiting people's freedom in a way that makes them miserable? We just got to throw this out the window, right? And I think that that doesn't work. It likes throwing conventional 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 a very, really, it's like a, it's like a sort of norms coordination problem. You've got to find the right person. You've got to find them at the right time.

54:15You've got to like ensure commitment from them. And of course, this is whole game about how like, men might want to have sex with more people, women wants to take, a man down. Like, it's really complicated game. And what societies come up with is ways of regulating it. Ways of regulating heterosexuality, basically, right? Which means restricting women's freedom. It does. That's what feminists have always noted. It also means restricting men's freedom. It says there are certain things that men can't do. And we had such a system, you know, we had the, like, you can't have sex outside of marriage, marriage has to be monogamous.

54:53And 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 throughout the window, I mean, it lingers a bit. But we have very low, I mean, in London, right? And now half of children will reach age of 15 without their biological father in the home. There's very, very high figures compared with their 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 timesides too. And I think every culture has marriage customs as some kind.

55:28Apart from ours, sort of. Like, what makes us think that we alone among people 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 the, what anthropology tells us is that actually we need structure. We need conventions and constraints and templates. You know? And those will sometimes feel restrictive. And there will sometimes be people for whom they don't work very well. But I think the idea we can just do without them is not true. I mean, go back to the polyamory thing. If you look at dating app data, sometimes people exaggerate this effect a little bit, right?

56:11But there is a tendency for basically very attractive men, high status men, the heathens, right? To do really well on dating apps, to get a lot of attention from a lot of women. And then for the bottom chunk of men in terms of attractiveness to get none, to just get no matches whatsoever. And this is a tendency, it's called hypergamy, female hypergamy, that women will tend to want to marry up socially. So they'll want to marry a man who is richer than them, better educated than them, more successful than them, et cetera. And, yeah, I mean, this is basically what you see when people are left to their own devices on dating apps, and you can monitor it carefully.

56:54That is basically what people do. And the problem you end up with is when you don't have a system of monogamous marriage, and you don't have the expectation that people weigh, there's really nothing stopping those men from just having loads of girlfriends, maybe having them at the same time, like having little haremes, right? Not calling them that, but having basically playing 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 having relationships with these men in the hope that it will turn into commitment, and then it never does.

57:36And 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, say, in the sector of evolution, was good for men, and it's like, it wasn't good for me, is it? No, no, no, no. There's a real, there's a, like, inbuilt inequality. So, to the ban, there's 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 1008, okay?

58:08You can't, you can't have multiple women on the go, you have to commit to a 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. And so I've heard it described as sexual socialism, monogamous marriage, because it does sort of encourage, like an equalizing effect. One each. Yeah, whereas in a polygamous system, obviously that's completely permissible, and in extreme circumstances, you'll have a high status men having, you know, 100 women or something like that in historical examples. And then, low status men just have none.

58:50And 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 is, I think it's what people kind of do and left to their own devices. That's like the natural way we settle, if there are no social restrictions. One downside of it is having a lot of unmarried, well, like having a lot of sexless men is quite bad for social stability, because they're very frustrated, they're angry, they don't have a lot to lose. One of the really interesting things about going back to testosterone, when men have children and get married, they're testosterone levels drop.

59:30They become less aggressive. Like in the year after, babies born, men commit less crime. They're less promiscuous. Like there's a real sort of... And there's having no 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 heighty. And that has a sort of taming effect, right? Or it's like, always, it's channeling male energies in a different direction, which in a societal scale can be really good in terms of having a peaceful, stable society. And polygamist societies do tend to be more unstable in that sense.

1:00:08There's also, there's more domestic violence in polygamist societies. There's more conflict within households. There are quite a lot of bad outcomes that you get from polygamist systems. So even though monogamy is maybe not the norm, and the plodgically, it does seem to be a good norm. And some of the most successful societies have adopted monogamy as their norm. And have been successful partly because of that. If you are to have a daughter in the future, and 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, let's say, 18 years old and says, Mum, I heard on that podcast you did ages ago, 20 years ago, but you said I shouldn't have sex with the guy I'm dating until engagement.

1:00:58Mum, can you just confirm why? What would you say to your daughter? There's a few reasons. One is because women in particular tend to get emotionally bonded from sex more than men do. Do we know that? Because anecdotally, you know, in the group chat. In fact. But is there a science to support that idea? Yeah, I think that you can measure it in terms of things like oxytocin. And there's actually over it about this in the book. There's this whole, like, horrible genre of journalistic articles, basically advising women on how to have casual sex without being miserable. And sort of what can you do to hack your brain so that you can have casual sex without feeling dreadful afterwards?

1:01:44This is like, public acknowledgment that this is a thing. And one of the pieces of advice is things like take ecstasy. Well, you're having sex because it will dull your emotional bonding response, things like that. Which I just won't say dystopia. Or you could just not. Or, you don't have to try and biohack your brain to enjoy something you don't really want to do. But anyway, women get more emotionally bonded from sex to men do. And then you do end up with this asymmetry, which comes up in the group chat right, of like, she basically is more into him than he is into her. And if there's no commitment, not even any necessarily social acknowledgement of the relationship, it might be just a friend of benefits or something, that can be really painful.

1:02:32So it's a good idea to basically hold off on having sex, you hold off on having that effect. And it means you commit clear -eyed decisions. If you see red flags, you're more likely to respond to them properly, if you're not like the fuddled folks at Oson, basically. The other thing is it's like, it's just a really, really good demonstration of commitment. If you always risk getting pregnant, you always do. Even if you're on model contraception, there's always that risk. And do you want a man who is going to ditch you if that happens, basically? Like, how can you find some guarantee that he's not going to do that?

1:03:13A 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 tri -and -tested one. It's pretty crazy how significant the shift in attitudes towards casual sex have changed. I was reading some research earlier that said, 67 % of Gen Z, think it's justifiable to have casual sex compared to 12 % of the pre -war generation. When we talk about the diamond ring being a good way to get commitment, but I had a divorce lawyer on the podcast the other day. And he said to me that 56 % of marriages fail. And that... One thing that skis that though, you know, is that people have multiple marriages and more like to get divorced.

1:03:59Yes, you did say, I think, 86 % of people that get married again after that. Yes, so there's some... But yes, I mean, the principle is true. So do you think marriage as a system or a technology is good? But do you just think it's... Because in the book it sounds like you think it's just the best available option. Yeah, because, okay, so the key reason I think that marriage is good, specifically for women, right? It's good for men too, but there's like particular reason why it's good for women. And why I think that feminist arguments against it are flawed, is that the nature of carrying children is that you have a period of some period of time where you cannot participate in the labor market, right?

1:04:43Where you're too pregnant, you've got a newborn, whatever. I mean, when I had my first baby, I calculated that in the first weeks and months of his life, I was spending 40 hours a week just breastfeeding, right? So you can't... You basically...

1:05:03Mothers and babies aren't really individuals, right? In the sense that they're not completely autonomous. My friend, Mary Harrington, who's also an author, she said that she'd this really... She realized this for the first time when she had her daughter. And her baby was crying to be fed in the middle of the night. And she realized that in a sort of... If you looked at their relationship in an individualist way, you were like, okay, you've got one human being who wants to be fed and another human being who can provide the feeding. But there were autonomous agents, they can just make their own decisions or whatever.

1:05:43She's like, no, no, no, I can't just decide, now I'm going to ignore her. I'm going to go back to bed. Like every cell in your body is saying, I must go feed my baby. It completely changes you physically, psychologically. It's like completely transformed into experience because your biological goal becomes keep this baby alive. And the baby is completely dependent on you. There's this child psychotherapist, Donald Winocott 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 someone is the mother. And when it comes to things that breastfeeding has to be really.

1:06:20I mean, we now have formulae and so on, so we can sort of... Is that old thing of using technology to take the edge of some of these social realities? But it's still basically the case that moms and babies are tied together like they're emotionally biologically. And during those times in your life, you need another adult, at least one other adult, who's going to do... You know, getting food, paying rent, doing all this basic stuff to support you. And who that adult is is something that one can... People have experimented with, right? Like attempts at communal child rearing, say, or... I mean, what to some extent you can do is depend on the state, right?

1:07:06Depend on the welfare state, depend on, say, 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 on this subject of marriage, just to really interrogate this further, because I feel like I'm in two minds about it. A, because of the stats show that 56 % end in marriage of divorce, and you've kind of rebuttaled that because of the remarriage rate. But then even the amount of people that seem to be in unhappy marriages seems to be pretty significant.

1:07:47This is part of what the divorce loads are to me. So you could say 56 % of marriages fail. But if you define failure as one or two people in that marriage being unhappy, the number is significantly higher. And I know a lot of people, again, it's anecdotal, so it's not worth much, but a lot of people that are married, you know, who I would define as being really just kind of the divorce part is so uncomfortable and painful that they've just decided to stay together, which is not always in the interest of the kids, because if that home becomes toxic in any regard, the trauma is passed down sufficiently to the kids.

1:08:22Yeah, okay. I take all of that. But I do think that one of the divorce rates to some extent are product of a divorce culture, where it's very permissible and very normal for people to, you know, really, really like tricky bit for people to get through is the first year after a first child is born, because everyone's tired, everyone's stressed, there are money pressures, etc, etc. No, sex. 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.

1:09:00It will get better, you will get less stress, you will get less tired, etc. So to some extent, a divorce culture will sometimes encourage people to make permanent decisions, which they will regret. And there is, there are stats showing that quite a lot of people do regret getting divorced, something like a third, a people regret getting divorced. So there's that. The other thing is that there is a lot of, it's not just, it's true, yes, that the people who have multiple marriages are more likely to get. Some people can be kind of serial offenders in this regard, right, with divorce. It's also, you know, there's a massive skew with a class in education.

1:09:33So 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, marriages becoming a luxury good, and there's this, there's this phenomenon, right, where a lot of people who are from those kind of elite graduate classes will, they'll talk for the 1960s, but walk for 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.

1:10:08and be very, 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 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, at that level of unhappy marriage, I think it's much better for the children to stay together.

1:10:51And one big reason for that is because the presence of step parents on average isn't good news for children. This is a single, the Cinderella effect in evolutionary psychology, where children who have a step parent in the home are 100 times more risk of child abuse than children who don't have a step parent in the home. 100 times. I know. And obviously, you have to be careful. And obviously not saying that all step parents are abusive. But any means we're just talking about risk. But it does go up by a lot. And what was, I mean, when this was discovered, it was taken as proof of the fact that parents having a genetic investment in their children is one of the...

1:11:39I mean, like children are very trying, okay? They wake you up, they have tantrums, whatever. If you have a genetic investment in them, it carries you through those moments. You're like, I love you, I want the best for you. You can sort of get over it. If you don't have a genetic investment in their children, even 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. Like it's not just...

1:12:16In some cases. It's not just like violent abuse. It's things like step parents are less likely to put a seat belt on their step children. Things like that. It's like, it's like subtle but small ways in which step children are disfavored compared with biological children. And of course, some people will smell that and be amazing step parents, detour like adoptive parents. Plenty of people will do a wonderful job, but it is a really significant risk thing. I had this woman called Katie Faust on my podcast. A little while ago who is an American campaigner for children's rights. And she said, try this, okay.

1:12:54Google my mom's boyfriend and see what Google suggests. It's not pretty. You've Googleed it, haven't you? Yeah. What does it suggest? It's things like, my mom's boyfriend touched 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...

1:13:41It's quite easy as an adult to kid yourself. And to be like, I'm not very happy with my partner, my husband, my wife. You know, sex not as good as it used to be. We like... He doesn't understand me. Like that kind of level of dissatisfaction. If only I had... 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 the implications is... Is it an adopted child being with a family better than being? I think definitely, yeah. But I mean, this is one of the reasons why adoption agencies are so careful and screen so thoroughly and like the criteria to be an adoptive parent of really, really stringent is because they know that there is this issue.

1:14:28I mean, particularly because also children who are being adopted are more likely to have their own issues. I 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 as you have to be careful. The things you're saying, you know that they're unpopular. Yes. Especially in 2024. Yeah. Because you're saying them anyway. Yeah. Why? Because I think it's true. Do you care about the consequences of people being annoyed about it? Yeah, although you know what? Since this book... Since this book was published two years ago, I have had...

1:15:07And I really did feel a little bit when I was writing it like, oh no, have I just completely ruined my life? And I'm like, am I going to just constantly face like... Am I going to get constant grief for this? Is it going to be a complete disaster? And actually, I would say that like 95 % of the responses have been incredibly positive. And I get emails and messages all the time from people saying, thank you, I've been thinking this this whole time. The feedback you've gotten following the publication of your book, how has it surprised you? And when I asked that, I'm asking in terms of like, who is sending you messages and what they're saying.

1:15:46I would say probably the two most common groups of readers are dads. Who are really worried about their daughters in particular and also their sons? And saying like, thank you so much for this. This was the reason I decided to do a young adult edition of the book. So in a few months, there's going to be a young adult version, which is basically like edited, made shorter, simpler, whatever, because the book has a lot of very adult themes, obviously. And I had so many people saying like, I wish I could give this to my 14 -year -olds. And I just kind of feel uncomfortable doing so, but I really, really, really want them to know this stuff.

1:16:26And so we did an adult edition for exactly that purpose. And often it is dads who are feeling mums too, but dads who are feeling relaxed about this. They're worried about, well, they're worried about sexual violence to their daughters. This is probably the key one. 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 our women who have lived this, and who have had this exact process of thinking I can have sex like a man, thinking I can completely imitate the masculine template.

1:17:04And that's good for me, and have had this deep sense of cognitive dissonance, which they've only belatedly realized was needless. Like, they didn't have to actually put themselves through what they did, but they felt that they had this process of conforming to something that was bad for them. I hear from a lot of those women. And you know, in many cases, like, I have had two women in my room recently to say that they are having a baby because of me. It's amazing. It's so cool. Just because they, because they had this, because the anti -mother messaging can be so strong. And... And feel so empowering.

1:17:53Yeah. And this feeling that... This painful feeling that actually there's something much higher status about the masculine template, that there's something lesser, there's something worse about doing the feminine thing, you know, being the mother. I think it's very baked in, and it's actually very anti -woman, I think, you know, to say that being just a mum, there's something wrong with that. That it would be better to have, say, a corporate job, that it would be better to live like a man. I think that when we... I think that when we say things like that, what we're basically saying is that what women do is worse, that there's something worse about women.

1:18:37Something like actually very deeply sexist about that in a way that I don't like at all. So a lot of what I try to do in my writing and podcast and everything is actually elevate some of the feminine stuff, which is needlessly marginalised, you know, being a mum. 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 about. It's okay to care more about your career than having children. Yes. You said that a little bit more reluctantly. No, it is. That is okay. I think that it is more common right now in our current cultural moment for women to be pushed towards the masculine role when it doesn't suit them than the other way around.

1:19:22I think historically it has been the other way around, right? The women who wanted to do the masculine thing and were really intelligent, ambitious and whatever were suppressed and were basically confined to the home, right? That definitely happened historically. I think we've kind of flipped there, actually. And now it's more common for women to be told that being just a mum is worse. Q1 is often when businesses start implementing new systems and processes in hopes of creating efficiencies for the year ahead. And over the course of my career, I've learnt just how crucial having the right systems in places, one which has helped me across many of my investments is NetSuite.

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1:20:39That's netsuite .com slash Bartlett. As societal level, there's been a big decline in birth rates, which is quite interesting. Are you concerned about the decline in birth rates? 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. The global fertility, or to keep it stable over time, the global fertility rate has decreased from 4 .84 live births per woman in 1950 to 2 .2 in 2021 and is expected to drop to 1 .5 by 2 ,100.

1:21:22And the last one I'll read is... Japan's population was 124 .3 million down 595 ,000 people from 2022 and the falling rate equals out to almost 100 people an hour are being lost from their population. And countries are taking drastic measures to get their birth rates back up South Korea, for example, as considering giving families about 60 ,000 pounds 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 evolution new challenges we're facing.

1:22:03I think we're going through an evolutionary bottleneck. So we're going through a period where any... It's partly the pill. The big... People... It's one of those issues that sort of attracts just so stories. People will often be quite confident about, oh, it's this, oh, it's this. Oh, it's feminism, oh, it's capitalism, whatever. I think that the single factor that actually best explains why you're seeing such mass -adrotts and fertility across not just Europe and America, but North East Asia as you were saying, and also actually lots of like, the least has quite low birth rates. Indian son continent has quite low birth rates.

1:22:42Basically the only place in the world that still has high birth rates is Sub -Saharan Africa. So this is basically global phenomenon. 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. Yeah. Because often people will say in an expensive city like London, people will say, I can't afford our kids. And they're sort of right.

1:23:19I mean, it is true that it's harder to afford... It's harder than it was 50 years ago, say, to afford a family home and to live on a single income. So at the kind of micro level, that's true. And that probably does disincentivise people from having children. Or certainly, I mean, often what people mean is I can't afford to have children at the standard that I would like in terms of the size of my house and all of this. Or in an army or whatever. Yeah, I mean, we're all descended from people who had 10 kids and a two bedroom hut. You know, like, so ancestors have all had children in much more difficult circumstances.

1:23:51And I think that it's a really interesting mystery why it is affluence make people less inclined to have children. One factor probably is a bit more mortality salience. When people... This seems to be why they're a post -war baby booms. It's not actually because all the soldiers come home and they're really horny, right? It's because war reminds people of death. And actually, people have this tendency to respond to death by wanting to create a new life. And you can test this in the lab. Like, if you remind someone of... If you remind people of death and then ask how many children they want to have, they want to have more.

1:24:31I know it's crazy, isn't it? But it may be that there's something about having very peaceful and... ...and comfortable ways of life in affluent societies that actually discourages people from reproducing. Which it does seem counterintuitive, doesn't it? But that's probably quite likely. I mean, what's probably going to happen, therefore, is that people who really want to have kids will be selected for. Because historically, Mother Nature didn't really care how greedy you were. She just cared how horny you were, right? Because if you had sex and children were a likely result, whereas now with reliable contraception, that's a lot less true.

1:25:13So probably right now... I mean, we're going to see really massive drops in population. In somewhere like South Korea, they have the lowest birth rates in the world. I think it's like 0 .7 or something. So that's 0 .7 babies per couple or person? A woman is how it's calculated. Okay, fine. So in order to have a placement, you'd need 2 .1 in a culture of low child mortality. Okay. And that means that in South Korea, they're probably going to lose about 95 % of their population in the next century. What is going on in South Korea? Where's no one having it? So really good question. They seem to just have all the problems that we have but more.

1:25:53Okay. It's like hyperversion of all the Western issues we're dating and with. They're also very urbanized. They're hypermodern in a lot of ways. And given that modernity seems to lead to low fertility, they're further on that track than we are. We touched on it briefly. The idea that porn might be playing a role in people having less sex. I read an interesting study from 2014 from Jammer's 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 associated with sexual stimulation.

1:26:30About. The percentage of women who consume porn is increasing and by the end of 2019, almost three out of every 10 porn hub users were female. The role that porn is playing all of this and what's your view on pornography? Good thing. Bad thing. Net negative thing. Net negative. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there are various objections you can have. I mean, it's very much not a fair trade product. I think everyone knows that really like deep down, right? Yeah. It's that the industry is really horrible and it has a tendency to. It's like, take people who are already vulnerable and completely destroy them.

1:27:08Very high suicide rates among porn performers, very high drug dependency rates, rates, things like that. So, yeah, you're not consuming something that has been ethically produced. And even when some porn claims to be ethically produced, it's often like, those claims are often actually very shoddy. And there's a lot of like, it is prostitution. It's prostitution with a camera at the room. So, it has the same issues as the sex industry tells in general in terms of coercion and misery, basically. So, there's that. But in terms of the effect on people who use it, yeah, I mean, it does seem to have this.

1:27:47Ethicrypsin Jo. Ethicrypsin Jo. So, it's a death group syndrome to be delicate about it. It's basically when a man must have baked 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? It's like a color expression. No, I think it's really emerged on Reddit. And anecdotally, if you stop using porn, Diagrypsin Jo tends to alleviate it. So, like, you're familiar with no fat. Which is like a movement to not masturbate. Yeah, yeah. And there's various, and I don't know if there's been proper studies. But there's anecdotal evidence that stopping using porn reduces erectile dysfunction and improves sexual health in various ways, right?

1:28:37I think there's also, I coin this term, cultural death group syndrome, where I think you end up with when sexual stimuli are so ever -present, and it's so easy to access, like, anything you can imagine, at the click of the button with the phone in your pocket. There's like, this is like high -propondence of sexual stimuli. 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 mistake. 100%. Yeah. 100%. I'm thinking about a lot of scenarios in my own life where I was... many, many years ago when I was single, I was set to go on a date with somebody, but then I might have masturbated, and my desire to go on the date just evaporates.

1:29:30Yeah. And I know a lot of people can relate. So, if you're pretending you're somewhat different, you're bothered it. But I mean, my friends always used to talk about it. That you could be like making plans with somebody, and then you masturbate, and you desire, as a man, can often, just like that. Yeah. In a way that I don't think a lot of people understand. I think it's also going back to this premarital sex thing as well. I think it also applies to other areas of life. We call it post -nutclarity. That was the name I was looking for. Yeah. If you live in a society where you can't have sex, unless you're married, or you can't have sex legitimately, you might be able to have sex with prostitutes or something, but basically your sexual options are massively restricted until you get married.

1:30:13And 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 these things. It's so motivating. And I think one of the problems that does come with allowing premarital sex and allowing porn and basically not inducing any kind of drive in young men is that they are less motivated to do those things. They're like, why would I work harder? Why would I prioritize any of these things when I've got porn up? Or soon enough, sex robots.

1:30:56It kind of kills that natural drive. It kills that natural motivating force, which is very, very compelling for young men. You think reproduction is at the very heart of male motivation? Well, I mean, yeah. Sex is. For most of them, outliers, yada, diada. 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 climb and build and be strong. Yeah. I think so. There might be some upsides in terms of one of the arguments that people use in favor of porn is that it reduces sexual violence.

1:31:46I don't really know if that's true. It's very hard to measure.

1:31:51And I'm skeptical about it because I think that it something that choking is now so so much more common among young people. The proportion of, I can't remember off the top of my head, but the proportion of young women who say they've ever been choked in beds is so much higher than portion of older women and just goes up. It's from your charity, right? The charity you're involved in. We can send to this, yeah. Estimated that two 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.

1:32:25And this is all being 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 tenfold increase in rough sex between 96 and 2016. Right. And I think that and the reason that the reason that we can't consent to this exists is because it was I mean we've we've we successfully chose the law on this. So hopefully this is having 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.

1:33:04When actually we think it's much much more likely that she died as a result of domestic violence to murder. Yeah, or get convicted of manslaughter instead of murder things like that. So this is you know, that's like a specific that's like the extreme end of this phenomenon. The other end of this phenomenon is more like just a sexual script becoming more violent and becoming more aggressive and yeah, and a lot of young women in particular having like to absolutely terrifying to be choked. Out of nowhere by some man you actually don't know very well. Right. That's a really just dressing experience.

1:33:39There are also what people always say to this is that also women who asked for it. And there are also women who who like choking. I think what's going on there is partly the mimetic thing. It's partly like this is cool. And this is what everyone's doing. So I want to do it too. So that's part of it. I think to some extent one difference between male and female sexualities 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 Ica's 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.

1:34:17I think men know that porn is letting them down. Yeah, I say men know that there's a significant proportion of women that listen to 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 comments section, men are very angry at seams 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.

1:34:50For 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 tour we use to analyze Google search data was, how do I stop watching porn? Yeah. And it almost seems like you think that was one of the most frequently searched terms that people are going to do. And I'm saying, how do I stop this? Yeah. There's a certain lack of control in a certain. It's really addictive. It's a serious, yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's really, really addictive. So it should be ban it. If you were Prime Minister of the UK, would you ban porn?

1:35:20You can press the button now, ban it. Yeah. There we go. Because I don't think, I mean, I just think down, the only downside of banning it is basically the, it's sort of like during COVID when people were banned from doing things, which everyone was doing, right? I ban from socializing, ban 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 legalizing gambling back in the mid 20th century, that there was statistics showing that like an enormous number of people were gambling.

1:36:07And so it just seemed ridiculous to ban something that everyone was doing. So that's one argument against banning porn that like people would keep doing it. It would be quite hard with the internet, like realistically. And so it would sort of undermine faith in the legal system in general. And I take that seriously. But I don't think it makes anyone's life better. Sex workers would have a bigger rebuttal to you there and say, you know, it's a much better career for me than working some horrible job in some... There might be a small number of women for whom that's really true. But in general, I think, and this applies to other areas of sex and history not just porn, the people you tend to hear from are the people who are doing best by it.

1:36:54And you also tend to hear from them at the point in their lives when they're in the middle of it. And they either haven't yet suffered the cost of it or are kind of have a self -protective narrative that they're telling themselves. And I've spoken to a lot of women who've been in the sex industry, including on my podcast, who will talk about this exact feeling of like, when you're in it, it's just you just need to get through the day. And telling yourself, I'm empowered, and this is okay, and I'm in charge of this and whatever, is a way of getting through the day. It's quite common for them to compare it to being an abusive relationship.

1:37:34When you're in it, like, I love him, it's fine, you know. And then it's only afterwards, you've left the relationship and the emotional connection is gone, that you can realise how bad it was for you. And there are some quite high profile examples of this, like Jenna Jamerson's. 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... 18 times more likely to be murdered if you're a female porn star, according to a study by Stuart Cunningham at hell.

1:38:15Yeah. And that danger is even more acute in other areas of the sex industry. 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 try... I've spoken to those people. I trust that they exist, but I think they're very unrepresentedive. And to say that we should basically design the law around those exceptions, rather than around what would be better for the people who are suffering most, I think, is wrong -headed. I mean, in terms of sex industry in general, I would favour what the law, as it is in places like Ireland and Sweden and France and quite a lot of other countries, were basically buying sex against the law, but selling sex isn't against the law, which I know seems kind of counterintuitive, but basically you say that the punters are criminalised, and talking about, like, on street sex, work and brothels and stuff, the punters are criminalised, but the prostituted women are not.

1:39:19So 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 all the various issues that are so much more likely to confront, but the punters are disincentivised from, because it's all fueled by demand, if there weren't men who wanted to buy sex, if there weren't many 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. You know what I mean?

1:39:52Like your kids are going to be able to access pornography. Sometimes accidentally if you scroll Twitter. And it's terrifying. For the minute, while their brains are forming, and that's the first real generation that I've 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 and whatever, but the only one is really bad. It's very addictive. It really damages your real world relationships.

1:40:26It affects your sexual taste as well, like it's more likely to... It's not like porn invents these things, like there's something like the choking phenomenon. It hasn't like invented it out of the net. It's feeding on an existing dynamic, where women tend to want to be dominated and men tend to want to dominate. But it exaggerates it. And it turns neuropaparase into your brain into motorways, you know? Because you're constantly reinforcing this stimul... This positive response to the stimulus with orgasm, which is like a very... Like you're training your brain, basically. And that point of choking, the other thing that pornography does, is it kind of resets your expectations of people's bodies and how people should look.

1:41:10Not just how they should perform in bed, etc. 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. Which seems to be playing in all of this. Yeah, and seems to be... Yeah, bath or self -esteem, bath or your sort of realistic sense of... So is that funny phenomenon, isn't it, where what looks good in 2D doesn't necessarily look good in 3D? You haven't 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.

1:41:50Because 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, the conversation around attraction itself is quite confused because again, there's sort of a political correctness around what you can't say about attraction, what men are attracted to and what women are attracted to. I think we can agree from an evolutionary perspective is different. And what is that? What are we not saying? I mean, there's lots of really interesting little data points about that. Like, perfect waist hip ratio that men like is 0 .7.

1:42:260 .7, which is just really, that doesn't know that they want the waist to be 0 .7. So it's the waist measurement divided by the hip measurement. It should be 0 .7, I think that's right. And like men having like up body strength is just straightforwardly, like basically, then all the better. There is this interesting thing with women where two masculine is off -putting. Oh, interesting. Women want like eight or nine out of ten, right? Masculinity. Yeah. But they don't want bodybuilder. Exactly. They don't want too much or like the super, super square -djord like intense look. And the reason for that is an interesting one.

1:43:08It seems to be because women have this balance and choosing a partner, where you want someone who's strong and will protect you and will provide for you and will, you know, like, 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 of aggression and might hurt you. So the 10 out of 10 is a bit risky. You want you at eight or nine out of 10. Like that's the sweet scar. It's a neck. I guess so. Or scary. Okay. Yeah. I don't think men have that in reverse as far as I can tell. They're more feminine and the better. Like men just really like, you know, all the signs that are adult, adult, the amount of attendity, attractive.

1:43:52You said that women like upper body strength. Yeah. You didn't say lower body strength. Is this why men don't you like that? I mean, that's the point where there's the most divergence between the sexes, like lower body strength. Between the sexes is, you know, I don't at the moment, obviously, but I normally do powerlifting. And the difference between squat for men and women is much less of the difference between bench. So it may be that everyone's trying to like exaggerate that dimorphism. I think that that, I mean, and there's also an interesting point around the way our society is less. Is less polarized.

1:44:36Like we, we do the same jobs. We, men and women are friends with each other. Like there are lots of ways in which we are much more sexually egalitarian and like mix more with the opposite sex than did our grandparents say. And I think to some extent people actually really crave polarity. They actually crave sexual difference. Maybe more than what they, that's one theory as well as to our BDSM is popular. The people are like really drawn towards like hypermatch, hyper feminine behaviors. If sex is hierarchical in the sense that if I may high status strong male, I'm going to attract more mates. Isn't it sort of innate then that there's always going to be this group of men at the bottom of that spectrum who are sexless?

1:45:22Yeah. And that are struggling because there is a lot of men that are really, really struggling at the moment. And there's suicidality amongst that group of men is shocking. The in -cell community, the, you know, the purposelessness, the addiction, the gambling addiction is really almost exclusive amongst men. Yeah. Now regard. Yeah, maybe Mother Nature's a mis -interest as well. But I think there is, it's one of the reasons why I talk here about things like attractiveness is not very, I don't know politically correct as quite the word but it's a bit like awkward and painful because it is quite hard not to just say, look, it kind of is a hierarchy.

1:46:03Like there is an extent to which some people are more attractive than others. And, and look is actually like a massive or social inequality that no one ever talks about. Look is. So people who are better looking basically do better in every way, people are nicer to them, they do better than their careers. There is a study of tipping during COVID because during COVID people working in restaurants, they have to wear masks. And so to some extent it hid people's faces. And normally better looking way to get more tips and waitresses. And then during COVID that was just something that's unequalised.

1:46:40I know it's kind of horrible. I know, I know, but it's like, and that's why I think we don't really talk about it. I mean, people clearly know this because they work so hard to be good looking. Think of the size of the beach industry and like gym culture and whatever, like people are desperate to be better looking. So we kind of know this is important but it seems a bit, I don't know, a bit horrible to talk about it. Mother nature is unfair. Yeah. And those trade -offs that go both ways. Yeah. I'm not, you know, him Kardashian is gorgeous, but if I was woman, I would necessarily want to be him Kardashian because there are trade -offs that I wouldn't be happy with.

1:47:17And I think that's much of what this conversation has really been. It's just highlighting some of those disparities and unfairnesses. But also the trade -offs and the opportunities that Mother Nature presents us with in all facets of our lives. And these are difficult conversations for all of the reasons you described their difficult, their painful, but... 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.

1:47:52It causes too much dissonance and pain and uncomfortable to look in the mirror at the nature of the way that the world is or is going to be. So some people would rather avoid it. And you know what? Fine. Yeah. That's they're coping. Yeah. Hope is a very powerful thing. We're all trying to find ways to cope. Like we're all who are. Yeah. So I have empathy for that. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for being 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.

1:48:25I think ideas that are opposing sometimes need to collide for us to make progress. And I think your book is very much a case of that. If anybody hasn't read it, I mean, 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. 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 blink 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.

1:48:57I'm 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? Yeah, this morning. I think we do it constantly. Yeah. I mean, on the co -playing. Yeah. Like I think actually, hmm, too much truth is probably a little bit too much to bear, right? Yeah. All at once. Yeah. Yeah. We have to lie to get through life, I think. Yeah. Little lie lies that. Let's cope with the day, which is kind of related to what we were just saying. Yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you. Really, really appreciate it. And I'm, um, congratulations on the small boy on the way.

1:49:34Oh, thank you. Everything goes well. And I'll see you again soon in the future and sure to continue this conversation. So thank you, Louise. Thank you so much.

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