Perry, Louise
▶ Watch on YouTubeCoverage note: full (about 55 minutes; auto-generated English captions with a few recognition errors, e.g. « tradives » for tradwives)
Core ideas
The case against the sexual revolution. Perry reads the revolution as both ideological and material, the pill being the key technology: women can control it, and it is invisible. She says she is a beneficiary of it, but argues that men and women differ in important ways: physically (only women get pregnant, asymmetry in vulnerability, sexual violence) and, on average, psychologically (men have a stronger drive to casual sex). A culture of casual sex is therefore worse for women. She traces the feminist critique (Dworkin and MacKinnon in the sex wars, losing to individualistic « sex-positive » feminism by the 1990s) through #MeToo, whose tools (reputational gossip, consent workshops) she judges weak: she thinks rape is biological rather than ideological, and no match for hundreds of hours of pornography.
Reactionary feminism, heteropessimism and the internet. Perry's « reactionary feminism » starts from biological difference and a long anthropological view of how societies have channelled young male energy; she is sympathetic to men's virtues alongside their dangers. She sees women's « heteropessimism » as downstream of hookup culture and of a lack of friendships with men, and the internet as turbocharging polarisation (exposure of what each sex says about the other, mimetic young women moving left, a manosphere that makes men lonely rather than violent). Tradwives, in her view, are angry and sad for the same reasons as progressive feminists but propose different solutions (blaming modernity for the pains of childbirth, free birthing).
What to do, and its limits. Pressed by Douthat, Perry offers a few concrete points: women should behave as if contraception did not exist (choose the man, not the moment) and use it within marriage to space births; premarital sex need not be strictly forbidden, but casual sex should be socially disapproved. She admits she is a critic more than an architect of a new sexual culture, doubts that restraint can be enforced without shame and double standards, and hopes female emancipation and restraint can coexist on a spectrum. Feminist cultures that cannot reproduce themselves, she warns, will vanish; her final view is a « tragic » one: structural solutions are scarce, but individuals with enough will can resist the worst trends.
Excerpts
“« I think that tradives are angry and sad for the same reasons that progressive feminists are angry and sad, but they have a different set of solutions which they think will solve it. »”
“« if feminist cultures turn out to be cultures that cannot reproduce themselves, then the political project dies within a generation. »”
“« I think the manosphere is unlikely to encourage young men to be violent and dangerous. I think is quite likely to encourage them to be lonely and sad and that seems like a problem. »”