THE FEMINISM DEBATE: Is Feminism Betraying Women? The Hidden Risk Of Casual Sex!

27:54I know young people who are absolutely opting out. I'm going to agree with her and say freedom has become a pressure. There's become a societal pressure to be free. I know many young people or opting out of the apps. Okay, I'm a therapist and I see so many young people and I give lectures and people come up to me. So I can say, and I write books about adolescence and I'm gonna say that mostly the term hookup culture is used between 15 and 30. So you're correct in saying a 32 year old woman should have the right to have sex with, whoever the hell she wants to have sex with. And I'm right there with you, she should have choice, whatever.

28:30But young women, young men who are developing emotionally, mentally, mentally. Should not have rhymes. No, no. That's shit. No, let me, can I finish? Yeah, yeah, sorry. Okay, sorry. So you interrupted, so I didn't get to finish. I'm so sorry. Okay. So they are more vulnerable. They are more vulnerable emotionally to what the hookup culture does to them. There's a lot of research to say that it causes loneliness, depression, anxiety, tons of regret, embarrassment, shame, self -esteem issues. And so, of course, we want freedom. In fact, I'm probably more in agreement with you on most things than you think.

29:10But in this, I say that freedom can become its own prison. So if you think about the early feminists, the really early feminists, Mary Wallstone Kraft, Mary Shelley, those women were fighting patriarchy. They were fighting a system that said they had to be a certain way. Of course, I don't accept what Iran does to women. I mean, that, you know, but what's happened is if the pendulum swings too far, you have a different kind of patriarchy on the other side. You know, we say the extreme left and the extreme right actually meet in the middle. And so have we just not, we never want to take choice away.

29:56the idea of taking choice away from women to have sex with whoever they want to have sex with, that's not the point of this. It's, have we created a society which pressures young women in its own way to be promiscuous, to have lots of experiences? It's not all glorious freedom. It is glorious, but it's also not all glorious. And it can be a pressure on young people to get rid of their virginity to have lots of sexual experiences and it's not all it's cracked up to be for them. It really isn't in terms of their mental health again. They are more, we say, 9 to 25, really 27 and young men is the second critical period of brain development where they are very susceptible to their relational experiences and their environment.

30:48And so in that period of development, which is mostly what we use the term hookup culture for it's in that very young developmental period. It's not just in colleges throughout their 20s, you know, until that woman becomes 32. That's a very vulnerable brain. And so we have created a culture that confuses that brain, that offers too many choices, that pressures them into having multiple partners and many experiences and leaves them feeling empty and lonely. Can I just say, though, again, to the time travel piece? I did not, you recommend Louise, because I heard you talking on this podcast before, that people don't have sex till they're engaged.

31:32But if you're engaged, the next step is marriage. So presumably you're going to marry that person. I .e. you're going to sleep with, the first person you sleep with, if you take that advice, is your partner. So you're going to have one sexual partner for life. I do not recommend that, ideally, because I came from a religion where that was the only option. And because I didn't meet anybody, I atrophied, I had no intimacy, I felt so lonely. Now you're saying sometimes people have a hook up and they feel lonely afterwards. a totally of course that's happened to everyone who's ever had casual sex in any quantity.

32:18Well you feel a bit like, well that didn't fill me up. It's like you know when they say you go and have a Chinese meal and you feel hungry half an hour later and you were wanting more. There is no utopia here. There's only options. And what happened to me because I had no option, I had no autonomy. I became more and more atrophied, more and more lonely, more and more empty, more and more disconnected from myself. To this day, I struggle with that. I struggle with intimacy, with eight, because we were in such a culture of you can't have sex before you get married, that you didn't really make eye contact with people.

32:51You know, normal teenagers were still in each other's laps and just experiment a little bit and they might have a little kiss or whatever. If you don't have anything like that, you can't really look at people properly, because you know, I might lead to something. It took me so long to heal, guys. And however old you think I was when I lost my virginity I was older. And it was tough. Because if you're losing your virginity very late, the person you're losing it with has had a more regular, healthy in my opinion, sexual development. They've had their first girlfriend or boyfriend. They've experienced a few things.

33:32It's still hard for me to say what I want. So I don't recommend the other thing either, which is don't have sex with anyone until you're ready to prepare at least to marry them. I've got a graph here that's somewhat dovetails into this conversation about when you should have sex and also marriage as a subject. And it shows that from the 1970s, roughly women would get married at about 21 years old. And now this graph will be on the screen. It's about 30. Men used to get married at around 23 years old, and now it's just over 30, which is a pretty crazy climb. So it feels to me if the sexual revolution took place in around this era where we see this rapid climb, maybe the two are somewhat interlinked.

34:19I, the agent which we'd be getting married or having sex underluices, you know, potential advice that it's with the time. It's because of the pill. That's why that happened. It's because it used to be that if you were having sex with someone you were risking pregnancy and now that's not, I mean it is still true because actually all conception fails and something like half of a woman in this country get pregnant didn't mean to or whatever. So the idea that it's foolproof is not true. But what the pill did when it arrived on the scene in the late 60s was it gave the illusion that sex was consequence free.

34:54And it isn't on a physical level, not really. It's less, it's less consequential than it was because of the pill. But the physical consequences are still there. But I think just as importantly, it became no less emotionally consequential. Just because you're on the pill or using condoms or whatever, your mind, I'm thinking particularly of women who as we talked about bond more quickly, your mind still thinks that this person could well become the father of my child. You are still experiencing sex as in the way that all of our ancestors did for all of human history up until five minutes ago until we invented this new technology.

35:34And I think that's why it has to, I mean, the reason that women have evolved to be picky about who they have sex with is because getting pregnant is an extraordinarily consequential thing for women. It's dangerous, it's difficult, it's a huge investment of their time and of their life. And you don't want to get pregnant by some bozo, right? That's why women tend to be very selective about who they're willing to have sex with and feel really bad. And I mean, I've got to say, I'm leaving aside words like sacred, because they're obviously difficult because they're religious implications. I think that we should, as feminists, describe sex as at least special, like having some kind of special status.

36:17It's not like other kinds of socializing. It's not like having a conversation with someone or playing tennis with someone. And we can tell that it's... We've been doing it wrong. So we'll be able to tell. But we could call it one of the most intimate experiences you can have as a human being. And that's why rape is so bad, right? That's why feminists... This is besturbing. ...the most intimate experience by making it into... By turning it into... rapist worse than theft, for instance, or rapist worse than assault, like non -sexual assault, and the law recognizes that, and we also actually recognize that, because there is something uniquely intimate and therefore uniquely violating about having sex without consent.

36:58And I think that it's really hard actually to hold those two things simultaneously in mind and say sex is unimportant. It's basically just like a skill set that you can practice to some other people that it's a leisure activity, all this kind of trivialization. Right. And then also say, are but consensus extraordinarily important? Like why? Do you not see the contradiction there? Autonomy. If I want it, if I want somebody, especially penetrative sex, you're talking about rape, they're talking about penetrative sex, there's nothing worse than somebody inside your body violating your actual insides.

37:36nothing worse than that. That does not mean that women do not have sexual urges that are exciting. I'm finished with this. I was not allowed to drop. That women don't have sexual urges that are just about attraction and a moment and fun and play. Play is so important to human beings. When I left that cold, it took me a long time and a number of different sexual experiences to find out what kind of sexuality I even had. You can't necessarily find it with the first person you meet. They may not be sexually compatible with you. And you may not know how to communicate well with them and end up having a life of very boring missionary position sex.

38:24If you encourage young people just to have sex with the first person they meet and stay with that person, which I'm not saying you're saying, but I am saying if you don't have sex before you're engaged, will engagement leads to marriage, you may end up with very little sexual fulfillment compared to what you could have had. You might not, you might get lucky. The first person you meet might just be amazing in bed with you and you find your space together and it might be wonderful. But I would say that is unlikely. And I would say that the reason that the pill changed how much sex women and had and with what variety of partners is because it gave them autonomy.

39:05It gave them agency. Suddenly, I can. And guess what? When I can, I choose to try. When you give women the choice, which the pill did, to have some experience, we see that most women want some experience, want to find themselves sexually, want to feel, oh, this or not that or yeah, oh, oh, oh, my God, this one. This is amazing. I could be with this guy forever, we hit it off, he's great in bed, we're working together. Oh, we've got a little problem now, but we'll work through it together because we love each other. Most people do some version of that. And maybe they hit a point in that monogamy where this relationship isn't working anymore, or something terrible happens, and they have another go at that.

39:49That's a large pattern. Now, how much of that is because that's what society expects. I don't know. But that is what most people tend to do. So for me, saying that because one night at a music festival, I had a really passionate, exciting encounter with somebody who I never saw again, that I am somehow minimizing rape is very disturbing. Can I just interject and just say that you're right in turning to me and saying I didn't mean that you have to marry your first partner? But there's something very important about the emotional connection. And that's coming from maybe me being a therapist and knowing and seeing the pain that the young people who come to me are in.

40:35When there's no emotional connection and they give their bodies over, by the way, young men too. I think young men, I think it's shifting actually. It's interesting what I'm seeing in my practice. just young men are more vulnerable than women now. Women have taken on the role that young men used to have emotionally. And so, you know, women have all these choices and now they're leaving young men in the dust and the young men are feeling lonely and you know, they have sex with a girl and they want to date her and she says, no, I'm sleeping with five guys at the same time and these are kids in their 20s.

41:12But sex is better with emotional connection. That doesn't mean you have to marry the first guy that you have sex with. I also wanna say that there is something called neurotic repetition. A lot of the early feminists had a lot of trauma. You had trauma, a lot of people had trauma. And what happens with trauma is it tends to be like PTSD. If we have disconnection early on or abuse or violence against us, attachment disorders, as I've talked about in your other podcast when you're very young, it gets reenacted and repeated throughout your life over and over and over and over again. So interestingly, the early feminists were mostly traumatized women.

42:01If you look at the histories of them, they had physically abusive fathers, alcoholic fathers. They had uncles who raped them. They had, I mean, terrible, even their mothers too. I mean, just really abusive parents, but mostly the men in their life were horrible. And so a lot of this whole experience depends on where you come from and what you had. If you've had good models, I mean, it's why I sort of talk about writing a book about divorce. Why am I writing a book about divorce if I believe in relationships? because divorce is going to happen and we need to help parents to know how to raise healthy children in spite of it.

42:39But relationships matter. They matter in the raising of children. So when we have a disconnected society where we say relationships don't matter, just sex matters. Sex, sex, sex. Of course sex matters. But what I say to young people is sex is a very small part of a relationship. It really is because in the beginning it's hot, hot, hot. And then as you get to know each other and you have the dailycomings and goings of life, it's the friendship, it's the connection, it's the companionship, it's the relationship. But if you've had a lot of trauma, then you are not gonna turn towards relationships and you are not going to turn towards men.

43:19If men traumatize you and you saw a man abuse your mother, of course you're not gonna want men in your life. So a lot of it, I think the feminist movement does something, which it's, first of all, I'm going to say it's done a lot of good. I wouldn't be here. None of us would be here without it. Those women that took the risks, we have to be grateful toward. But I mean, what it also did is it distorted a lot of the importance of relationships and and how important male and female relationships are. I'll stop there, because I've talked too much, but can I say something about agency? Because this work came up earlier, and I've been thinking about a lot about it recently, and I just find it interesting as a subject.

44:07So I think that actually a better way of thinking about agency than is this binary thing that humans have agency, et cetera, is it's kind of more of a personality trait? I think that some people are very agentic. Some people are able to set their minds on doing something and they just make it happen. Those people are very well suited to making their own decisions. Those people hate the idea of any kind of limits on their freedom. But they are unusual people. Most people actually, they go with the flow, they kind of do what other people around them are doing. they drift a little bit, they're a little bit passive, they kind of make decisions based on what seems normal, they follow the template as it appears to them in their moment.

44:57You know, that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that those people are more vulnerable to bad scripts. The problem with the sexual liberation narrative is it assumes that everyone is highly agentic. It assumes that everyone is capable of being faced with all these various choices and saying, I'm going to choose this one and that one and make it happen. Rather than what I think is more realistic, and particularly when you're talking about young people, and I think even more talking about young women, I think young women are particularly mimetic, and particularly, I mean, there are studies showing this, that women, for instance, more likely to imitate other people's body language, they're more likely to, they pick up slang more quickly than men do.

45:36Like, young women are very socially -attuned, like more than any other group. They're very alive to what's high status and low status and like keen to imitate it. You also see this with fashion, all sorts of things, right? I think to just say to those young women, good news, you can choose anything you want, you can do anything you want. Obviously, if you are highly agentic, I think you mentioned other young people who are just like, no, I'm not into this off the apps, not doing it. They're highly agentic. That's very impressive, but it's rare. Like most people actually are basically going to do what their peers do.

46:09And so that's why I think just saying, Everyone gives everyone choice and kind of close the lid and say, good luck. I think that doesn't work. I think that actually we need to be a bit more prescriptive. Women were less agenteic before the sexual revolution. Overall, as a population, we are more agenteic now. We have more agency. And we flex that agency more frequently. If you are worried that young women seem to you to be mimetic, i .e. influenced by their peer group, then we need education for what's happening in that peer group. I don't disagree with you that thinking about intimacy, thinking about, do I really want to do this with my body?

46:51Do I want to let this boy touch me here or there or this girl do this or that with me or whatever? Of course, but that's education so they can have agency And that's the discussion that the parents have, ideally the schools are having, we desperately need that. That's what we're doing here, right? Right. Yeah. But rather than saying they need rules, I would say they need to be further attuned to their own desires, their own body, their own environments, relationships, you know, how long does it feel right to me, listening to my own body, listening to my own mind, having a confidence that they They can talk to who are older and more responsible if they don't feel comfortable talking to their parents because some kids of course teenagers don't necessarily go, Mom, I had this urge.

47:38Do you provide other people in their community who they might have that conversation with? There are all sorts of ways that we can make sure our girls and our boys have agency and listen to themselves. But when I hear rules, when I hear it's just better for them not to until they're engaged and then just stick with that person for life, ideally. I fear that is going, taking us back generations, and women, 100 % were not happier then. They put us put up with more. I do want to separate young people from what you were talking about, adult women. I want to separate them because they're not the same species.

48:21There's so much development going on in adolescence. and adolescents, as I said, goes on till 25. So by the time you're an adult woman, you are, for the most part, developed. By the time you get to 32, you know, there's gonna be stuff going on, but the major part of your personality and character development is pretty much set. And so that developing period is really more my concern. It's not that I'm not concerned about my older patients who come to me and talk about how free sex and, you know, multiple partners makes them feel good. I would say great. It's your choice, you know, if that makes you feel good, wonderful.

48:56But in young people where they're developing, I agree with you that we need more education. I'm all for more education, but I'm for education. So we have so much sex education right now in schools, too much sex education, if you ask me. We're teaching nine year olds about anal sex. We're teaching them about genital warts. That's not something a nine year old needs to know, you know, in school. So, but I think we're not teaching them about emotional connection, about relationships, about family, about about the arc of a life, that if you want to be single and you want to have multiple partners and you want to be free, that's your choice.

49:39I have no problem with that, but we're not teaching about the importance of connection and emotional connection and building families. And so what do we have? We have a bunch of young people out there who are having sex but feeling empty and lonely and depressed and anxious and not knowing why because we are teaching sex but we're not teaching about connection. Can I also say and I don't know that it's true that in the UK that we're teaching nine year olds about anal, by the way, but the thing that's lacking in sex education often here is pleasure. They do not talk about how pleasurable it can be or that girls should be when they have their first sexual experience.

50:27Ideally as young women, that are not girls, but of course they should be young women, they should be of age. That their pleasure matters. There's so many young women who at the first just go, I guess I have to do this and he has to find pleasure in it. But learning what makes your own body feel pleasure is a wonderful, wonderful thing. Knowing that it can give you great intimacy and it can be a lifelong relationship partner all those things. So that's a 1950s idea. The 1950s were a time, I mean, nobody wants to go back to the 1950s. You know, when I, the books that I write, people come up to me and they say, you want women to go back to being pregnant and barefoot in the kitchen.

51:10I'm like, what? No, we don't want to go back to the 50s. because women didn't have choice. And women didn't know about orgasm and they didn't know about, you know, that sex could be pleasurable. And so we don't want to go back. We want to move forward. We want to take the best of, the highlights of the past and not leave all of the good parts of the past behind. And, you know, take the good parts of the feminist movement too, but there's a lot of it that's not so good. And I'm going to agree with Louise that there are so many young women and older women. but let's just say young women. Didn't point at me and say old women.

51:46No, no, no, I'm old too. Older. Over 32. I'll admit to it. I have a Sessie too, Eric. That's all I can give you. But that's all we're doing. That's all we're doing. You're older than 25. There are so many young women who are looking to understand the secret sauce. What is going to make them the happiest? I don't love the word happy, but I think our young people are so very unhappy. They have never been so unhappy. The statistics on mental illness and unhappiness and loneliness are, we have all the sexual freedom, we have all of these feminist ideals, and yet young women are so very unhappy. I think we've got a causation correlation problem there.

52:33I think the world is not well. We are really looking down the barrel of climate change, land wars, cost of living is out of control. Young people will never own a home unless their parents give them an enormous amount of money. There are so many factors feeding into the unhappiness of people of all ages and young people look at this long future and go, what is this going to be for me? I think to blame feminism for that is misguided. It's a piece of the puzzle. And remember that my lens is a lens of seeing patients who come to me for relational issues. So therefore you've got a biased set of information.

53:16The people that are unhappy with their relationships come to you. Yes, everything's a piece of the puzzle. But if it wasn't this, it would be that. And what that was was, you know, oh, I'm stuck with this person now that I'm... We're not having sex and it's a miserable time and he doesn't talk to me and I don't talk to him, but I can't really get out of it. Human beings find ways to be dissatisfied with their lot in life. somebody who we look at and go, my God, they're so fortunate. They've got everything they want. It's probably one of the happiest people you know because they're going, is this all there is?

53:47You know, that's why often you'll see like a rock star or a movie star get absolutely everything they want and they have to go up a mount to talk to a guru because they're like, well, I was hoping that I'd be super successful and wealthy and you know, have all this choice. And now I've got that and I'm still not happy. And the idea that we can look at unhappiness with what is here and then say, if this wasn't here, but that was here, those same people would be blissfully happy, doesn't bear out with history. So I actually think what does bear out is that human beings, universally, from birth, crave security, we know that.

54:29They crave safety and security and stability from birth. And we don't teach that. We say just be impulsive, be in the moment. And I think that's a lot of what's causing the unhappiness, is that we don't help educate and strategize what a good life means to you. Now maybe for you a good life is just being free. And having a great career, and I have no problem with that. I'm the first one to say, the women's movement gave women choice to have the life they wanna have. Absolutely. I think there's a lot of women who feel bullied by this narrative of freedom. They feel bullied by it. And I hear it in my practice.

55:12I see it online on my Instagram following and people writing. You're right. I have a particular lens. So people may come to me because of that. But what I will say is that there is the feminist movement, at least the second wave of the feminist movement, was a little bit of a cabal in a sense that it was a small group of women saying every woman should feel this way. Every woman should want to go out to work and leave their children in daycare. Every woman should want free sex and the bottom line is a lot of women don't. A lot of women want the choice to be respected to have intimate and loving and marital relationships and monogamy and they want to be able to stay home with their children and have society say you're amazing and admire them for it.

56:02And what I know is that there's a lot of young women and adult women who are feeling pressured to live a life that isn't making them happy, that is without relationships, that's without having one intimate partner, that is freedom without any limits. If women feel bullied by freedom, I feel like they should try the alternative. I still feel the predominant narrative is the wrong common one. The predominant narrative is you should be married by 30 with a white dress. Everyone should stand around and say you've done it now. You should have babies. That to me is still the predominant narrative that you are successful if you have achieved these things.

56:48Now, it is true that many women feel also they should have some kind of career. That is very true, but I feel like the main thing that women are asked to aspire to, if you really look around, it is still find the one, have the wrong -com ending. And I do not see this idea that women are told the whole time we should be out on the town, sleeping with everyone in town, far from it. And I know this isn't true because I went to a school that's a very, very good girl school, at the State School, but very, very high end one in London. In 2018, when we were all out marching in the street, the women's march.

57:28Recently, I went back and all those girls are talking about being a high -value woman, which is from the manosphere and not too high, having not too high a body count. These are obviously different girls. The ones 2018 went off to university. That's in seven years. They were saying, you know, in 2018, 2019, around that time, they were saying, no slut -shaming, listen to your body. They weren't saying run -around have sex with everybody, or I've got to have a lot of lovers. They were saying, I make my own decisions. I don't listen to patriarchal ideas about how I need to live my life. I am going to go to university.

58:07I'm going to meet people and make meaningful relationships and some of those will be friendships. They are now talking Manusphere talk. I made the biggest investment I've ever made in a company because of my girlfriend. I came home one night and my lovely girlfriend was up at one a .m. in the morning, pulling her hair out as she tried to piece together her own online store for her business. And in that moment, I remembered an email I'd had from a guy called John, the founder of Stanstore, our new sponsor and a company I've invested incredibly heavily in. And Stanstore helps creators to sell digital products courses, coaching and memberships, all through a simple customizable link in bio system.

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1:00:42Yeah. So how did these ideas come together to, and also Lincoln and Polly into this web, Manusphere? Because this subject of Manusphere has been the very forefront of conversation. It's everything's a little out of balance, everything's a little out of whack. So it was out of whack in the 50s and so we fixed it and now it's out of whack in a different way We went from the patriarchy of men dominating women to now we have the patriarchy of women dominating men I mean what we need to do is not go back but come to the middle We need to just make common sense. How are we dominating men? Oh? my goodness 60 % of college students are women and graduate students I'll dominate that.

1:01:23Let me finish. Let me finish. Young men are afraid of women, and the power they have over them to accuse. No, it's true. In universities, it's a real thing. I know because I have two sons. And, you know, there is, again, the correction was necessary. We needed to course correct in society, absolutely. But we've gone so far. So the men were powerful, and the women weren't. So the women said, give us some power. So now the women took the power and now the men feel powerless. You need a society that's balanced. It needs to be balanced. And the idea was that where we wanted to go, and the truth is that all movements often go to extremes.

1:02:05The women's movement, those women had to go to extremes because to change society, you have to do that, right? So should some women not go to university? Is that what you're saying? No, but actually, I think there needs to be a balance in society of men and women. If we say that we are going to be like Amazon women and not need men anymore, the truth is that the way it works is that by the research is that women will marry at their educational level or above and men will marry at their educational level or below, that means that because we have fewer men in college and graduate school, women are not finding partners.

1:02:46I'm just going to jump in there and talk about a report that came out in 2025, which Central Quaves across the UK, it was called the Lost Boys Report. I think we might have talked about this in a previous episode, but it was a report by the Centre of Social Justice, which highlighted how many young men are now struggling in school, facing increased mental problems and lacking positive role models, leaving them lost and isolated. And as a result, they suggested that many of them are turning to what we call the manosphere. And to give a definition to the manosphere, because I didn't actually know what it was, The definition I have from Cambridge Dictionary is, Manifier includes websites and discussion groups focused on men's rights, which often oppose feminism in some way.

1:03:22And just to give up a sort of a top line look at some of the stats around this, by age five, 25 % of boys in the UK are falling behind in language communication skills compared to just 14 % of women. GCSE level boys results are on average half a grade lower than girls. The same applies for mental health and well -being, obviously we know about the suicide rates in young men with nearly three and a half, then nearly three and a half times higher than those of young women, eating disorders have risen as well in young men. And from an employment perspective, as of late 2024, 15 .1 % of men aged 16, 24 were knocked in education, compared to 11 % of women, which equates in the UK to about 550 ,000 men.

1:04:03And lastly, young women are between age of 16 and 24 now earn nearly 10 % more than their male peers, is reversing the traditional gender pay gap in this age group. And I could go on and on and on specifically, the things that I've kind of not talked about are just how family dynamics have changed. And by age 14, nearly half of first born children do not live with both natural parents compared to 1970. And this was really shocking. And I think it really rose an argument, which I saw plough out in, I saw the Sunday Times do a big piece about it, I saw it on LinkedIn, which is what is going on here.

1:04:37And is this a clue as to why we now I'll have this time, Manusphere. It's a reaction. Manusphere is a reaction to the pendulum swinging too far. The pendulum needed to swing, for sure. I slightly disagree. So I think I spoke at the beginning about the sexual revolution being two things. So one is the ideological thing. We've respect a lot quite a lot. And the other is the material changes, which no one designed really. This wasn't coordinated by anyone. This just happened. This is just our technology goes. And I think in general that history should best be understood as technology, with everything else kind of running along in its wake, including ideology.

1:05:14I actually think a massive thing that's going on with young men, it's not actually feminism that has messed them up. It's actually technology and economics. So it's that one of the most consequential things of the 20th century, and before this is really industrial revolution onwards, is male strength became less important economically. Blue collar work is less valuable than it used to be. It's less available than it used to be. It turns out, America was saying that girls predominate at universities, girls actually tend to be better suited to a loss of work, which has flourished in this era, to say, service sector work or working in education.

1:05:59Things like that. There's basically been a boom in areas of life, which are better suited to women professionally, and the opposite has happened with men. I really think that a lot of what's going on with men, say, turning to the manosphere, is this feeling of being economically devalued. There are feminists who cheer that on, but that's not basically... that pretty much has actually nothing to do with ideology. It's actually to do with just much bigger changes in the world. And we should expect, by the way, I mean, if AI continues to pace, we should expect to see the same sort of social effects happening.

1:06:39When you change how people earn their money, and particularly when we're talking about people matching up, women tend to want to marry a man who, I think being a provider is not quite right. I think what women really want though is a man who provides excellent insurance, a man who, when you've just had a baby and you can't work or you're ill or you want to spend more time home with children, whatever, you want a man who can step up and can look after your family. And unfortunately, the nature of the economy means that they actually aren't that many of those men. And that makes men feel really bad and it makes women feel resentful and it creates a lot of dysfunction and it's not really anyone's fault.

1:07:17It's just what's happened. I want a partner. I want someone that when things are going badly for them, I'm there. When things are going badly for me, they're there for me. I want a partner. I don't want this biological essentialism of he's got to step up and be the provider and the protector. I don't want that. But ask to that point then on the partnership. As a man, I still kind of assume that a woman is more likely to choose me if I have more money than how and I can pay the bills. And I take care of her. And so I looked into some of the research around that and there's still an expectation amongst women that their male partner will earn much more than them.

1:07:56And when they did, they did this big, I think it's about 70 percent, I'll put the right start on the screen. When they did this big analysis of dating behavior where they looked at 1 .8 million online dating profiles across 20 different countries. If you earned more, so if you had higher income, you are 255 percent more likely to get an indication of interest on these applications. And so I would love to live in a world where that wasn't the case, but it seems that women are still choosing men that earn much more money, and that expectation of therefore being the provider is so inherent in reproductive success as a man.

1:08:31There's a reason for that though. So what we haven't talked about, can we talk about children now? Sure, we can talk about one of you. If you want to raise children and be the primary attachment figure for your children. And it's usually the mother. Sometimes it's the father now, but it's still usually the mother. Children need a primary attachment figure as present as possible in the first three years if they are going to be mentally healthy in the future. All of the research shows that. If you're going to be as physically present as possible, unless you've saved a lot of money as a woman, you need to depend on your partner, on your team member.

1:09:05My husband and I were a team before we had children. We both earned a lot and worked really hard and spent our money equally. But then we decided it was a strategy. We were going to have children. And I was going to work as little as possible. So I could be there for them. And he did the bulk of the earning. And now the joke is, I'm out in the world. And I'm going to be taking over. And he's going to be sitting by the pool. And I'd be fine with that. But that's what teamwork is. But the idea that I could lean on my husband financially eventually in those years and not have to earn money and be able to be present for my children.

1:09:40There is a very good reason why that is critical for children. And we don't talk about children. We're sitting here. This is the first time we talked about children. We're talking about adults and individuals. And no, children are dependent on us. If you don't have to have children to be happy, but if you are going to bring children into this world, you have a responsibility to those children. and it surpasses any individual desire you may have. And you're saying the mother should be there in those opinions? The primary attachment figure who's usually the mother. Daycare is terrible for children.

1:10:14Let's define daycare. Daycare is anything under the age of three. Otherwise we call it preschool, we used to call it nursery school, three to five before kindergarten. Okay. So anything under the age of three where you put your child in group care is daycare. And what it really is, they're day orphanages. You separate a baby who needs skin -to -skin contact, the sound of their mother's voice, her eyes, her physical and emotional presence to soothe that baby when they're in distress for a moment to moment to help to regulate their emotions. So two things mothers do. They buffer children from stress, which is so important because the part of their brain that regulates stress is meant to remain offline for the first year and very quietly slowly come online for the next two years.

1:10:59So what are we doing? We're throwing babies into these institutional orphanages. It's overstimulating. It's stressful. If you walk into any daycare, you are going to hear many, many children crying. Children are not meant to cry much in the first year. They're meant to be held by their mothers and atheld against their mother's bodies. So they buffer children from stress and they regulate their emotions. So what we're seeing as a mental health crisis is a crisis of emotional regulation issues in children, adolescents, and adults. Depression, anxiety, ADHD, these are all emotional regulation issues.

1:11:36That means people cannot regulate their emotions. And so we're just giving them pills. We're not saying where does emotional regulation come from? What's the origin of it? And the origin of it is in the very early days of your life. If you had a mother who sued you when you were in distress for moment to moment, it regulates your emotions. So it's only after three, 85 % of the right brain is developed by three. It's only after three that you internalize the start and internalize the ability to regulate your own emotions or to deal with stress and adversity in the future. So does that mean that if I'm not home as a mother for those early three years, you think there's possible chances that my child might grow up to be somewhat traumatized or have some kind of...

1:12:17It is not what nature intended for us. And so we have made social changes that are about narcissism and self -orientation and me, me, me, and don't involve an understanding of children's irreducible developmental needs. And if we did, then maybe more women wouldn't have children. And that would be fine. I have no problem. I'm not a pro natalist. You don't have to have children to be happy. You can build businesses, build houses, have loving intimate relationships, not have children. But if you're going to have children, you need to know that dropping and running, putting them in daycare, or now, let's talk about very poor women.

1:12:58Because this is always going to come back at me. What about very poor women? There are so many solutions for very poor women that do not involve daycare. And I hate when people say poor women have to rely on daycare. Why should they have to rely on daycare? When rich women don't have to rely on daycare. And the truth is there are other solutions. Poor women can live together and support one another and form communities. They can share care of a caregiver. It's far better to have a single surrogate attachment figure, a babysitter who is a full -time babysitter than putting a child in daycare. So if you can't be there and you're poor and you have to work, then it's far better to have first kinship bonds, someone who's related to you, because it's going to be a more similar investment in that child than anyone else.

1:13:44Secondly, a single surrogate caregiver, a babysitter and nanny. If you can't afford it, share the care with another mother, because that's still going to be better for that child than putting them into an institutional group environment. Because what you're doing is you're basically putting, usually, no less than five children with one caregiver under the age of three. In some cases, it's under the age of one. And if you've ever had a baby crying, You know that that baby is going to get the other babies crying and now you have five babies crying There's no way you can soothe them and just when they're in distress There's no way you can regulate all those babies emotions We are doing terrible damage to our children by putting them in daycare now daycare was the feminist agenda It was about the the second wave of feminism.

1:14:34They said put your babies in daycare It's the only way you're gonna go back back to work and work work work and they didn't talk about children. The first wave of feminists, they talked about children. Mary Shelley and Mary Wallstonecraft, they believed that mothering was powerful work. It was work, it was a career, it was admired, it was elevated. They also believed in fighting the patriarchy. They believed in equality, but they didn't forget about mothering. The second wave of feminists, I think it was Betty Friedan said that staying at home with your children was she called it a concentration camp with comforts.

1:15:12That was the beginning of the tie. That's when the tie turned for women with a narrative change. So women felt, women who were loving being mothers and loving raising children suddenly were told that they were in a concentration camp and that they were prisoners and oppressed. And some of them were, and some of them probably shouldn't have had children. And many of them weren't. And even today, people write me every day and say thank you for saying what you say, because society's narrative is so much about we have no value unless we go out into the workforce. So can I ask you, genuinely want to know, what baby boomers tended to be raised by state -owned mothers because financial world was totally different then.

1:16:02Like, you know, when you talk about very poor women, I have university educated friends who cannot afford to buy a property anywhere, they don't have parents that can give them money, they're never going to be able to save that much money, and they move out of a rented property probably once a year because the landlord moves them on, and then the boy is not working and so on and so on and so on. And I have a local food bank that I donate food to and I often get chatting to people, there are nurses, full -time nurses who live in London, who have two children at home, who the hospital cannot have any more nurses leave because there are not enough nurses.

1:16:40It's a real problem that the NHS is so understaffed. Various reasons for that. In America too. But the nurses can't give up their job because their children would have nothing to eat. They are at food banks with a full time nursing job. So we're not talking about, you know, I don't really know what you mean by very poor women. There are women with professional roles who will never own their own home, who are struggling to keep the lights on, struggling to put food on the table. Now, when I heard you talk on Stephen's podcast before, you said, well, look, you know, people don't want to downscale and when my children were young, we did without things like second homes and vacations.

1:17:18And Erica, there is no hope for a second home now for anyone. And I understand that's different. In general, it's different. No, but that's why I said, women who are working class and must work, There are solutions for those women that don't involve putting their children in daycare. But do you see? We're not discussing those solutions. But do you see? Listen, I would love if the government of every government would say, here's the option to stay home for three years, here's the... There are some. ...and great. There should be no... ...servinia, hungry, there are some. And that is amazing. And I think lots of parents, and for me, I don't think it has to be the mother and I've got friends who are same -sex parents and who have the most incredible relationships with their children.

1:18:03I don't think it has to be a mother. But I feel like there's lots and lots of parents who would love to stay home for three years with their children and be able to afford that and to be able to afford to get and that corporations would then go, there's a lot of evidence that if you take three years off to raise your child, when you come back, you've got a whole new skill set. You can just look through it in a bad way. Oh my God, you go back into the financial district, You've negotiated with the toddler for three years. It's very exciting. And yet, often that is not recognized. Women are pushed out of the workforce.

1:18:34So I am 100 % with you that attachment is important and that many parents would love to take three years off. And this is not being made possible by unregulated capitalism, by governments who do not care. You agree. And if it's America or we don't have any paid leave at all. Absolutely. I go and advocate on the hill for this. I mean, I've been advocating for a decade for paid leave and I don't seem to be getting anywhere, but I'm trying. What are your thoughts on this, Louise, in terms of the role that feminism has had on mothers and motherhood? And someone in the trenches. So I should say, I partly as a consequence of reading Eric's work and also having you on my podcast.

1:19:15We have moved heaven and earth to not put our children in daycare, which has involved quite a lot of creative thinking. And we are poorer than we would otherwise have been. And people look at us like we're crazy sometimes, and then why have you made your life so complicated? And it's because me and my husband both have this really strong feeling that we don't want to put them in institutional childcare. And that is weird. And one of the things that I really don't like in the UK policy space, and this is true in other countries like the US too, is that governments, at about the time of the millennium, seem to have cotton on to the fact that they can use women to boost GDP.

1:19:55And David Goodhart, who's a friend and also, he wrote a book recently called the Care Dilemma and he described this historical event as a one -time boost to GDP. It's not replicable. But in really the 1990s, obviously, the such revolution predates this, but really the 1990s is when you see this massive surge of working mothers. This idea that you should be out of the house 40 hours a week, children and decade, that's pretty new. And governments like this, because governments like women paying taxes. And I think that to some extent, some, she was saying non -maternal feminism has been a little bit naive about this and thinking that if we can get the government to support daycare based initiatives, that that's good for women, there's so much research on this, showing that actually most women and find it really, really hard.

1:20:49And it's a very common thing in mom's groups and on social media and so on, women thinking, I do not want to leave my baby. 66 % of women in the UK want to stay home at the very end. Right, all want to stay home more. And what I object to is the current arrangement that we have in the UK and elsewhere, where the government does nothing for you if you're a stay at home mother. The government actually punishes families in the tax system. If you're a single -earner family, you will earn, you will pay more tax and if you earn the same amount but across two incomes, you are directly punished. This was deliberately established as a quote -unquote feminist policy so that it would channel women back into the workforce after they'd had children.

1:21:31I also don't like the fact that the only set -up that's available in terms of getting any kind of funding from the government is for take care. You can't put money towards a nanny, you can't put money towards having a grandparent or an aunt or something and help them out of choice. Yeah, the only way that you can get any kind of subsidy is through daycare. And I think that, I mean, talking about choice, that's removing choices from women. And most women don't want to take that choice, and they're doing it because they've been channeled in that direction by economic forces, which I object to. But I don't think that's, to call it a feminist policy, it feels like guilty women twice.

1:22:05What I said at the top about relieving women from this emotional burden of guilt, I feel like if that's a cap, an unregulated capitalist policy, that is not a feminist policy. I think what she, what if I heard her correctly, she said that they were using feminism in a way they used it as a banner, but it's actually the government wanting the GDP. I mean, that's what I heard. Yeah, well, it's a policy. The thing is that women disagree on stuff, right? So including, you know, present company included. Some women, I mean, this is kind of the whole story of the second wave. There are some women who for temperamental or life circumstance reasons have benefited from this, for instance, pushing daycare as one example.

1:22:52I could list loads. There are some women who are more temperamentally inclined to work full -time, who don't like being stay -home moms, who find it boring, frustrating, whatever it is. Can I ask you a question, Stephen? Go ahead. Would you take a three year career break? Would you be able to do that? Would I be able to take a three year career? Emotionally, mentally. So I would be it's possible, but my Would that be my choice now? It's obviously possible because I have the means to so I'm a different person. I'm slightly more privileged person to ask But what I want to take three years off my career stop doing this to to solely raise children, I would not want to.

1:23:36You would struggle. And the thing is, men aren't expected to. So we have different nurturing hormones. We have a biology that's really different. I think we just need to take into account that no one is judging Stephen for saying that. But if I said, just couldn't do it, people would be like, And that societal expectation and that societal guilt needs to be acknowledged. But men and women are different. They are. Steven could say other things which would have people's jaws on the floor. Like I don't want to financially support my wife and child. I think people would be quite shocked by that. I mean, we just have different expectations from my supervisors.

1:24:15I just don't want to go back to men from Mars and women from Venus. No, no, no. I want to give some evidence of that. So there is hormonal research to show that men and women respond to nurturing differently. We have different hormones, different amounts of hormones. They come, it comes from different parts of our brain. Women produce when they give birth, when they breastfeed, when they nurture their young, they produce a ton of oxytocin. If they're healthy, oxytocin helps you to attach to your baby and it also is, is, is inversely connected to cortisol. So it lowers the baby's stress, it lowers your stress and it raises the well -being of the baby and the well -being in you.

1:24:52And so what we know is that oxytocin is passed back and forth between babies and mothers, right brain to right brain connection. Oxytocin makes mothers sensitive and pathic nurtures. It makes them very attuned to the distress of their babies. When fathers produce oxytocin, when they stay home, it comes from a different part of their brain, and it makes them more playful tactile stimulators of babies. They tickle the babies, they throw them up in the air, they chase them around, they encourage risk -taking, they encourage exploration. They're great with separation. But in terms of providing that emotional security and that emotional regulation in those early days, mothers do it differently.

1:25:30Fathers produce a lot of vasopressin. It's called the protective aggressive hormone. There was a study that was done where fathers and mothers lay in bed together. It was done in the UK. And when the baby cried, almost nearly every time the mother woke up in the middle of the night to the baby's cries and the father slept through it. But when there was weight, listen, when there was a wrestling of leaves outside the window, the fathers woke up and the mothers slept through it because of the predatoryal threat. We are wired, we are mammals. We are not better than mammals. We are mammals. And mammals have been doing this for thousands, for millennium.

1:26:05And evolutionarily, there's a reason why we have different responses, different nurturing behaviors that are correlated with our hormones. We are not the same, we are equal in so many ways, but we are not the same in terms of our nurturing behaviors. That doesn't mean a father can't learn. It doesn't mean a father who wants to be the stay -at -home dad can't learn to be a sensitive and path -ing nurture. But if we can't acknowledge that we're different, then we can't teach what we need to teach. You said we need education. We need all kinds of education, but you can't educate a father that he's different than a mother.

1:26:39If you're not admitting that he's different than a mother. We are different. We're exception. We're equal. It's not menaceable. It's not menaceable from Mars, women, from Venus, it's overlapping bell codes. So there are outliers. But at the population level, which is what we're talking about, you have to acknowledge that there are differences. Did you say that sex would, what was the number you cited? 66 % of women would like the opportunity to be able to stay at home. That's a UK figure. 60 % in America is 66 % in the UK. I don't know the numbers on men, but I would guess that it's really low.

1:27:10And I know that there are others to six around when fathers aren't earning. That can cause, I mean, it's kind of difficult to, because there are obviously confounding factors, maybe fathers aren't earning because they are very depressed or because they have poor health or something like that. But when fathers aren't earning, that tends to be bad for relationships, bad for men's self -esteem. Like, I think... Whether this is a good thing or bad thing, I think the truth is that most people aspire to something like kind of traditional gender roles with some flexibility. And I don't think that we should consider that to be like some inconvenient problem.

1:27:49I think that if that's what human beings are like, then our politics ought to accept that and allow people to flourish and allow people to have the things that they want while trying to ameliorate the trade -offs. So you're agreeing with me that we need agency and autonomy and people need to choose, because men are taller than women, right? That's an observable fact. Overall, it doesn't give you any information at all about me and Tom Cruise. So we're talking about trends. We're not talking about the first time Steven holds his baby and nurtures and thinks, bloody hell, I'm going to take a year off, because I can't afford to.

1:28:28And wants to do that. All we can ever talk about is trends. We cannot talk in absolutes because we don't have any information about what I, if I were a mother, what I should do, or what Stephen should do as a father. But what about policy? So let the example I gave, right, the fact that at the moment you basically will not get any money from the British government, unless you put your child in danger. They will not give you money for being a stay -home parent, etc. That's a policy choice and we can't be neutral about that. We have to decide, are we going to incentivize one thing or another? In practice, it's fantastical to say, we just need to give people as many choices as possible.

1:29:03It's not like humans work in the so -called societies because societies are greater than the sum of their parts. So another example, Elizabeth Warren of all people wrote a book called The Two Income Track. I forget when, the 90s, I think. This was before she became a really prominent American politician, where she argued that one of the really important things in boosting house prices in America, and this is true elsewhere, there are other factors to mortgage interest rates and stuff. But one of the reasons why house prices have rocketed and have made it more difficult to be a single -earner family or to be a nurse and future children.

1:29:38You know, as we were talking about, is because banks started giving mortgages based on two incomes, and it became possible to this crucial legal change in Britain, happens in the 1990s, similar elsewhere, basically instead of just borrowing against the father's income, you're borrowing against both incomes, and then all of a sudden, how's prices go up? Because people have more money to spend, and it becomes disastrous for a family who are paying their mortgage based on, and of course rent because rent is all just downstream of property prices, paying their mortgage on the expectation that they have two incomes.

1:30:13This is a really good example of why you can't just think at the individual level. It would be really easy to say, we'll just give women choices to do with them, what we'll find. The problem is when it becomes the norm and when it becomes public policy for a certain choice to be made, suddenly everyone has to make that choice or they suffer serious consequences. And of course, people can be weird. And there are people, I know them who look at the property price problem and say, no, I want to be a stair, her mother, I'm going to move house, I'm going to like take up some cottage industry job at home, like you can do it, but you have to be a gentick.

1:30:48But also, can you live on an Etsy shop and to have a slightly smaller house, that's not what I know, I, I, people are really struggling guys. We need these governments to step up and allow this and we need corporations to say, you know, you can have a three -year break and come back if this is the ideal thing. What I would also say is I think it's extremely important for whichever parent decides to be the primary career to have windows outside where they get fed emotionally, intellectually, creatively. If what floats their boat is early childhood development, and that's enough for them, that's great, that's autonomy, that's awesome.

1:31:32But that is not most people's experience. A lot of my friends tell me that effectively having a child is becoming an unpaid Uber driver for someone who doesn't want to go to karate and hate to you anyway. And it's hard, hard work. But that's that is a narrative that I'm going to push back on which is part of the problem which is that it's the narrative of misery which has been promoted and It's not miserable to have children. It's joyful. It's the most incredible love you'll ever experience in your life But it's also really hard and I think we have a bunch of pussies actually Right, we are producing we are producing women and men who are pussies and I'll tell you what I mean by that They cannot deal with discomfort.

1:32:16They cannot deal with frustration. They cannot deal with sacrifice or hardship or responsibility. They want it to be easy. Who said raising children was easy? You don't get the good stuff unless you put in the work. And it's the same if you're out in the world. Of course, it's easier to go to a job than it is to stay home with a child because a child demands more of you, but it also gives back more. And I'm gonna say, this is not a binary equation here. So 66 % may want to stay home, but they may want to stay home and have part -time work or do some work from home. It may not be as binary as you're making it out to be.

1:32:51It's not like you have to stay home for three years. And it's not an elitist idea. So can I just answer the guilt question because I didn't get to answer that because you said you're making a lot of women feel guilty. So guilt is actually quite a healthy emotion. In small supply, guilt is a very healthy. It means that your ego is functioning. So if we're not just preoccupied as women on our own needs and desires and self -orientation and narcissistic sort of wishes, then listen, listen, listen. Then we have to, no, I mean, if we're not just concerned with ourselves, then when we leave our very, very, very young children, we should feel badly.

1:33:36Because those children need us. If we stop feeling badly for our children when we leave them, you break the bond. You can't turn off attachment. So a little bit of guilt means your ego is functioning. It's a good sign. Now, the response to that may not be that you can stay home with your children even part time. But at least it informs you. So whatever time you have with your children, you spend it wisely. I mean, I think it was, it was Penelope Leach who said, well before me, that don't have children if you don't want to care for them, because you can have a very productive and creative life without having children.

1:34:18But if you're going to have children, you need to care for them. And they're your responsibility. Can I push back on the word narcissistic? Because I'm thinking of those nurses that I met down at the food bank. One of them had, I think, a nine -year -old of the others had, the other had two small ones. The idea that that woman is narcissistic in any way, I just, you've used it a couple of times and that she should feel guilty when she drops that child off. I feel so sad that it's another layer of, oh, it's this healthy guilt. Women feel so much guilt all the time. Nobody is worried that women aren't feeling guilty enough.

1:34:56They are trying so hard. And this world is becoming more and more and more and more and more, fraught with inequality. That does is running around desperately trying to give people, one of them said to me at one point, I want to give people even a good death. I don't want to leave them. I have to go over here and throw a medicine at this person. This person is dying. I want to sit with them and hold their hand because they don't have any family or they're not here. We're talking about this, the most empathetic person. I think we're asking too much of women. Evidently, but to say that that, use the word narcissistic because she's going to do her job as a nurse.

1:35:36They didn't call that woman narcissistic. I said there's a tremendous amount of narcissism out there in women and in men that they do not think about their children first. They think about them now. That doesn't mean that nurse. That nurse may be the exception. And there's a lot of exceptions, but the truth is we have a very narcissistically oriented society. We do. That's why we have all these narcissistic disorders. What do you think addictions are eating disorders, alcoholism, drug addiction? These are all narcissistic disorders. So why are they on the rise? Because narcissism doesn't make you a bad person.

1:36:12A narcissistic disorder means you were neglected as a child and you formed defenses to help you to cope with that neglect and that abandonment. And we are neglecting and abandoning our children on a very fundamental level in the years that they need us most and they are developing as a result narcissistic disorders in childhood adolescence and adulthood. Louise, I want to just bring you into this for a second because I know you're a mother of two young boys. There was a comment made earlier about many women consider parenthood and I don't want to mischaracterize anything you said Deborah, but to be why would they want to be an unpaid observer?

1:36:44driver. I was saying that like that's sometimes the experience. It's not just all roses and happiness and joy. For somebody. So therefore you need something outside for your head space. That's what I mean. I don't mean you can't be a full -time parent. I do mean a lot of people don't just find it a singular joy. And they just eat a little something outside even if they can afford to stay home, which most people can't. That's what I mean. So to that point and then also to the point about narcissism and individualism. What are your thoughts here? I'm primarily angry politicians, okay? In terms of making the life of say this nurse really difficult unnecessarily so.

1:37:21The thing that I also want to draw attention to is the extent to which branches of feminism have made a mistake. Like there have been feminism is very complex, because it was also very old, it didn't start in the 1960s, but in Eric, it's talking about maternal feminism. I would also call myself a maternal feminist. And I think that feminism has had a really difficult relationship with motherhood certainly since the 60s, because motherhood is really difficult because it, particularly if your ideologically committed to the idea of gender sameness, underplaying the differences, biological differences between men and women, sometimes call biological to feminism.

1:38:03Then, motherhood is a real problem for you, because it really highlights those differences. I think that there are a lot of just facts about men and women that we don't actually know widely and a lot of young people certainly don't know. One of the things that a lot of women don't know is how much they're going to want to be with their babies, because we don't really talk about this. And it is a difficult fact for the idea of men and women being basically the same with different, different like bits and bulbs. And that is partly because we're not properly educating women about what the experience is like, but it's also because unfortunately there has been this this strain of feminism, it's not all feminism at all, which has basically aspired as much as possible to make women like men.

1:38:46And that includes women being like men professionally, women having sex like men, that's the expression they use in sex in the city, having sex like a man, right? Basically enjoying hookups without any real emotional connection. And I think that's a real track for feminism is to assume that women should want to be as much like men as possible. Women's bodies. Even if you look at teenage girls bodies, they all aspire to be like adolescent boys. They don't want breasts, they don't want hips, they don't want to be. It's almost as if we elevated in a funny way. Feminists were trying to reject patriarchy, but they ended of idolizing it and wanting to be it and then rejecting everything feminine and that's a problem and it's certainly a problem for motherhood.

1:39:31And I think what maternal feminism says is actually maybe women are all right and maybe actually this feminine stuff is good and maybe motherhood is actually just as valuable as your professional life and we should aspire to feminist ideas, as policy education, whatever, which prizes that. And how much do you see women elevated to her mothers? I mean, do you go to a cocktail party and you ask a woman what she does? And she says, I'm a stay at home mom and I'm raising my children. The back will turn on her, whether it's a woman or a man. And so that means that we've denigrated and not just deprioritized, we've deprioritized, we've denigrated it, we've dismissed it, we've turned it into something less than.

1:40:15And so remember that what helped women to feel valuable in society was the admiration for them. Feminism has to get to a place where it says you have choice. We admire your choice to stay home with your children and admire our choice not to have children. You know, but the idea that the second wave of feminism it was about it's all drudgery and it's disgusting and boring and And it made it into this. And now you have these websites, which are frightening to me, the Scary Mommy websites, where you have women saying, I hate breastfeeding and I hate pregnancy and I hate my children. And it's so disturbing to me because what have we done to those women?

1:40:59What have we done to society that we have those websites? It's okay to feel frustrated, to feel bored, to have many feelings about mothering, but the hostility towards mothering, the hostility towards children, the hostility towards raising children. If we don't admire mothers again, there will be no mothers in the future. I feel totally the opposite, but so interesting, because I'm not a mother, I had a guilty feminist podcast episode where Susan Kalman, who's a comedian, came on and we said, what do you want to talk about? And she said, I want to talk about the fact that I've never wanted to be a mother.

1:41:34I said, I've tried to have children, couldn't, but I have lots of nurturing relationships, love children. I have never had more fury in my inbox, like we were monsters because we weren't mothers. So what you're saying is true that sometimes, similarly, oh, you're a state -owned mum and I despise it. Being a stay -home parent is a job of work and I want women to be celebrated for staying home with their children. I want men to be celebrated. Mentioned to be celebrated more if they do that work. I want women to be celebrated. I want all parents of any gender to be celebrated for that. We agree, I'm math.

1:42:11How have we got to... You said something there, which links to the next thing I want to talk about, which is if we don't practice in some way, we're not going to have mothers. When we look at the birth rates and the fertility rates... This is... The keeping a certain of young women don't want to have children. So, you know, again, I'm all for choice, and I think women have to come together. So, in a way, the feminism movement didn't unite women, it split women. In many ways, the second way, the feminism. women were historically, for millennium, the caretakers of a community, the community leaders.

1:42:44They would check on the elderly, they would feed the poor, they would take care of the children. So what happened is that we took them out of their caretaking roles, and it was like taking a keystone species out of the environment, much of the environment degraded and shriveled up. That's why we're seeing 50%. That's why we're seeing, in my opinion, that's why we're seeing such a rise in mental illness. Women aren't going to check on their neighbors anymore. They're not feeding the poor at their local church. They're really preoccupied with making money and materialism and the GDP and a world in which they are no longer caretakers.

1:43:25No, not everybody's meant to be a caretaker. But the point is once we lose that, that linchpin, the society degrades. It becomes system. It degrades. Is it our job to be down at the sip kitchen and checking on the elderly neighbor? Surely that's the community job. We should raise our sons and daughters to do that. All children should be raised to check out. It's not women's job. I work in a writers room at the moment and I love it and I am not less good in the room than any man. and I get so much joy from it. It's so exciting. If we say, oh, feminism took away my key linchpin role where I have to go to a soup kitchen and then check on a neighbor and check on the graph, while men still get to go into the writers room and create an animated feature film like it was in the 50s or the 60s or even the 70s or the 80s or the damn 90s, let's be honest.

1:44:18I don't get to do that. The film gets to be more male. It tells the story to the next generation and the boys get to make that film and the stories go on and on and on. My role is checking on the elderly neighbour, and the man's role is to go and write the exciting movie and screen for story. That's not the counterpart. Men do pro -social things too. They don't just write TV shows. They fight fires, they earn money, they chop wood. I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, but I'm talking about whatever it was saying about the young pay -out of checking English. So can I say, I think that one of the problems we have in the contemporary world, and this applies just as much to men as to women, we'll talk about the manosphere earlier, is that?

1:44:55Gender roles contain both privileges and responsibilities, both of them. So, many other pro -social things, right? And I think that genuinely one of the problems that we have in contemporary culture, having rejected so much of traditional gender ideas, is that gender roles traditionally contain both privileges and responsibilities. So for men, the privileges are kind of obvious, like feminists have drawn a lot of attention to these, but men also have counterpart responsibilities, which includes things like dying for their country or for their family, which includes doing back breaking labour. You know, there are all sorts of hard things that men are expected to do.

1:45:30In exchange, I think this is the unwritten agreement, in exchange for those responsibilities. Those privileges, rather. Women have that too. So women have some privileges. You get to the Women and Children First Principle when it comes to saving lives. Women are often the beneficiaries of what's called benign sexism, So men being kind of deferential to women, like nice gentlemenly men, being deferential to women. There's this cognitive bias called the Women a Wonderful Principle where people will actually, if you ask someone to, do you want to save a woman that you don't know or a man that you don't know from drowning, people will overwhelmingly choose to save the woman.

1:46:11So there are those privileges. There are also responsibilities and they include things like caring work, which is hard, and the danger and difficulty of childbearing, which is really hard, and I think that one of the problems, and maybe this is narcissistic, I don't know, this is a touchy word, but maybe this is narcissistic, is that both sexes want the privileges without the responsibilities, and you see that within the manosphere as well, that's what the manosphere wants. They want all the privileges of masculinity without any of the responsibilities. They don't want to have to be breadwinner for their families or to do difficult work or to risk their safety doing anything.

1:46:43And I'm afraid sometimes feminism is like this as well. that we expect women to be given to be deferred to and to be prioritized. But we say, I don't have time to do all this stuff for other people. That's ridiculous. I should be writing TV shows. I mean, that's not the counterpart, right? Writing TV shows is great, but it's not like essential work to society, whereas raising children and protecting your community really is. And we do need people to do that with both sexes. Problem is we can't put a price on it, and that's the problem, is that we can't put a price on how important it is to raise children.

1:47:14and there's an unpaid work. And because we focus so much on society on paid work, we can't put a price on how elevated women's work should be, meaning how elevated nurturing children should be in society. I mean, my kids always say, again, I'm going to get a lot of help for this too, but my kids always say, it's not fair that people in finance are earning all that money, and doctors, and nurses, and social workers, and teachers, earn so little. and they used to say that when they were little. And I had a hard time explaining to them why that was. And all I could say was the world does not a fair place.

1:47:51That's not a very good response. And so I think the idea that we have shifted this narrative towards working out in the world and paid labor and accomplishments out in the world and achievements out in the world as opposed to what's right in front of you, the accomplishment, which is maybe the greatest accomplishment of raising emotionally, mentally, physically healthy children that you put out into the world for the next generation. I mean, we have to survive as a species. And so that's every, all of that paid work is also important. And you should have the choice to do that, or nurture, or some of both.

1:48:31But if I were gonna say my one goal out of this podcast would be to help people understand that we have denigrated maybe one of the most important work you can do instead of elevating it, instead of admiring women for staying home and dealing with the boring moments and dealing with the hardships and dealing with the sleeplessness and the frustration, it's much easier to go to work. It's much easier to leave your children in daycare or with a nanny, not the women that have to, believe me, but it is much easier if you have a choice to go to work because being out of the house is it's harder work staying home.

1:49:08So why are we admiring the women who are staying home and doing that hard work and having those boring moments? I agree that parenting is difficult work. I agree that raising the next generation is extremely valuable. I agree that the people who do it, whoever they are, should be respected and should be paid in the way that we live in a capitalist society and if we don't put of value on it or we don't create tax breaks around it or have child and downwind around it, we then say it's non -important. So I absolutely agree with all of that. I do not agree that women, we pull feminism, pull the linchpin out when it said women, women shouldn't have to be the ones that visit the neighbor and do all the unpaid labor around in the community.

1:50:03I think that should be Unpaid labour in the community is important, but that's what why they call it community and not women's work. It's a community effort. So I should do it, but I should also get to go to work in the writers room, and my husband should do it, and he should go and get to do his job. So I don't think, I think a lot of times today, I don't know, I think maybe, I don't know, maybe without meaning to, I've heard from both of you, even though we agree on many things, feminism really did a number on us. Or feminism pulled the lynching thing, or it's feminism's fault. Without feminism, none of us would be around this table, because Stephen wouldn't value our voices.

1:50:45Absolutely. Like, in the nicest possible way, if you were in a man in the 50s, would you invite three women on effectively, like a TV radio show, whatever media was available? 100 % no. Well, it's why I said feminism did a lot of good, but it went too far. But that's me saying, I respect the women that came before us that created a paradigm that allows us to work out in the world, to have a voice, to have choices, to have control. But why is feminism not going too far and capitalism not accommodating and our government's not accommodating the new world that we live in that is obviously better for women?

1:51:21None of us could get a credit card a couple of decades ago. So conjugal rape was still legal in this country to like, what, I don't know, you would know better than me than like the 90s. Something like that. Norties. Technically in case the law. You know, I, it just, we wouldn't have been able to go and get a mortgage or a bank account on our own. We couldn't have anything. So instead of blaming feminism, which has got us around this table so frequently, I feel we should look at, okay, feminism got us here. And now what would we like next? feminism has got us this far. So what can, how can we encourage, instead of damning feminism, encourage feminism to make sure we admire and respect and pay properly the women in our workplaces, and also admire and respect and pay properly or make sure that women are in safety and security when they parent?

1:52:15How can we do both? I agree with that. I feel when you keep saying, well, feminism did this, feminism did this, at this time, this is, this is, we got to meet this moment, women. We have to meet this moment. And do you know what this moment is? This moment is a moment where Roe vs Wade has been overturned, where far -right Christian nationalists are rising up to take away our rights. There are people in America right now saying there should be one vote per household and that should go to the man. I have seen Paula White who is the faiths are of, at the White House, saying it's God's arrangement that women being in subjection to men, I have lived that.

1:52:52I will not go back. You are both professional women, intelligent women, you have written books. Please come with me and say feminism has got us this far and feminism can take us further. If you keep saying feminism's to blame, the manosphere are watching and they take those clips, they take those clips, they go see women are saying feminism. So I think the ideas I believe in maternal feminism, where all women are respected, whether they work at home, or they work outside the home. Luce. So I think that is exactly why we need to be thinking about maternal feminism. Because if basically a feminism cannot reproduce itself, literally, if it is the case that a feminist society is a very, very low fertility society, which does not respect motherhood, which discourages women from having children because it's limits of freedom, et cetera.

1:53:47Then feminism dies out, feminist societies die out. They whether and die. And conservative, very conservative, not the kind of conservative I'm okay with, like the very conservative societies, if they are the only ones that can accommodate children, then they win. At the moment, the best predictors of, within low -fetalities societies like ours, the best predictors of how many children you have is basically how religious you are and how conservative you are. It used to be up until relatively recently that Democrats and Republicans had basically the same birth rate. Now Republicans are massively outstripping Democrats.

1:54:23And the thing is that all of this stuff is at least to some extent heritable. People at some extent they adopt the politics and the worldviews of their parents. Not always, obviously, people rebel. But in general, you imitate the culture you were raised in. And also some of this stuff is actually heritable, like there are personality traits which make you more religious or make you inclined to certain politics, which are heritable partially. So basically current, the current trajectory, while we're kind of arguing about the rights and wrongs of the stuff, the current trajectory is for our societies become much more conservative.

1:54:56And that's what the birth rates, phenomenon, spells for everyone. And I mean, I genuinely think as someone who likes being able to have my own bank account and vote and whatever I ask you. Yeah, right. Like I'm a centrist here, okay? And I actually think that if we care about any of that stuff Then we have to find a way of having a feminism that is fertile. Deborah, we need a fertile feminism. Good luck Louise. Listen, I'm as barren as Fox Steve, so I can't help with this. However, I'm fine about it. Don't worry. I don't want you to feel sorry for me. I have an amazing life and in the end, I think this was probably the better thing for me.

1:55:38But I don't think we need to call it maternal feminism. All the feminists I know either have children or really support the mothers in their community, including me. I don't recognize this guy. So I don't recognize it. I feel like I go on marches, feminist marches in London. There's children everywhere. where secular progressive people are so, so below replacement, just on the data. But I'm talking about that. We're going to run out of these people if they don't start having kids. I mean, it makes, I, there's probably reasons for it. Like if you're more progressive, you're more aware of climate change, you're more, you're more likely to pay your taxes, you're less likely to have excess wealth to raise the next generation, you're going to be more aware of like, what am I bringing the children into?

1:56:32If you have a vision of the world that God's going to save everything and you, you know, you're just going to vote this way and everything is going to be great. Maybe you pump out more children. If you think that, you know, your God, whoever that is is going to save the day. I don't know. Do we need to be having more children now? My concern about it is, is what are we having them for? If the world is getting more difficult to live in, if people can't afford a home, even like a nice rented property that feels quite stable. If they can't afford a home, if they're working millions of hours and not being able to balance parenthood and feeling very stressed and you know the the manosphere is rising and its its boys are so depressed and girls feel like this and all of that.

1:57:20What are we having at what are we doing it for? Unless we're going to create conditions that people want to live in that make us happy or at least you know no one can be happy feel the time but what are we doing it for? Make sure you keep what I'm about to say to yourself. I'm inviting 10 ,000 of you to come even deeper into the diorevasia. Welcome to my inner circle. This is a brand new private community that I'm launching to the world. We have so many incredible things that happen that you are never shown. We have the briefs that are on my pad when I'm recording the conversation. We have clips we've never released.

1:57:55We have behind the scenes conversations with the guests and also the episodes that we've never, ever released. And so much more. In the circle you'll have direct access to me, you can tell us what you want this show to be, who you want us to interview, and the types of conversations you would love us to have. But remember for now, we're only inviting the first 10 ,000 people that joined before it closes. So if you want to join our private close community, head to the link in the description below or go to doccircle .com. I will speak to you then. The hardest conversations are often the ones we avoid, but what if you had the right question to start them with?

1:58:32Every single guest on the Diary of a CEO has left behind a question in this diary. It's a question designed to challenge, to connect and to go deeper with the next guest. And these are all the questions that I have here in my hand. On one side you've got the question that was asked, the name of the person who wrote it. And on the other side, if you scan that, you can watch the person who came after who answered it. 51 questions split across three different levels, the warm -up level, the open -up level, and the deep level. So you decide how deep the conversation goes. And people play these conversation cards in boardrooms at work, in bedrooms alone at night, and on first dates, and everywhere in between.

1:59:12I'll put a link to the conversation cards in the description below, and you can get yours at thediary .com. I want to talk about one last subject, which is the subject of pornography. Leftist for the end. Cool, we're in the other side. Yeah, I'm interested to see how you all think that the impacts and implications of pornography impact everything we've talked about today, whether it's men, it's women, it's children, etc. And also how that ties into feminism. I would say there is increasing evidence that everything we do alone on our phone excessively is causing us to disassociate, is causing us to get some kind of addiction property from it, is causing us to dysregulate, is causing the breakdown of regular communication and society.

2:00:00So... Do you think porn is a net negative for society? I think it's a moot point because it's always been there and it's always going to be there, but I would like... But if you could press a button and get rid of it and pressing that button, would that cause society to be better or worse in terms of happiness if we use that as a metric and any of the metrics that one would use? Honestly, it's like saying, can you press a button and get rid of human sexuality? I don't know what the world would look like. If people were working it out. But there is no before we had porn. People always drew things.

2:00:38But we're not graffitiers through walls. Can I say that when it was too dimensional, when you had one boy said a Playboy magazine under their bed or they stole their father's Playboy magazine, that was actually less harmful than the movies and the video because it too dimensional isn't as powerful as the video, I mean, I'm saying films, yeah. Modern porn is a super stimulus. It's a completely, it's not like... Real action is not... It's like sourcing murals and pompey, right? It's designed to be incredibly stimulating. In its very clever, actually, the way that the porn platforms work, it's really, it's a clever product.

2:01:18And we're talking about unregulated capitalism. Like this is the pre -eminent example. It's designed to tap in to our most profound desires. I mean, particularly for men using it, it's like hyper -visual, everything's exaggerated. It's, I mean, one of the reasons why it's a bad idea to use porn in general, aside from it being super unethical as an industry, is it will make the rest of your sex life worse generally, because it will mean that real sex will not measure up. If you've trained your brain to enjoy the super stimulus, the normal stimulus becomes less exciting, like how have you ate junk food than it becomes less attractive to eat, vegetables or whatever?

2:01:57It's not like playboy of the 50s. Does it left room for fantasy? There's no, I mean, it's so explicit that it leaves no room for fantasy, even your own fantasy. And is it harming men as well, Louise? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, not least, one of the things that is certainly anecdotally a massive problem with compulsive porn use is a rectal dysfunction when you actually try and have sex with a real human being, because you've trained your brain and you've also trained the rest of your body to only respond to this particular stimulus and to masturbation. If I put the button in front of you, like I said to Deborah, would you press it to...

2:02:33Of course I would. Porn is all bad for not least the porn forms. I mean, even just on that basis, in the same way that I would ban some hideously unethical industry that I had nothing to do with sex, because people, I mean, like the suicide rate among poor performers is appalling. Or like, I can't remember her name, but the most promiscuous woman in Australia, the only fans model who just last week had sex with 583 men in one day and was hospitalised. Subsequently, right? This is what we're talking about in practice. This is like a hideous industry. It is so bad for women. I cannot understand how feminist could endorse it.

2:03:09I just can't. It's one of my strongest opinions. Can you... Would you ban saucy murals in Pompeii? I can't. No, you can't ban anything. So would you? But there's the button, saucy murals in Pompeii. Which, by the way, is number five on the show. There are two -dimensional. I don't mind two -dimensional. It's funny. I don't mind two -dimensional. It's when it's live -action. And actually with video games, they did studies to show that the more realistic the video games, the more harmful they were to teenagers. And so there's something about. So the murals were too dimensional and maybe they would be considered art.

2:03:46So you would press the button and the three dimensional porn. And you wouldn't press the button. I just think the buttons right there would you do. You can press it. No one's watching. Okay. That holds the wholesome couple who were really into each other, I thought this is modeling something that I think is very healthy. People doing violent things to women and like hen tie porn, which I discovered in my research, which is animated porn with like Lolita Star Girls that look really young and violent stuff. I, we obviously, we need regulation and we need discussion. I am not the person to lead it.

2:04:24But, you know, if you would press the button to get rid of the source emurals in Pompeii, then it's kind of a racing human sexuality, I think. And I don't know. What would you or not? Would you leave those up as a sort of little racing artifact? What would you do, Lewis? I wouldn't put it up in a school room. I mean, I think everyone accepts that even that really mild stuff needs to be like limited. If not, it needs to be limited, if not legally then socially. What about Statue of David? What about just the naked form? No, I would not ban that. But I think that this is a rhetorical trick to avoid the fact that this is the least feminist industry we can conceptualize.

2:05:07And a lot of feminists have really dropped the ball on this and have actually decided to prioritize their own status and their own commitment to sexual liberalism over actual real women who have been sexually tortured within this industry and it makes me really angry and I think that, I mean this is true in all sorts of areas of feminism. I mean what we're doing here is an intra -feminist argument, right? Like we're all basically starting from the same position which is we think that women's interests ought to be protected, that women's flourishing, ought to be promoted. Yeah. Children's too. What we're arguing about is over how to do that and that's an argument that's going to go on forever and has gone on forever and I think it's good.

2:05:43We should have these arguments but if we can't start from the premise that like the sexual torture of women for profit is bad, then what are we doing? Why does it make you angry? What part of it makes you angry as a list of families? It's possibly as partly from having work with victims, I think, but I guess it's the,

2:06:04I guess it's dishonesty, I just don't like. I'm not accusing a mean dishonest, but I just think for this ideology is just so driven with contradictions. Where did feminism drop the ball? In prioritising the interests of a small, unrepresentative group of women over the interests of other women. And I don't just mean in terms of like class or wealth, although that is a factor. I mean a lot of it is to do with personality. We've talked about agency. We've talked about some people are more maternal than others. I think that one of the one of the perennial problems with feminism is that the women who tends to sort of rise to the top and get media careers.

2:06:39I do realise I'm in this category, are not representatives of other women and will often have preferences that are very different, which I just not share by everyone else. I want to ask you all a question just for me, which is something that I contend with now that the world is shifted and changed and definitions have shifted, which is about masculinity and what it is to be a good man, I aspire to be a good man. And I'd like you all to tell me one by one, what masculinity now means to you and how all of the men that have gotten to this point in the podcast and also the mothers of men and fathers of men should be raising their young boys to be good men.

2:07:16And how does that sort of contradict or how is that in harmony with our evolutionary nature? So starting with Louise. I think that the key task that every society has to set itself is how to, young men in particular, had this incredible energy that can be put to good things and to bad. Like the greatest discoveries in the world, have a well -money be made by young men, and young men also commit the vast majority of violence, right? It's this particular group, is contains the most incredible opportunity, and also the most incredible danger. And every society faces this problem, like what do we do about these guys?

2:07:55Like how do we, how do we correctly channel that in a way that's pro -social and anti -social? And I don't think our society is doing a specially good job of that. I mean, to some extent we do pacify men with porn and video games, so they're less dangerous than they have been in previous areas. But at the same time, I don't think that we're deploying male talents as well as we could, and I don't think that we are encouraging men to become good husbands and fathers. What about the provider protector pro -creator? Narrative Scott Galaway has talked about that. Men should aspire to be providers, protectors, pro -creators.

2:08:30This is that, Akira? Yeah, that sounds about right, yeah. I've written about CAD and Dad Mode as well. How do we encourage men to reject CAD mode and embrace Dad Mode? What is CAD mode? I like that. A CAD, you know? No, he's a CAD. Kind of an old fashioned word for a man who would sweep in on a motorbike or a car. Oh, a land for a tender or a man for a boy. Yeah, I wasn't going to say that, but you know, that's a very... So, okay, so just to make sure I've completed my perspective of how you think about masculinity. So should I be holding the door open for my partner? And should I be paying the bill on the first date?

2:09:05I think shivalry is great. I think the rejecting shivalry was a mistake. But also it's not the most important masculine virtue. I mean, most of the virtues should be demonstrated by both sexes, you know, honesty, whatever. But there are some which I think may be men need to focus on more and women need to focus on more. And I certainly was raising my boys who are very little at the moment. But we've, we've, me and my husband have talked a lot and thought a lot about how do we encourage specifically masculine virtues and sometimes that means parenting boys slightly different from girls. In what way give me an example of a masculine virtue you're trying to bring out?

2:09:40Like this question about what to do about a young male aggression, I think a tried and tested way of doing that, which we're certainly going to try with our kids is combat sports or sports in general or it basically teaching young men how to sublimates and regulate and six and channel effectively those feelings of aggression in a way that is constructive and not destructive. Deborah, how do you agree to agree with that? I. That's not at all my world view. I think we should be teaching our children to find their humanity and their empathy, no matter their gender. When I researched my books, six conversations with GED have, I thought it was going to show me that the internet and especially social media made us less and less empathetic.

2:10:26You know, we think about keyboard warriors and make up to your face and all that. But what I discovered is in fact, every single day social media asks us to be more and more empathetic, to fewer and fewer people. That is a cult. I was in a cult. You have to be very empathetic to the people in it. And the second someone steps outside, they're dead to us. And that is what I see on the internet. I see it in, I think we're all in a big series of cults. So I see now this rise of young men being told, women are dreadful, women have taken our place, which is just, it is not for girls not to go to university to make things more fair for boys.

2:11:08It is for us to nurture our boys, to make sure if they're feeling lost or they're feeling that they can't compete or they're out in the world and they're flailing around. We need to build them up. we do not need to tell girls to step back. That is, we haven't got a quality yet. We know we're near it, much less pulling ourselves back to make more space for boys at this point. We desperately need to invest in our brothers, in the boys in our community in any way we can. I went into a school and chatted to the boys about gender norms and how they felt about it and what impositions they felt, or what random things were weird.

2:11:44And I said to them, what would be weird if a boy did it for no reason. Like there's not, and one of them said knitting. He said, if I brought my knitting to school, he said, you know, not that he needed, he said, everyone would laugh at me. And why there's no reason for it. And another boy just went, I'd bring knitting in. I wouldn't care. Boys and girls fundamentally, biologically, physiologically, neurologically different. And therefore, do they need a different approach? They're hormonally different. We kind of understand that. We will agree with that from birth. So do they need to be raised differently to cater to that difference?

2:12:17I wouldn't exacerbate it. I would say we all should be, as I said, I want a partner. And I think we should be raising both our goals and our boys and any children that feel that they're neither, to aspire to their humanity, to their empathy, to look out for each other. I think exacerbating roles and telling boys, you're like this and girls are like that, is pushing us further away and it's pushing us back decades and generations. Should a man, a young boy, be a provider, a pro creator, a protector? Should we instill those values in young boys? No. Why? Because there's this heavy imposition on boys, and there's a heavy imposition on girls, that their life should look a certain way.

2:13:04And we've got to a point where men can stay home and raise the children, where women can go out and explore new territory, where we see that women are as clever as men, as talented as men, as able to debate as men, why would we push this back and go, well, girls, it's really more feminine. If you do this and boys, girls will fancy you more if you do this. So what does that young man, what should his virtues be? You said empathy and those kinds of things. And then on the chivalry side of things, should I be holding the door open for every woman that walks through one, try to be paying that bill on the first day?

2:13:42I think I think it's lovely when all human beings hold doors open behind them for other human beings. I really disagree that we should not... When we issued shivalry, what was going on was that there was a period of time where it was like, she's more gentle, she needs help, and it stopped people seeing us as people who could be entrepreneurial CEOs. So women said, look, could you just not do that? Because if you're not holding the door open for any of the guys, then you hold it open for me, they see me as somehow less than sweet, sexualized. So we said no. Now I think, look, honestly, if a man holds a door of him for me, that's very nice, whatever.

2:14:19I don't think people see me that way anymore. I don't think it's a big deal anymore. I don't like the idea that you have to pay on the first date. I think, you know, if I've invited you out, I'll pay if you've invited me out. You'll pay. I mean, you're much richer than me, so probably you should pay. But that's nothing to do with Jen Dusty. It's then not something evolutionary in that. If we look back through our ancestry, that the qualities of fertility are more attractive to men and the qualities of being a provider and more attractive to women. So if I don't invest in becoming a provider as a young man, I'm actually going to do much worse when I get older.

2:14:58According to some of the day -to -be -reference to earlier, 250 % less women are going to opt for me. So if I don't sort of build a base and becomes a provider, am I going to be a disadvantage as a man in the society that we live in? But also if we look back to our evolutionary history, is that not hard coded into us? Makes me feel so sad that boys feel this huge responsibility when we are now at a point when it is evident that you do drag and send you sit next to Deborah Mead and who's every bit as good an entrepreneur as you. So why is it your responsibility? Why is it men's responsibility? We can both raise children, we can both, we've demonstrated, we can both raise children.

2:15:39I've got the best society I live in. But let's reshape it. Let raise your children to think differently and reshape it. Is the society we live in a consequence of our evolutionary survivor of the fittest, natural selection, pick a good partner so that you can reproduce past and you see this in women where I watch in the state and show it called Pop the Blue, which I love, which has just gone to Netflix. And it's so crazy that when so basically Pop the Blue is 10 men standing aligned with the blue or 10 women standing aligned with the blue and then a man or woman walks out. So when a woman walks out and she looks at the line up, she will go down the line up and pop every blue of a man that's below six feet tall, just like that is crazy.

2:16:18And they'll say, why did you pop his blue small short? Why do you probably spend short, short, short, short, short? This is just part of... No, it's so destructive, though. Look, we can talk about evolution, but I've seen David out in brushows, where our shared ancestors who are primates are ripping each other apart. A chimp comes up and they rip the chimp, chimp, limb from limb. What human beings have done is evolved to be better when we are. When we war, we are not better, but we know our better nature and our better self doesn't do that. Are we fighting against? Remember hearing some of the book has told me that across cultures, men and women typically go for the same thing.

2:17:00So like men are going for a certain hip ratio, whenever and women are going for a certain shoulder ratio. Are these things not like fundamentally evolution? It's a status symbols. Like my husband's shorter than me. It's a status. And status is an evolutionary desire. It is, but we can be better than that, can't we? Can't we teach our girls and boys and non -binary young people that these superficial things are what we should be like aspiring to. We should be aspiring to get past them. The idea, like a lot of it is, we know this because different cultures have different beauty standards, different times in history, have had different beauty standards, and men tend to go for the beauty standard of the time they're in, although location therein.

2:17:44And therefore it is social. It's, hey, that one means that you're a successful guy. Is it a no way evolutionary in your mind? I think if it is evolutionary, get over it, get past it, get beyond it. Good luck. What do you think I'm going to say? I don't know, I have no idea. I disagree with almost everything she said. So, boys are neurologically more fragile than And girls, more boys are born in the world and more girls survive. They don't survive because boys don't survive as much because they are incredibly neurologically fragile, emotionally fragile too. What that means is they're more prone to aggression, behavioral problems, ADHD -like behaviors, which is distractability.

2:18:30They're more sensitive to stress from a very young age. They are not the same as girls. They don't learn the same way as girls. They need lots of physical expression during the day if they don't get it and they're forced to sit in circle time like little girls can sit in circle time, little boys go off the rails and then they're labeled as having attentional issues. And so we are educating little boys today like little girls, which is why they can't keep up. So if you ask me, we should separate little boys and little girls. So in terms of the neurological fragility, they need that attachment figure even more than the little girls.

2:19:04when it comes to going to school, maybe we should separate little boys and little girls when they're little so we can cater to their individual needs and it is different. And in terms of going forward, men and women are not exactly the same. And even if we try to thousands of years of evolution are not gonna be turned around in 50 years. So we may make some of these changes, but that's not realistic. What's realistic is that we functioned in a way that is based on survival for thousands millennium. And we're gonna keep functioning that way to a certain extent. There may be some people who branch off and try to do it differently.

2:19:43You know, the other thing is that young men today are not, they're at a disadvantage when it comes to school and I'm gonna say, we need quotas. And this may sound radical, but when it comes to college, it should be 50 -50. So my kids went to a school and when it came to nursery school, they balanced the class. That means if you go to any preschool they have half girls and half boys That's just the way they do it. They balance it in other ways too Alpha girls and beta girls and alpha boys and they you can't have all the same kind of kid But the idea that we have to balance the odds otherwise We're marriage is also going to come to an end because of that statistic that women are only going to marry at their educational level or above So we're going to marriage will end to so which shouldn't go though It's not which girls shouldn't go.

2:20:30It's giving boys advantage to succeed. And it's saying, you know what? We have 50 % girls and 50 % boys in this college, in this class. So in America, we have a lot of universities. I don't know the UK system. It's not my country, but in America, there's a lot of different places you can go. But the idea that all it's like funneling, all the kids are being funneled in this way. And what I will say is that if we don't balance the odds, So girls and boys have equal opportunity in college and graduate school. We are going to have a huge social dilemma because nobody's marrying. And we have single parents.

2:21:08Then women are going, I can't find a man and they're having children on their own. And that's causing a social problem because now we have little boys and little girls that don't have fathers. So all I'm saying is we need to balance the odds. That's it. When you have to make more spaces because if 60 percent... Maybe that's the solution. If 60 % because otherwise what you're saying is boys who are less academic get the places of the 10 % of girls that now can't go in. So is America going to create more spaces? There's less funding. I'm not great at math but I'll say we can have 60 and 60. I don't mind 120.

2:21:44OK. I'm... Thank you all so much for being here. I just want to give you an opportunity just to summarize your thoughts on the sexual remediation in two sentences if you can. I'm going to repeat the insight of a great friend of my Mary Harrington is also an author, she wrote this amazing book called Feminism Against Progress. She says that feminism kind of bubbles up at moments of big societal change when things have really changed materially and there's like a reassessment of gender relations. And I think that's the reason why we're seeing this right now. It's because it's because of the digital revolution.

2:22:18So so much has changed, so much in flux, we're having this like re -negotiation of how men and women are supposed to relate to one another. And there's always happens. And I think that it's good to talk about it. And one way or another, men and women are going to have to learn to get along. Because otherwise we won't reproduce the species. There we go. So I believe in freedom of choice. But not if that choice is to do harm to children. So I believe that children should always come first in our lives. Our family should always come first. Freud said, you need love and meaningful work, but your love should always come first.

2:23:00If it's your children, if it's your spouse, if it's your parents, if it's your next door neighbors who are your best friends, love always has to come first. And so we have become a world where we work first. And so what I would say is I believe in choice of all kind. I don't believe in demeaning or diminishing someone else's choice. If they make that choice, I'm fine with it, but don't demean or diminish my choice. You're broke. I think the sexual revolution has given women in spades, agency, autonomy and emotional freedom. We don't yet have enough emotional freedom. There are many women around the world who have less agency and autonomy than they did 100 years ago.

2:23:43So we must fight for them and I think everything is better when women are free. I think we can create our own structure and we need to be desperately, need to be our own guiding light. So any women watching this, take everything we've said on board and then decide for yourself, do you want that spaciousness in your life or do you want rules? And I believe that feminism, all feminism should be maternal feminism. I don't think we need the word maternal in it. And I really, really, really want all of us around this table who believe that feminism has given us the right to sit at it, to say that feminism has given us a lot, and unregulated capitalism has taken.

2:24:34and the next stage is to work together because if we divide as women and as feminists, there is no hope. There is so much coming our way from the far right Christian nationalists, we must stand together. Thank you so much. I want to just appreciate all of you for being here because I think progress starts with these kinds of conversations and I think all too often in society these conversations happen in little silos in echo chambers. So everyone's belief just ends up being reinforced. You just confirmation bias just doubles down in whatever you think. Can it, it's not easy to step into these environments when there's going to be people watching this that sort of different sides of this table in terms of their perspective.

2:25:18So I applaud you for doing the thing that I think is most sort of conducive with progress which is having the conversation and being respectful in the ways that you disagree about that. So thank you so much. You all have incredible books. There's something there's so many that I can't even, I can't even put them on the table or hold them all. But I'm gonna link all of the books below. So if you wanna hear more from all of these wonderful people at the table, Erica, Louise and Deborah, about what they think on these subjects, please do go and buy their books. Good to link all of them below for you.

2:25:45And where else can we find you, Libby? Where's the best place to hear more from you about what you think? So I have a podcast called Men, Man, Mate, Shark, MMM. You can find it on YouTube or the other podcast platforms. I've had Erica on before. Maybe it's Deborah, anytime, very welcome. I talk about sexual politics, but also, I mean, I say that the things that I'm mostly interested in are birth, sex, violence and death. So that's what the podcast is about. And religion. I'll link that below as well, Eric. www .comasarkeomisar .com. You can find everything I do on there. You can make an appointment with me because I do virtual appointments.

2:26:24And I also started a nonprofit called Attachment Circles, which is an educational platform, but a community building platform. So please go to Attachment Circles and join. And if you feel generous, donate, because we need the resources to get the community building going. I'll link all of that place while in Deborah. I do the podcast, the Guilty Feminist. So if everyone could subscribe and do all those things, that would be great. But I'm also starting a new grassroots movement called the Road to Gilead, because there are moves in this country from far right, American Christian nationalists to take our abortion rights and to take our LGBTQ plus rights.

2:27:06And I'm really scared about it. And I've been talking about it around the country on the book tour, and I've discovered other academics and people who are very worried. We're also talking about it. So if you would like to hear more about Road to Gilead, you can sign up to the mailing list at guiltyfeminist .com and you will get the occasional email about the shows we're doing but also road to Gilead grassroots projects coming up. I shall then call it that below you. Thank you so much. This is a very long conversation but it's exactly what I was hoping it would be and I found my opinion shifting and changing throughout so that's success for me.

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