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The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
THE FEMINISM DEBATE: Is Feminism Betraying Women? The Hidden Risk Of Casual Sex!
02:28:20
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- [00:01]
Erica Komisar
Fourth of July savings are here at the Home Depot, so it's time to get your grilling on. Pick up the traeger Pro Series 22 Pellet Grill and Smoker now on special buy for $389. Was $549. Smoke a rack of ribs or bake an apple pie. This grill is versatile enough to do it all this summer. No matter how you like your steaks, your barbecues are guaranteed to be well done. Celebrate 4th of July with fast free delivery on select grills right now at the Home Depot, subject to availability. The feminism movement didn't unite women. It split women.
- [00:36]
Deborah Frances-White
I feel totally.
- [00:37]
Erica Komisar
Wait, listen. 50% of young women don't want to have children. They're really preoccupied with making money and materialism.
- [00:44]
Deborah Frances-White
But we're still looking at a society that is increasingly telling women where they could be better.
- [00:49]
Louise Perry
But sometimes feminism expects women to be prioritized and both sexes want the privileges without the responsibilities.
- [00:56]
Erica Komisar
Can I just add, we are producing women and men who are. And I'll tell you what I mean by that. It'll be an interesting discussion. We're joined by three leading and outspoken voices in female societal issues with very different opinions to unpack the choices and consequences women face in modern society.
- [01:11]
Deborah Frances-White
The sexual revolution gave women freedom, but.
- [01:14]
Louise Perry
Things like the washing machine, women entering the labor force, the pill had enormous social changes. For instance, it gave the illusion that sex was consequence free.
- [01:22]
Erica Komisar
But. But the second wave of the feminist movement was every woman should want free sex, and yet 82% of young women are depressed and anxious after casual sexual encounters. Or every woman should want to go out to work and leave their children in daycare. But we are doing terrible damage to our children by putting them in daycare.
- [01:41]
Louise Perry
This strain of feminism has basically aspired as much as possible to make women like men. And now gender roles are changing, and.
- [01:47]
Erica Komisar
We'Ve gone so far. So we have women dominating men.
- [01:50]
Deborah Frances-White
How are we dominating men? Love.
- [01:51]
Erica Komisar
Oh, my goodness. 60% of college students. Students are women. No, let me finish. Young men are afraid of women and the power they have over them.
- [02:01]
Deborah Frances-White
Oh, God. To blame feminism for those things. I mean, it's insane.
- [02:04]
Erica Komisar
But there are solutions.
- [02:06]
Stephen Bartlett
I'm just going to jump in there and talk about a report that came out in 2025, and this was really shocking. What are your thoughts about this?
- [02:11]
Louise Perry
Okay, so first of all.
- [02:16]
Stephen Bartlett
Quick one. Before we get back to this episode, just give me 30 seconds of your time. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week means the world to all of us. And this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place. But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started. And if you enjoy what we do here, Please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app. Here's a promise I'm going to make to you. I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now, now and into the future. We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to, and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show. Thank you. Thank you so much. Back to the episode. Let's start with some introductions. Louise, what is your professional background and what do I need to understand and know about your experiences that feed into your perspective on this subject?
- [03:13]
Louise Perry
So, my professional background, I'm a journalist. I write about ideas for a living. I don't have, like, a political agenda. I'm just. I just write and say things that I think are true. In terms of how I arrived at some of my views on what we're going to talk about today, Sexual revolution. I think I was raised with a lot of the assumptions around the sexual revolution, which are sort of like the water that we swim in now culturally. And it wasn't until I got to university that I started gradually unpicking them. After I left university, I worked in a rape crisis center, which was quite formative for me in that I saw some of the ways in which some of the feminist theory that I had learned at university didn't quite map onto reality. And then after leaving that job, I became a journalist again. I kept thinking about these things, and I guess I've reached a point where I take a very mixed view of this history. I think there are good things, I think there are bad things that have come out of the sexual revolution.
- [04:17]
Stephen Bartlett
Louise, can you define for me what you mean by sexual revolution for anybody that doesn't know? Cause it's gonna be quite an important term today, Right?
- [04:23]
Louise Perry
So I think that there are two things, really. The ideological event, really, of the 1960s and 1970s. So this was a period of. Not just in relation to sexual relationships, but all sorts of things. A period of really questioning and challenging traditional ideas, and particularly traditional Christian ideas about how what sexual relationships ought to look like. I think actually, the point that we've reached in terms of progressive Culture is the assumption that those traditional ideas are necessarily questionable, unnecessarily fit to be challenged. I think that's the ideological thing that we're talking about. But there's this other thing that happens at the same time, which is partially connected, which is a material change. So you have the introduction of the pill, the advent of safe abortion. Remember, historically, abortion is not safe. So you have the advent of safe abortion. And of course, it's decriminalization. You have things like the washing machine and central heating and all sorts of other domestic appliances, domestic technologies, which actually have been enormously important in changing sexual relationships, because all of a sudden, it means that this basically takes less time to run a home. And so it becomes more possible for women to enter the workforce. So then you see this wave of not only changing marriage rates and birth rates, but also women entering the labor force en masse and really some enormous social changes, like so enormous that it can be a little bit hard in 2025 to realize how enormous they were because we've become used to them.
- [05:58]
Stephen Bartlett
We'll talk about all of that today. Going clockwise, then, Erica, same question to you about your background and the work that's fed into the perspective you have.
- [06:04]
Erica Komisar
I'm a psychoanalyst in private practice. I'm an author. I write books about parenting. And the book I'm probably most well known for is my book Being There. And it's basically about the neuroscience of attachment or the importance of mothers in the first three years of a child's life to create emotional security, which lays down the foundation for mental health in the future. And so from my perspective, I guess the conversation we're going to have, I should say right off the bat, I consider myself a feminist, but I consider myself a term that I like better and that my community uses, the people that I work with, which is, I consider myself a maternal feminist. Basically, there was a school of thought called maternal feminism, which really elevated women in their work as mothers and really talked about it as very important work. And so I'm not an anti feminist, and I'm certainly for women to have choice. So it'll be an interesting discussion. I guess you could say I'm more of a centrist on this topic. As Louise said, there are parts of feminism that I think really helped women, and there are parts that really did a lot of harm to children.
- [07:15]
Stephen Bartlett
And lastly, Deborah. Yes, same question to you.
- [07:20]
Deborah Frances-White
So I am best known as the host of the Guilty Feminist podcast, and I started that podcast to learn about feminism, and I have since researched A lot. I wrote a book called the Guilty Feminist. I've just written a book called Six Conversations We're Scared to Have, which does also challenge some of the directions that we've gone, but more in about how combative we've become as progressive people to each other and how difficult it is to talk to people on the right now and how we need to get back in rooms and we need to be having difficult discussions like this. So it's interesting what Louise says about being raised in a progressive household, but then being disillusioned, thinking that there was. There's some ways in which life was better before the sexual revolution because I'm effectively a time traveler. I did live before the sexual revolution because when I was 14, just coming into my puberty, my family joined a religious cult. I didn't have any normal sexual development, and I didn't get out. I didn't escape that patriarchal cult till I was in my middle 20s. So I know what it is, and I do not believe women want it. I know what it is to not have autonomy, to not have agency, and to not have emotional freedom. And those are the three big things that I think the sexual revolution gave women. First of all, agency. I think it's just agency is so important. So agency is just the ability to go around and choose what you do moment to moment. And autonomy is, can I decide what my life looks like, the shape of my life, what choices do I have? And emotional freedom is the third one. And I don't think the sexual revolution did give us emotional freedom, because I think we're still sitting in a lot of guilt as women as to, if I'm at work, I should be at home with my children. If I'm at home with my children, am I providing for them financially well enough, or am I going to have a career when I go back to work? If I'm doing both of those things, things very well, am I a good enough daughter, friend? Am I running a half marathon for charity like we are in a stage of such guilt. That's why my show and my. One of my books is called the Guilty Feminist, because I felt that feminism had become another thing to feel guilty about. And so anything to me that engenders more shame in women or more guilt in women or takes their autonomy away, even emotionally. For me, I would like to move far away from that, because in my life, every year, I've been away from that cult, and I have had more autonomy and more emotional freedom. I have felt more spaciousness, and I have Become a better person, a better partner. I have maternal roles in my life. It makes me so much better in those roles if I'm filled up, if I'm creatively fulfilled. And it also makes me a better person in my community in every way. So that's, for me, what feminism is.
- [10:35]
Stephen Bartlett
So autonomy, emotional freedom and agency. I also want to touch on the word guilt as well, because I remember that being pertinent to our conversation. But if I reflect on those three words, Louise, autonomy, emotional freedom and agency as the byproduct of the sexual revolution, would you agree with that?
- [10:50]
Louise Perry
Yes and no. So I think that. Can I give an example that is, like, quite dark, but I think throws us immediately into, like, some of these really difficult questions about freedom and whose freedom. Right. There's this line from Matthew Arnold that I really like. Freedom is a really good horse to ride, but to ride somewhere, like, freedom ought to have a purpose. Right. And so an example from my professional life, which I think highlights some of the issues about sexual revolution promoting freedom. The law around bdsm. I won't go into the details because it's boring, but there's, like, complicated law around BDSM basically like this. So this is bondage, domination, sadomasochism. So people basically doing consensually violent or abusive things in sex. So stuff that would be illegal if they weren't Consent, pretty much. And the law around it is complicated. The law basically says that you can consent up to a certain level of harm, and then above that level of harm, you're criminally liable. And if something goes wrong, like, you're done for it. And there's been ongoing campaigns by proponents of sexual freedom to loosen these laws and to make it so that you can consent to more than what you legally can at the moment. So consent to, like, serious body modifications as a sex thing, or consent to quite serious violence as a sex thing. Like, if something goes wrong at the moment, you might be criminally liable. So me and a bunch of other feminists set up a group called We Can't Consent to this. The reason we did this is because there were an increasing number of cases in the uk. This isn't unique to the UK of women who had died during sex and their partners claimed that they had consented to the violence that killed them. So this was normally strangulation, but there were other, like, horrible ways in which these women died. And these men were getting away with this in the sense that they were successfully claiming, no, no, no, this was all just a sex game. And they were successfully avoiding a murder prosecution and sometimes getting very light sentences for manslaughter. And I think this is a really, really good example of freedom for who and freedom for what? Because you can completely see why some campaigners would want the law in BDSM to be much more liberal. And they would say. And they do say, you know, I'm a consenting adult. Who are you to tell me that I can't do XYZ in the bedroom? Who are you to tell me that the law ought to step in and try and criminalize what adults do in the privacy of their own homes? And you can see their argument. But then I say, okay, but the problem is we're all connected to one another. And your freedom's impact on mine and this all. You know, a society is greater than the sum of its parts. And if you're going to say that sexual freedom is the preeminent value, then I don't know what we do in these cases, these concrete cases, where it seems to me that a terrible wrong has been done to this woman. And if we don't have illiberal laws, at least partially illiberal laws, then men who make this defense are going to get away with it, as. I'm sorry, this is a dark example to, like, kick off the conversation with, but I just think it's a pertinent example of how freedom is difficult and agency is difficult and choice is difficult. And we can say that. That these things are good generally. I think they are good generally, but they are virtues that need to be balanced against other virtues. And that's the challenge.
- [14:18]
Erica Komisar
Freedom is a wonderful thing. No one would want to take freedom away from human beings. But excessive freedom without structure is not good for human beings. So I'll just use the example because I talk about children a lot. If you raise your children with respect for their will, that is a good thing, right? You don't want to raise. You don't want to quash their will. You want to support their individuality and support their choices. And even when raising children, you're going to give them choices. Do you want eggs or waffles for breakfast? Do you want to wear your green pants or your blue pants? No, more than that with small children. But if you don't provide any structure for them, they don't feel loved, they don't feel secure, they don't feel stable. And so what I'm afraid of is that we went too far. It's not that freedom isn't a good thing. It's that excessive freedom without any structure at all can also make us feel untethered, unbound, without connections to the people that we're most intimate with. And that's my concern. So it's not that sexual freedom isn't a good thing, it's that, in my mind, it may have gone too far.
- [15:37]
Stephen Bartlett
Just to add to that, before you jump in there, despite the general decline in sex, especially amongst younger people, societal acceptance of casual sex has grown quite rapidly. In the UK, approval of casual sex rose from just 10% in 1999 to 42% in 2016.
- [15:54]
Erica Komisar
The hookup culture.
- [15:56]
Stephen Bartlett
Yeah.
- [15:57]
Deborah Frances-White
So when you say rules and structure, Erica, I'm really interested in that turn of phrase because, of course, children need rules and structure, but women aren't children.
- [16:08]
Erica Komisar
Well, we're all children. Men are children too. From a psychoanalyst perspective, there's a child in everyone, of course.
- [16:15]
Deborah Frances-White
But I think when we're talking about rules and grown women, we are really, really in dangerous water, because we are looking at a society that is increasingly closing down on women and telling women where they could do better, be better. If we're looking at an extreme example, we're looking at Iran in 1970s and women in Parliament and women walking around, part of the sexual revolution in miniskirts and having a wonderful time. And then you're looking at women in Iran. Now you're looking at women in Afghanistan. Now, women in Afghanistan now have rules and they have structure. They can't stand near a window, they can't leave the house without a man, they can't raise, they can't use their voice in public, they can't sing. Anything that says rules to me, I'm immediately like, firstly, our society has plenty of structure. We have a lot of structure. We all have to work to make a living. We are all encouraged into monogamous relationships. And there's a feel that you're successful if you find the one and get married and have 2.4 children. There's so much structure in our lives, there's very little time for relaxation or even considering what we really might want to do. I would be very intrigued to know what you mean by women should have rules.
- [17:43]
Erica Komisar
Yeah.
- [17:44]
Deborah Frances-White
What do you mean?
- [17:44]
Erica Komisar
So, first of all, I don't agree with you. If I can just say that I don't agree that we are encouraging monogamy. I think we're encouraging polygamy, and I don't mean marriage polygamy, I mean multiple partners. Young people are hooking up. I wrote an article for the Institute for Family Studies on why the Statistics on the hookup culture and what it's doing to young people in terms of their mental health. It's causing them to feel more depressed, more anxious, more embarrassed, having more regrets, self esteem issues. It's got some major implications and we're talking, the statistics say 72 to 82%. 72% of young men and 82% of women. Young women are feeling depressed and anxious after these casual sexual encounters. Tinder has an ad that says, meet the love of your night. What it does is it takes something so sacred and intimate and it turns it into something not just casual, but it turns it into something irrelevant, unimportant and dangerous. If you ask me, emotionally dangerous. And it can be physically dangerous. If you're having casual sex. You could get a sexually transmitted disease. AIDS is still around. I think in a way, what we've taught our kids and what I encourage the young people that I work with is that experiment with sex, care about the people that you're experimenting with. Find people who care about you and who you care about. So that structure.
- [19:24]
Deborah Frances-White
Can I just counter about this sort of idyllic option of monogamy? In the United Kingdom, the police receive a domestic abuse related call every 30 seconds. Yet it's estimated that less than 24% of domestic abuse crime is reported to the police. One in four women in England and Wales will experience domestic abuse in her lifetime. On average, nearly two women are killed a week in this country. And I know that America has a similar story, but probably worse because there's guns. This is around the world, it's the same in Australia. It is not an either or. It's not that women were so happy and fulfilled in the 1950s because their husbands would go to work. And I mean, watch Mad Men, which is a, you know, it's a sort of researched idea of how things often were for women then and mentioned and how, you know, Don Draper would go off into the city, he would have a fulfilling career, then he would sleep with any number of women and come home to his wife who knew he was having affairs, who could sense it, who could vibe it, who could smell the perfume and had to just put up with it until she couldn't any longer and she was at risk of STDs because he was going out and doing whatever he wanted. The idea that monogamy is this utopia and since we've gone into a more hookup culture, I still think there's a hell of a lot of pressure for people to find the right one. Yes, people hook up before they find the right one. But there is pressure to have the rom com ending. Most people, if they're hooking up, are hooking up to have sexual satisfaction while they are looking for a longer term relationship, or they're not and they're really happy single and they're finding fulfillment. And that is the spaciousness and the freedom and the autonomy to do that. I love that women can choose that now. I love that women can say, I'm really happy single. This settling for someone who's not good enough for me or it doesn't suit me or it doesn't fit me, doesn't have to happen for me anymore. I can live my full self and maybe my career is more important to me or fulfilling or my friendships or my desire for travel. I love that we have options. I want the women watching this to appreciate all the options that they have. All the options that they have if they want to be single and they want to hook up, if they're looking. But in the meantime having that sexual freedom, I want them to have it all. But if what they want is this monogamy that you're talking about to find the love of their life and settle down and have two children or whatever they want, I want them to have that too.
- [22:12]
Stephen Bartlett
Deborah, can I ask, do you think that there is a cost to hookup culture and casual sex in regards to the implications it has on women, as Erica was implying, psychologically, and is that more adverse in women than men?
- [22:25]
Deborah Frances-White
I think human beings can suffer from too much choice. Like, we know that if you put 800 varieties of jam out on a supermarket shelf, people will buy less jam than if you put out eight because they get confused and they just think, oh God, I don't know none of it then. And they walk away. I think the fact that we have young people sitting in a bar on a hinge date and while that person goes to the bar, they're like, what else is out there? I think that's bad for human beings. I think that is bad for women, for men, for non binary people. That's bad for everybody.
- [23:05]
Stephen Bartlett
But this sort of sacredness, Erica was alluding to a sacredness of sex itself.
- [23:08]
Deborah Frances-White
Yes. I think that is not a thing that we are somehow finding. Women find sex more sacred than men. I.
- [23:18]
Erica Komisar
But I didn't say that women find it. I think it's sacred for men and women.
- [23:23]
Stephen Bartlett
But yeah, so you were speaking to a sort of sacredness to it. And I know, Louise, in your work you've talked about how there's different implications for men and women as it relates to casual sex.
- [23:32]
Louise Perry
So I think that hookup culture basically is better suited to the average preferences of men than of women. So the average preferences of men are more likely to be towards the having lots of partners, jumping into bed really quickly into the spectrum, basically. And this is what psychologists call sociosexuality. So men are generally more unrestricted in their sociosexuality than are women. And hookup culture favors the highly sociosexual. And actually you can see this if you look at campus dating cultures and sexual cultures, which are interesting because in a way, university campuses are almost a closed environment. You've got all these young horny people hanging out, not very much to do and like interacting with one another. And on campuses which have more men than women, so the women are the scarcer resource, basically, assuming everyone's heterosexual, right. They tend to have more, more conservative sexual cultures. So more monogamy, less hooking up, people wait longer to have sex, et cetera. On campuses where there fewer men and more women, which increasingly is true of all universities actually, because exactly you have the opposite. You have more hookup culture because basically the men are the scarce resource and they can set the terms. And men prefer more hookup culture. There are obviously exceptions. You know, this is all true. But at the population level I think that's really good evidence that actually women en masse don't like hookup culture and are actually engaging with it because they sort of have to.
- [25:03]
Deborah Frances-White
What you're talking about there is very young women who have just left home. It's their first exploration into sex. Now if you ask a 32 year old woman in London who knows her body, who knows her preferences, who knows what kind of man turns her on, who can talk about these things and communicate, and you ask her, do you regret that hookup? She'll be like, no. I was, look, you know, I worked really hard this week. I was literally looking forward to it and it was wonderful. If you ask that same woman, do you regret any of the hookups you had when you were a fresher? She'll be like, oh my God, I didn't know myself, I didn't know how to ask what I wanted. The boys were terrible at it because they didn't know themselves. I don't think universities are a great place to get this information because that is when you are literally just exploring and going, is this anything? And we're all too embarrassed to say what we want or to say how that would be like, oh, so you've got to put into that mix, boys are told you gotta get laid, you gotta get laid. As you're not cool women. Young women are told, you don't want too high body count, you're gonna get slut shamed. So you're talking about 18 year olds don't know themselves yet and you're saying when the men are scarcer resource, it's one way, women another way. That is exactly what I expect to see.
- [26:26]
Stephen Bartlett
You're talking about 18 year olds that don't know themselves yet.
- [26:29]
Louise Perry
What we are currently experiencing in our sexual culture where yes, there's some structure, yes, there are some rules, but we are much, much more sexual sexually, not just liberal, but even libertine, than say the, the sexual culture of our grandparents or whatever. I think everyone, everyone ought to be able to agree on that. There clearly is a change now in the sexual culture from previous generations and it's mostly to do with the pillow, as I argue. But the expectation is kind of, as you say, that you just have to figure it out. Like there isn't a very clear template. Yes, maybe there is. I think that, Deborah, you're actually right that most people do in the end aspire to monogamy and having children and everything. But there's also an expectation that you're supposed to experiment a bit in the meantime. And it's kind of actually weird to be a virgin on your wedding night. And I think that, yes, I mean, girls have to tread this really difficult tightrope where on the one hand they are at risk of slap shaming, but they're also at risk of being called frigid. If they're, I mean, they, they are much, much more at risk actually of being called frigid than in previous generations. And they just, I mean, the idea that we can escape from social judgment around our sexual choices is probably not realistic. I think that basically that's what humans are like. We do just tend to be judgmental about this. But anyway, I don't think it's very wise to subject girls to this experience, is how I would put it to say that you have to go through the hookup culture.
- [27:59]
Deborah Frances-White
I know people are opting out. I know young people who are absolutely opting out. They're not.
- [28:04]
Erica Komisar
I'm gonna agree with her and say freedom has become a pressure. There's become a societal pressure to be free.
- [28:09]
Deborah Frances-White
So I know many young people who are opting out of the apps who don't follow.
- [28:13]
Erica Komisar
Okay. I'm a therapist and I see so many young people and I give lectures and People come. So I can say, and I write books about adolescence and I'm going to 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. But young women, young men who are developing emotionally, mentally should not have the right. No, no, they shouldn't have. No, no, let me. Can I finish?
- [28:45]
Deborah Frances-White
Yeah, yeah, sorry.
- [28:45]
Erica Komisar
Okay, sorry. So you interrupted, so I didn't get to finish. I'm so sorry. Okay, so they're 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. But in this I say that freedom can become its own prison. So if you think about the early feminists, the really early feminists, Mary Wollstonecraft, 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. The 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, early 27 in young men is the second critical period of brain development where they are very susceptible to their relational experiences and their environment. And 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, 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.
- [31:24]
Deborah Frances-White
Can I just say, though, again to the Time Traveler 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. But 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 hookup and they feel lonely afterwards? Totally. Of course, that's happened to everyone who's ever had casual sex in any quantity, where you feel a bit like, oh, 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, with. 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. You know, normal teenagers will sit on each other's laps and just experiment a little bit, or 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, it 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. It'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 prepared at Least to marry them.
- [33:49]
Stephen Bartlett
I've got a graph here that somewhat dovetails into this conversation about when you should have sex and also marriage as a subject. And it shows that from the 1970s, in 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, I. E. The age in which we'd be getting married or having sex under Louise's, you know, potential advice that it's with.
- [34:29]
Louise Perry
Benefits 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 contraception fails and something like half of women 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. And it isn't on a physical level, not really. 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 pillow 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. And I think that's why it has to. 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, you know, 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, 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. It'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 been doing it wrong.
- [36:30]
Deborah Frances-White
Well, but we can tell. Well, it's.
- [36:32]
Erica Komisar
We could call it one of the most intimate experiences you can have as a human being.
- [36:37]
Louise Perry
And that's why rape is so bad, Right? That's why feminists are so bastardizes the.
- [36:42]
Erica Komisar
Most intimate experience by making it into, by turning it into violence.
- [36:46]
Louise Perry
Rape is worse than theft, for instance. Or rape is worse than assault, like non sexual assault. And the law recognizes that and we all socially recognize that because there is something uniquely intimate and therefore uniquely violating about having sex without consent. And 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 on other people, that it's a leisure activity. All this kind of trivializes it, right? And then also say, ah, but consent is extraordinarily important. Like, why do you not see the contradiction there?
- [37:25]
Deborah Frances-White
Autonomy. If I want it, if I want somebody. Especially penetrative sex. You're talking about rape, dating about penetrative sex. There's nothing worse than somebody inside your body violating your actual insides. Nothing worse than that. That does not mean that women do not have sexual urges. I know, I'm finished sentence. That was a lot of trouble. 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 cult, 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. If 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 had and with what variety of partners is because it gave them autonomy, it 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, or 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. That'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.
- [40:18]
Erica Komisar
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 when 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. 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. But. But sex is better with emotional connection. It doesn't mean you have to marry the first guy that you have sex with. I also want to 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 have 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 podcasts, 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. If 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. I'm 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. But, but 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 daily comings and goings of life, it's the friendship, it's the connection, it's the companionship, it' but if you've had a lot of trauma, then you are not going to turn towards relationships and you are not going to turn towards men. If men traumatized you and you saw a man abuse your mother, of course you're not going to want men in your life. So a lot of it, I think the feminist movement does something which, 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 how important male and female relationships are. I'll stop there because I've talked too much.
- [44:01]
Louise Perry
But can I say something about agency? Because this word came up earlier and I've been thinking a lot about it recently, and I just find it interesting as a subject. So I, I think that actually a better way of thinking about agency than is this binary thing that, you know, humans have agency, et cetera, is, 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. You 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 making 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 are, 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. Like, young women are very socially attuned, more than any other group. They're very alive towards high status and low status and 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, Deborah, 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. And so that's why I think just saying everyone, give 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.
- [46:27]
Deborah Frances-White
Women were less agentic before the sexual revolution. Overall, as a population, we are more agentic 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, that is 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. Do I want to let this boy touch me here or there, or this girl, you know, do this or that with me or whatever? Of course. But that's education. So they can have agency. And that's the discussions that the parents have. Ideally, the schools are having. We desperately need that.
- [47:12]
Louise Perry
That's what we're doing here, right? Or trying to.
- [47:14]
Erica Komisar
Yeah.
- [47:14]
Deborah Frances-White
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 own body, listening to my own mind, having confidants that 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, do 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 just put up with more.
- [48:16]
Erica Komisar
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. There's so much development going on in adolescence, and adolescence, 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. But 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 educ. 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 9 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 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. I 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. And not knowing why, because we are teaching sex, but we're not teaching about connection.
- [50:08]
Deborah Frances-White
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, how pleasurable, how pleasurable it can be, or that girls should be when they have their first sexual experience, ideally 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 and all of that.
- [51:02]
Erica Komisar
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? I'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 wanna go back. We wanna move forward. We wanna take the best of the highlights of the past and not leave all of the good parts of the past behind and take the good parts of the feminist movement too. But there's a lot of it that's not so good. And I'm gonna agree with Louise that there are so many young women and older women, but let's just say young women.
- [51:49]
Deborah Frances-White
Don't point at me and say older women.
- [51:50]
Erica Komisar
No, no, no, I'm old too. Older. Over 32.
- [51:54]
Deborah Frances-White
I'll admit I'm over 32, Erica, and.
- [51:56]
Erica Komisar
That'S all I can do. 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? You know, 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.
- [52:34]
Deborah Frances-White
I think we've got a causation correlation problem there. I 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.
- [53:09]
Erica Komisar
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.
- [53:16]
Deborah Frances-White
So therefore, you've got a biased set of information. The 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 is probably one of the unhappiest people, you know, because they're going is. Is all there is, you 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 mountain to talk to a guru because they're like, well, I was hoping that I'd be super successful and wealthy and 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.
- [54:26]
Erica Komisar
So I actually think what does bear out is that human beings universally from birth, crave security. We know that they 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 want to have. Absolutely. I think there's a lot of women who feel bullied by this narrative of freedom. They feel bullied by it. And listen, I hear it in my practice, I see it online on my, you know, my Instagram following and people writing. And 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. 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 are amazing and admire them for it. And what I know is that there's a lot of young women and. 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, you know, freedom without any limits.
- [56:26]
Deborah Frances-White
If women feel bullied by freedom, I feel like they should try the alternative. I still feel the predominant narrative is the rom com 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. Now, 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 rom 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 girls school. It's a state school, but a very, very high end one in London in 2018 when we were all out marching in the street, the women's March. Recently 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, 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 20, in 2018, 2019. Around that time they were saying, no slut shaming, listen to your body. They weren't saying run around and 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, I'm going to meet people and make meaningful relationships and some of those will be friendships. They are now talking manosphere talk.
- [58:18]
Stephen Bartlett
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- [60:46]
Erica Komisar
Yeah.
- [60:47]
Stephen Bartlett
So how do these ideas come together and also link in and parlay into this word Manosphere? Because this subject of manosphere has been at the very forefront of conversation.
- [60:56]
Erica Komisar
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. I mean, what we need to do is not go back, but come to the middle. We need to. It just makes common sense.
- [61:17]
Deborah Frances-White
How are we dominating men, though?
- [61:18]
Erica Komisar
Oh, my goodness. 60% of college students are women and graduate students stop dominating women. No, let 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. The women's movement, those women had to go to extremes because to change society you have to do that.
- [62:15]
Deborah Frances-White
Right, so should some women not go to university? Is that what you're saying?
- [62:20]
Erica Komisar
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.
- [62:51]
Stephen Bartlett
I'm just gonna jump in there and talk about a report that came out in 2025 which sent shockwaves 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 center of Social justice which highlighted how many young men are now struggling in school, facing increased mental health problems and LAC lacking positive role models, leaving them lost and isolated. And as a result, they said, 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 manosphere includes websites and discussion groups focused on men's rights, which often oppose feminism in some way. And just to give a sort of a top line look at some of the stats around this, by age 5, 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. They're 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 1624 were not in education, compared to 11% of women, which equates in the UK to about 550,000 men. And lastly, young women are between the age of 16 and 24, now earn nearly 10% more than their male peers, 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 firstborn 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 play 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? And is this a clue as to why we now have this term manosphere?
- [64:45]
Erica Komisar
It's a reaction. Manosphere is a reaction to the pendulum swinging too far. The pendulum needed to swing, for sure.
- [64:53]
Louise Perry
I slightly disagree. So I think I spoke at the beginning about the sexual revolution being two things. So one is the ideological thing, which we've spoken about quite a lot, and the other is material changes, which no one designed really like, this wasn't coordinated by anyone. This just happened. This is just how 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. I 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 lot of work which has flourished in this era to say, service sector work or working in education and things 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. And 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. And there are feminists who cheer that on. But that's not basically, that's a. 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 apace, we should expect to see the same sort of social effects happening that this, this when you change how people earn their money, and particularly when we're talking about people matching up like 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 there actually aren't that many of those men and that 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. Fault. It's just what's happened.
- [67:23]
Deborah Frances-White
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. Like 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.
- [67:44]
Stephen Bartlett
Deborah, can I ask to that point then on that partnership as a man, I still kind of assume that a woman is more likely to choose me if I have more money than her 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. And when they did, they did this, this big. I think it's about 70%. I'll put the right stat 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% 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.
- [68:35]
Erica Komisar
There's a reason for that, though. So what we haven't talked about. Can we talk about children now?
- [68:39]
Stephen Bartlett
Sure.
- [68:40]
Deborah Frances-White
We can talk about whatever you like.
- [68:43]
Erica Komisar
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 members. My 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, you know, and I'd be fine with that, but that's what teamwork is. But the idea that I could lean on my husband financially in those years and not not have to earn money and be able to be present for my children, there 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. 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.
- [70:11]
Stephen Bartlett
And you're saying the mother should be.
- [70:12]
Erica Komisar
There in those opening years, the primary attachment figure, who's usually the mother. Daycare is terrible for children. Let'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, from 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. So 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 held 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. That 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 soothed you when you were in distress from moment to moment, it regulates your emotions. So it's only after 3, 85% of the right brain is developed by 3. It's only after 3 that you internalize the start, internalize the ability to regulate your own emotions or to deal with stress and adversity in the future.
- [72:12]
Stephen Bartlett
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.
- [72:21]
Erica Komisar
It 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 pronatalist. You don't have to have children to be happy. You can, you know, build businesses, build houses, have loving, intimate relationships, not have children. But if you're going to have children, you need to know that driving, dropping and running, putting them in daycare, or now let's talk about very poor women because 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 else. Secondly, a single surrogate caregiver, a babysitter, a 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 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 second wave of feminism. They said put your babies in daycare, it's the only way you're going to 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 Wollstonecraft, 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. That was the beginning of the tide. That's when the tide turned for women where the narrative changed. 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.
- [75:56]
Deborah Frances-White
So can I ask you genuinely want to know what baby boomers tended to be raised by stay at home mothers. Because financial world was totally different then. Like you know, we're not. 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 boiler's 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. It's a real problem that the NHS is so understaffed.
- [76:47]
Erica Komisar
Various reasons for that in America too.
- [76:48]
Deborah Frances-White
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. Now, when I heard you talk on Steven'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 and Erica, there is no hope for a second home now for anyone. And I understand that's different. The generation was different.
- [77:29]
Erica Komisar
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. And we're not discussing those solutions.
- [77:40]
Deborah Frances-White
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 some.
- [77:49]
Erica Komisar
There are some.
- [77:50]
Deborah Frances-White
Well and great. They should.
- [77:52]
Erica Komisar
Slovenia, Hungary There are some.
- [77:55]
Deborah Frances-White
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. I don't think it has to be a mother, but I feel like there's lots and lots of parents who would love, 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, you know, 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.
- [78:27]
Erica Komisar
Yeah, there's books written about it.
- [78:28]
Deborah Frances-White
Oh my God, you go back into the financial district, you've negotiated with a toddler for three years.
- [78:32]
Erica Komisar
That's right.
- [78:33]
Deborah Frances-White
Step inside.
- [78:34]
Erica Komisar
Absolutely.
- [78:35]
Deborah Frances-White
And yet often that is not recognized. Women are pushed out of the workforce. So 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.
- [78:52]
Erica Komisar
And I'm from America, where we don't have any paid leave at all.
- [78:56]
Deborah Frances-White
Absolutely.
- [78:57]
Erica Komisar
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.
- [79:06]
Stephen Bartlett
What are your thoughts on this, Louise, in terms of the role that feminism has had on mothers, Mothers and motherhood.
- [79:12]
Louise Perry
And someone in the trenches. So we, I mean, I should say I. Partly as a consequence of reading Erica's work and also having you on my podcast, we have moved heaven and earth to not put our children in daycare, which has involved quite a lot of like, creative thinking and we are poorer than we would otherwise have been, you know, and people look at us like we're crazy sometimes and think, why? Why have you made your life so complicated? And it's because me and my husband both have this really special long 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 turn of the millennium seem to have cottoned on to the fact that they can use women to boost gdp. And David Goodhart, who's a friend and author, 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 sexual 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 in daycare, that's pretty new. And governments like this because governments like women paying taxes. And I think that to some extent, some, should we say, 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 find it really, really hard. And it's a very common thing in mums groups and on social media and so on. Women thinking, I do not want to leave my boy.
- [80:59]
Erica Komisar
66% of women and new people, okay, want to stay home if they bring.
- [81:03]
Louise Perry
Right or want to work, stay home more yeah. 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 than 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, so that it would channel women back into the workforce after they'd had children. I also don't like the fact that the only setup that's available in terms of getting any kind of funding from the government is for daycare. You can't put money towards a nanny, you can't put money towards having your, a grandparent or an aunt or something. You have no 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're being channeled in that direction by economic forces, which I object to.
- [82:04]
Deborah Frances-White
But I don't think that's, that's to call it a feminist policy. It feels like guilting women twice. What I said at the top about relieving women from this emotional burden of guilt, I feel like if that's a, that's a cap. An unregulated capitalist policy, that is not a feminist policy.
- [82:20]
Erica Komisar
I think what she, which 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. I don't know.
- [82:32]
Louise Perry
Yeah, well, and also 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. I could list loads. There are some women who are more temperamentally inclined to work full time, who don't like being stay at home mums, who find it boring, frustrating, whatever it is.
- [83:09]
Deborah Frances-White
Can I ask you a question, Stephen?
- [83:10]
Stephen Bartlett
Go ahead.
- [83:11]
Deborah Frances-White
Would you take a three year career break? Would you be able to do that?
- [83:15]
Stephen Bartlett
Would I be able to take a.
- [83:17]
Deborah Frances-White
Three year break emotionally, mentally?
- [83:19]
Stephen Bartlett
So I would be. It's possible. But my. Would that be my choice? No, it's obviously possible. Because I have the means to. So I'm a different person. I'm a slightly more privileged person to ask, but would I want to take three years off my career, stop doing this, to solely raise children? I would. I would not want to.
- [83:40]
Deborah Frances-White
You would struggle. And. And the thing is, men aren't expected to.
- [83:45]
Erica Komisar
So we have different nurturing hormones. We have a biology that's really different.
- [83:49]
Deborah Frances-White
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.
- [84:09]
Louise Perry
But men and women are different.
- [84:10]
Erica Komisar
They are different.
- [84:11]
Louise Perry
Stephen 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 environment.
- [84:19]
Deborah Frances-White
I just don't want to go back to men are from Mars and women are from Venus.
- [84:22]
Erica Komisar
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. 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 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. And so what we know is that oxytocin is passed back and forth between babies and right brain to right brain connection. Oxytocin makes mothers sensitive, empathic nurturers. 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. Fathers 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. Wait, listen. When there was a rustling of leaves outside the window, the father woke up and the mother slept through it. Because of the predatorial 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 and 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, empathic nurturer. 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 if you're not admitting that he's different than a mother.
- [86:47]
Louise Perry
We are different with exceptions. It's not a little bit different. It's not Mena from Mars, women from Venus, it's overlapping balance curves. So there are outliers. But at the population level, which is what we're talking about, you have to acknowledge that there are differences.
- [87:00]
Stephen Bartlett
Did you say that, what was that number you cited? 66% of women would like the opportunity to be able to stay at home.
- [87:06]
Erica Komisar
That's a UK figure, 60% in America, 66% in the UK.
- [87:10]
Louise Perry
I don't know the numbers on men, but I would guess that it's really low. And I know that there are other statistics around when fathers aren't earning that can cause. I mean, it's kind of difficult too because there are obviously confounding factors. Maybe fathers aren't earning 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 a 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, like some inconvenient problem. I 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.
- [88:05]
Deborah Frances-White
So you're, 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 Stephen holds his baby and nurtures it and thinks, bloody hell, I'm going to take a year off because I can afford to and 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. As if I were a mother, what I should do or what Steven should do as a father.
- [88:46]
Louise Perry
But what about policy? So like 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 daycare, they will not give you money for being a stay home parent, et cetera. That's a policy choice and we can't be neutral about that. We have to decide are we going to incentivise one thing or another. In practice, it's fantastical to say we just need to give people as many choices as possible. It's not how humans work and it's not how societies work, 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 Trap. 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 too, like 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 feed your children, you know, as we were talking to about, is because banks started giving mortgages based on two incomes and it became possible to. This crucial legal change in Britain happened in the 1990s. Similar elsewhere, basically, instead of just borrowing against the father's income, you were borrowing against both incomes. And then all of a sudden house 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. This is a really good example of why you can't just think at the individual level. It would be really easy to say, well, just give women choices to deal with them. Fine. 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 stay at home 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 agentic.
- [90:53]
Deborah Frances-White
But also, can you, can you live on an Etsy shop and 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.
- [91:03]
Louise Perry
I agree.
- [91:04]
Deborah Frances-White
And allow this. And we need corporations to say, 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 carer to have windows outside where they get fed emotionally, intellectually, creative, 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. But 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 hates you anyway. And it's hard, hard work.
- [91:50]
Erica Komisar
But 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. We are producing women and men who are pussies. And I'll tell you what I mean by that. They cannot deal with discomfort, they 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 going to 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. It'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 own needs and desires and self orientation and narcissistic sort of wishes, then listen, listen, listen. Then we have 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 because 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. But if you're going to have children, you need to care for them and they're your responsibility.
- [94:28]
Deborah Frances-White
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 9 year old and the other had two small ones. The idea that that woman is not 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. They are trying so hard and this world is becoming more and more and more and more and more fraught with inequality. That nurse 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 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.
- [95:33]
Erica Komisar
I think we're asking too much of.
- [95:34]
Deborah Frances-White
Women, evidently, but to say that that used the word narcissist because she's going to do her job.
- [95:41]
Erica Komisar
I 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 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. A narcissistic disorder means you were neglected as a child, and you form 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.
- [96:36]
Stephen Bartlett
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 Uber driver?
- [96:49]
Deborah Frances-White
I was saying that, like, that's sometimes the experience. It's not just all roses and happiness and joy. So therefore. Or you need something outside for your headspace. 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.
- [97:12]
Stephen Bartlett
So to that point, and then also to the point about narcissism and individualism, what are your thoughts here?
- [97:17]
Louise Perry
I'm primarily angry with politicians. Okay. In terms of making the life of, say, this nurse really difficult, unnecessarily. So the 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. It's also very old. It didn't start in the 1960s. But Eric is 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 you've got. If you're ideologically committed to the idea of gender sameness, underplaying the differences, the biological differences between men and women, sometimes called biological determinism, then 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 bits and bobs. 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. And 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.
- [98:57]
Deborah Frances-White
Right.
- [98:57]
Louise Perry
Basically enjoying hookups without any real emotional connection. And I think that's a real trap for feminism, is to assume that women should want to be as much like men as possible.
- [99:09]
Erica Komisar
Even women's bodies, even if you look at teenage girls bodies, they all aspire to be like adolescent boys. You know, they don't want breasts, they don't want hips. They want to be right? So it is. It's almost as if we elevated in a funny way, feminists were trying to reject patriarchy, but they ended up 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.
- [99:35]
Louise Perry
And I think what maternal feminine 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, policy, education, whatever, which prizes that.
- [99:56]
Erica Komisar
And how much do you see women elevated who are mothers? I mean, do you. 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. 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. And 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 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? What 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.
- [101:25]
Deborah Frances-White
I feel totally the opposite. That's 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. I 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 someone will say, oh, you're a stay at home mom. And I, 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. Men tend 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.
- [102:14]
Erica Komisar
We agree on that.
- [102:16]
Stephen Bartlett
Have we got a. You said something there which links to the next thing I wanted to talk about, which is if we don't correct this in some way, we're not going to have mothers. When we look at the Birth rates and the fertility rates.
- [102:26]
Erica Komisar
60% 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 wave of feminism. Women were historically, for millennium, the caretakers of a community. The community leaders, they would check on the elderly, they would feed the poor, they would take care of the children, right? 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. Now, not everybody's meant to be a caretaker. But the point is, once we lose that linchpin, the society degrades the ecosystem. It degrades.
- [103:42]
Deborah Frances-White
Is it our job to be down at the soup kitchen and checking on the elderly neighbors? Surely that's the community's job. We should raise our sons and daughters to do that. All children should be raised to check on. It's not women's job. I work in a writer's room at the moment, and I love it. And I am not less good in the room than any man. 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, like, go to a soup kitchen and then check on a neighbor and check on the graphic, while men still get to go into the writer's room and create an animated feature film like it was in the film 50s or the 60s, or even the 70s or the 80s or the damn 90s. Let's be honest, I 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 that my role is checking on the elderly neighbor, and the man's role is to go and write the exciting movie. And that's not the counterpart.
- [104:39]
Louise Perry
Men do pro social things too. They don't just write TV shows. They fight fire, they earn money, they chop wood. I mean, I'm Being really.
- [104:47]
Deborah Frances-White
But I'm talking about what Erica was saying about the unpaid labor of checking.
- [104:51]
Louise Perry
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 talked about the manosphere earlier, is that gender roles contain both privileges and responsibilities, both of them. So men do 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 backbreaking labor. You know, there are all sorts of hard things that men are expected to do in 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, gentlemanly men being deferential to women. There's this cognitive bias called the women are 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. So 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. This is a touchy word, but maybe this is narcissistic, autistic, 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 the breadwinner for their families or to do difficult work or to risk their safety doing anything. And 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, like, 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 of both sexes.
- [107:12]
Erica Komisar
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. It's unpaid work. And because. Because we focus so much in 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. You know, I mean, my kids always say, again, I'm gonna get a lot of hell 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 is not a fair place. But that'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. But if I were going to say, my one goal out of this podcast would be to help people understand that we have denigrated may be 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 is 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. So why aren't we admiring the women who are staying home and doing that hard work and having those boring moments?
- [109:17]
Deborah Frances-White
Deborah, 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 into.
- [109:35]
Erica Komisar
In.
- [109:36]
Deborah Frances-White
In the way that we live in a capitalist society and if we don't put a value on it, or we don't create tax breaks around it, or, you know, have child endowment around it, we then say it's not important. So I, I absolutely agree with all of that. I do not agree that women, we pull. Feminism pulled a linchpin out when it said women. Women shouldn't have to be the ones that, that visit the neighbor and do all the unpaid labor around in the community. I think that should be. Unpaid labor in the community is important, but that's 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 too. I've heard from both of you, even though we agree on many things, feminism really did a number on us, or feminism pulled a lynchping, or it's feminism's fault. Without feminism, none of us would be around this table because Steven wouldn't value our voices.
- [110:49]
Erica Komisar
Absolutely.
- [110:50]
Deborah Frances-White
Like in the nicest possible way. If you were a man in the 50s, would you invite three women on effectively, like a TV, radio show, whatever media was available, 100% of all.
- [111:00]
Erica Komisar
It's why I said feminism did a lot of good, but it went too far. And so 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.
- [111:16]
Deborah Frances-White
But why is it feminism not going too far and capitalism not accommodating and our governments not accommodating the new world that we live in that is obviously better for women. None of us could get a credit card hard a couple of deck. A few decades ago, conjugal rape was still legal in this country till like what, I don't know. You would know better than me than like the 90s, something like that. Naughties, technically in case 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. How can we do both?
- [112:22]
Erica Komisar
I agree with that.
- [112:23]
Deborah Frances-White
I feel when you keep saying, well, feminism did this. Feminism this. At this time, this is. This is. We gotta 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 faith czar at the White House, saying it's God's arrangement that women be in subjection to men. I have lived that. I 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 us those clips. They take those clips, they go. See, women are saying feminism.
- [113:18]
Erica Komisar
So I think the idea is, I believe in maternal feminism, where all women are respected, whether they work at home or they work outside the home.
- [113:26]
Stephen Bartlett
Luis.
- [113:27]
Louise Perry
So I think that is exactly why we need to be thinking about maternal feminism. Because if, basically, if feminism cannot reproduce itself, literally, if it is the case that a feminist society is a very, very low fertility society which has no. Which does not respect motherhood, which discourages women from having children because it limits your freedom, et cetera, then feminism dies out. Feminist societies die out. They wither 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. Within low fertility 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. And the thing is that all of this stuff is at least to some extent heritable. People are, to 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, the current trajectory, while we're kind of arguing about the rights and wrongs of this stuff, the current trajectories for our societies become much more consistent, conservative. And that's what the birth rates phenomenon spells for everyone. And I mean, I, and I genuinely think, as someone who likes being able to have my own bank account and vote and whatever, I actually have choices. 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.
- [115:23]
Stephen Bartlett
Deborah. We need a fertile feminism. According to Louise.
- [115:26]
Deborah Frances-White
Listen, I'm as barren as fuck, 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 think this was probably the better thing for me. But all the feminists, 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. I don't recognize this, guys. I don't recognize it. I feel like I go on marches, feminist marches in London. There's children everywhere.
- [116:07]
Louise Perry
Secular progressive people are so, so below replacement just on the data.
- [116:13]
Stephen Bartlett
How do you respond to. I'm talking about that we're gonna run out of these people if they don't start having kids.
- [116:17]
Deborah Frances-White
I mean, makes. There's probably reasons for it. Like, if you're more progressive, you're more aware of climate change, you're more, you're less, 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? If you have a vision of the world that God's going to save everything and you, you know, you 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.
- [116:52]
Stephen Bartlett
Do we need to be having more children, though?
- [116:53]
Deborah Frances-White
Because my, my concern about it is, is what are we having them for? If the world is getting more difficult to live in, if it's. 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 and not being able to balance parenthood and feeling very stressed and, you know, the manosphere is rising and it's boys are so depressed and girls feel like this and all of that. What are we having it? 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 all the time. But what are we doing it for?
- [117:38]
Stephen Bartlett
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 diary of a sea. 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 iPad when I'm recording the conversation. We have clips we've never released. We 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 join before it closes. So if you want to join our private close community, head to the link in the description below or go to doac circle.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 the with? Every single guest on the diary of a CEO has left behind a question in this diary. And 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 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. I'll put a link to the conversation cards in the description below and you can get yours@thediary.com I want to talk about one last subject, which is the subject of pornography.
- [119:29]
Louise Perry
You left this for the end. Cool.
- [119:31]
Stephen Bartlett
Yeah, I just, 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.
- [119:43]
Deborah Frances-White
I would say there is, 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 in society.
- [120:04]
Stephen Bartlett
So do you think porn is a net negative for society?
- [120:10]
Deborah Frances-White
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.
- [120:15]
Stephen Bartlett
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.
- [120:28]
Deborah Frances-White
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 weren't kicking it out. But there is no. Before we had porn, people always drew things.
- [120:43]
Erica Komisar
Can I say that when it was two dimensional, when you had. When boys had 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 two dimensional isn't as powerful as the, I guess, video. Video. I mean, I'm saying films. Yeah.
- [121:02]
Louise Perry
Modern porn is a super stimulus.
- [121:04]
Erica Komisar
Yeah.
- [121:04]
Louise Perry
It's a completely different. It's not like real action is not saucy murals in Pompeii. Right. It's designed to be incredibly stimulating, like in. And it's very clever, actually. Like the way that the porn platforms work is really. It's a clever product. And we're talking about unregulated capitalism. Like, this is the preeminent 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 eat junk food. Then it becomes less attractive to eat vegetables or whatever. Like it's. It's not like playboy of the 50s.
- [122:06]
Erica Komisar
Because it left Room for fantasy. There's no imagination. I mean, it's so explicit that it leaves no room for fantasy. Even your own fantasy.
- [122:13]
Stephen Bartlett
And is it harming men as well, Louise?
- [122:15]
Louise Perry
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, not least, one of the things that is certainly anecdotally a massive problem with compulsive porn use is erectile 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.
- [122:33]
Stephen Bartlett
If I put the button in front of you, like I said to Deborah, would you press it?
- [122:36]
Deborah Frances-White
Yeah, of course I would.
- [122:37]
Stephen Bartlett
Trend porn forever.
- [122:38]
Louise Perry
Of course I would. Porn is all bad for not least the porn force. I mean, even just on that basis. In the same way that I would ban some hideously unethical industry that 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. The most promiscuous woman in Australia, that onlyfans model, who just last week had sex with 583 men in one day and was hospitalized 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. I cannot understand how feminists could endorse it. I just can't. It's one of my strongest opinions.
- [123:15]
Deborah Frances-White
Can you. Would you ban saucy murals in Pompeii?
- [123:19]
Louise Perry
I can't, no.
- [123:21]
Deborah Frances-White
No, you can't ban anything. So would you? But. But there's the bottom. Saucy murals in Pompeii, which, by the way, is number five.
- [123:29]
Erica Komisar
They're two. They're two dimensional. I don't mind two dimensional. It's funny. I don't mind two dimensional 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 two dimensional, and maybe they would be considered art.
- [123:51]
Stephen Bartlett
So you would press the button to end the three dimensional porn.
- [123:53]
Erica Komisar
Porn, yeah.
- [123:54]
Stephen Bartlett
And you wouldn't press the button?
- [123:56]
Deborah Frances-White
I mean, I just think the button's right there.
- [123:59]
Stephen Bartlett
What'd you do? You can press it. No one's watching.
- [124:00]
Deborah Frances-White
Okay. The wholesome couple who were really into each other. Other. I thought this is modeling something that I think is very healthy. People doing violent things to women. And like hentai porn, which I discovered in my research, which is animated Porn with, like, Lolita style, 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.
- [124:28]
Erica Komisar
But.
- [124:29]
Deborah Frances-White
But, you know, if you would press the button to get rid of the saucy murals in Pompeii, then it's kind of erasing human sexuality, I think. And I don't know, would you or not, Would you leave those up as a sort of little racy artifact?
- [124:44]
Stephen Bartlett
What would you do?
- [124:45]
Erica Komisar
Louise?
- [124:45]
Louise Perry
I think you wouldn't put it up in a schoolroom. I mean, like, I think everyone accepts that even that really mild stuff needs to be like, what about limited? If not. If not, it needs to be limited, if not legally, then socially.
- [124:58]
Deborah Frances-White
What about Statue of David? What about just the naked Form?
- [125:03]
Louise Perry
No, I would not ban that. But, Deborah, I think that this is a rhetorical trick to avoid the fact that this is the least feminist industry we can conceptualize. And a lot of feminists have really dropped the ball on this and have actually decided to prioritize their own. 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, children's too. What we're arguing about is over how to do that. And that's an argument that's gonna go on forever and has gone on forever. And I think it's good we 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?
- [125:54]
Stephen Bartlett
Why does it make you angry and what part of it makes you angry?
- [125:57]
Louise Perry
As it relates to feminism, it possibly is partly from having worked with victims, I think. But I guess it's the. I guess it's the dishonesty. I just don't like. I'm not accusing of being dishonest, but I just think that this ideology is just so rude, driven with contradictions.
- [126:16]
Stephen Bartlett
Where did feminism drop the ball in.
- [126:19]
Louise Perry
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. You know, I think that one of the, one of the perennial problems with feminism is that the women who tend to sort of rise the to top and get media careers, I do realize I'm in this category, are not representative of other women and will often have preferences that are very different, which are just not shared by everyone else.
- [126:52]
Stephen Bartlett
I want to ask you 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. And how does that sort of contradict or how is that in harmony with our evolutionary nature?
- [127:26]
Louise Perry
So starting with Louise, I think that the key task that every society has to set itself is how to young men in particular have this incredible energy that can be put to good things and to bad. Like the, the greatest discoveries in the world have overwhelmingly been made by young men. And young men also commit the vast majority of violence. Right. It's this, 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? Like how do we, how do we correctly channel that in a way that's pro social and antisocial? And I don't think our society is doing an especially 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 eras. 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.
- [128:28]
Stephen Bartlett
What about the provider protector, procreator narrative? Scott Galloway's talked about that men should aspire to be providers, protectors, procreators. Is that accurate?
- [128:35]
Louise Perry
Yeah, that sounds about right. Yeah. I mean, I've written about CAD and dad mode as well. Like how do we encourage men to reject CAD mode and embrace dad mode?
- [128:44]
Stephen Bartlett
What is CAD mode?
- [128:45]
Erica Komisar
I like that. A cad, you know, oh, he's a cad. Kind of a jerk.
- [128:48]
Deborah Frances-White
Old fashioned word for a man who would sweep in on a motorbike or a cart boy?
- [128:55]
Louise Perry
Yes. I wasn't gonna say that, but yeah.
- [129:00]
Stephen Bartlett
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?
- [129:09]
Louise Perry
I think chivalry is great. I think that rejecting chivalry was a mistake.
- [129:13]
Stephen Bartlett
Okay.
- [129:14]
Louise Perry
But also, it's not the most important masculine virtue. I mean, most of the virtues should be demonstrated by both sides, you know, honesty or whatever. But there are some which I think maybe men need to focus on more and women need to focus on more. And I certainly with raising my boys, who are very little at the moment, but 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.
- [129:41]
Stephen Bartlett
In what way? Give me an example of a masculine virtue you're trying to bring out.
- [129:44]
Louise Perry
Like this question about what to do about 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 basically teaching young men how to sublimate and regulate and channel effectively those feelings of aggression in a way that is constructive and not destructive.
- [130:04]
Stephen Bartlett
Deborah, how do you agree. Disagree with that perception?
- [130:09]
Deborah Frances-White
That's not at all my worldview. I think we should be teaching our children to find their humanity and their empathy, no matter their gender. When I researched my book, Six Conversations We're Scared to Have, I thought that it was going to show me that the Internet and especially social media made us less and less empathetic. You know, we think about keyboard warriors and they can't see 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. It is for us to nurture our boys to make sure if they're feeling lost or they're feeling that they. They can't compete or they're out in the world. And they. They're flailing around. We need to build them up. We do not need to tell girls to step back. That is, we've. We haven't got equality yet. We know we're near it. Much less pulling ourselves back to make more space for boys at this point, more. We desperately need to invest in our brothers, in our. 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. And I said to them, what would be weird if a boy did it for no reason? Like, there's no. And one of them said, knitting. He said, if I brought my knitting to school, he said, you know, not that he knitted. 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.
- [132:05]
Stephen Bartlett
Are 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 all agree with that from birth. So do they need to be raised differently to cater to that difference?
- [132:21]
Deborah Frances-White
I 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.
- [132:50]
Stephen Bartlett
Should a man, a young boy, be a provider, a procreator, a protector? Should we instill those values in young boys?
- [132:57]
Deborah Frances-White
No.
- [132:58]
Stephen Bartlett
Why?
- [133:00]
Deborah Frances-White
Because there's this heavy imposition on boys and there's a heavy imposition on girls that their life should look a certain way. And 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.
- [133:33]
Stephen Bartlett
So what does a 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. Should I be paying that bill on the first day?
- [133:46]
Deborah Frances-White
I think it's lovely when all human beings hold doors open behind them for other human beings. Beings. I. I really disagree that we should not. When we issued chivalry, 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. 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 man, sweet, sexualized. So we said no. Now, I think, look, honestly, if a man holds a door open for me, very. That's very nice. Whatever. I 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. 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 gender.
- [134:40]
Stephen Bartlett
Steve, is there 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 are more attractive to women? So if I don't sort of invest in becoming a provider as a young man, I'm actually going to do much worse when I get older? According to some of the data we referenced earlier, 250% less women are going to opt for me. So if I. I don't sort of build a base and become a provider, am I. Am I going to be a disadvantage as a man in the society that we live in? But also if we look back through our evolutionary history, is that not hard coded into us?
- [135:19]
Deborah Frances-White
Makes me feel so sad that boys feel this huge responsibility when we are now at a point when it is. It is evident that you do Dragons Den. You sit next to Deborah, me, and. Who's every bit as good an entrepreneur as you.
- [135:34]
Erica Komisar
You.
- [135:35]
Deborah Frances-White
So why is it your responsibility? Why is it men's responsibility? We can both raise children. We can both. We've. We've demonstrated we can both raise children. I've got friends, but we. Let's reshape it. Let raise your children to think differently and reshape it.
- [135:51]
Stephen Bartlett
Is the society we live in a consequence of our evolutionary survival of the fittest natural Selection, Pick a good partner so that you can reproduce past. And you know, you see this in women, where I watching this dating show called Pop the Balloon, which I love, which has just gone to Netflix. And it's so crazy that when so basically pop the balloon is 10 men stand in a line with a balloon, or 10 women stand in line with a balloon, and then a man or woman walks out. So when a woman walks out and she looks at the lineup, she will go down the lineup and pop every balloon of a man that's below 6ft tall. Just like that. It's crazy. Every and just they'll say, why did you pop his balloon small? Why do you publish being short, short, short, short, short. This is just part of.
- [136:31]
Deborah Frances-White
It's so destructive though. Like, look, we can talk about evolution, but I've seen David Attenborough shows where our shared ancestors who are primates, are ripping each other apart. A chimp comes up and they rip the 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 herself doesn't do that.
- [136:56]
Stephen Bartlett
Are we, Are we fighting against. I remember hearing someone on the podcast tell me that across, across cultures, men and women typically go for the same thing. So like, men are going for a certain hip ratio, whatever, and women are going for a certain like shoulder ratio. Are these things not like, fundamentally evolutionary?
- [137:12]
Deborah Frances-White
It's a status symbols, like, my husband's shorter than me. It's a state.
- [137:15]
Stephen Bartlett
And status is an evolutionary desire.
- [137:18]
Deborah Frances-White
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, that, that these are the, these superficial things aren't 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 here in history have had different beauty standards. And men tend to go for the beauty standard of the time they're in or the location they're in. And therefore it is so social. It's, hey, that one means that you're a successful guy.
- [137:53]
Stephen Bartlett
In no way evolutionary in your mind.
- [137:55]
Deborah Frances-White
I think if it is evolutionary, get over it, get past it, get beyond it.
- [138:00]
Louise Perry
Good luck.
- [138:01]
Erica Komisar
What do you think I'm gonna say?
- [138:02]
Stephen Bartlett
I don't know. I have no idea.
- [138:04]
Erica Komisar
I disagree with almost everything she said. So boys are neurologically more fragile than 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 distractibility. They'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 when it comes to going, 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 going to 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 going to keep functioning that way To a certain extent there may be some people who branch off and try to do it differently. The other thing is that young men today are not. They're at a disadvantage when it comes to school. And I'm going to 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. You can't have all the same kind of kid. But the idea that we have to balance the odds otherwise 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 lay to.
- [140:30]
Deborah Frances-White
So which girls shouldn't go though it's.
- [140:32]
Erica Komisar
Not which girls shouldn't go, it'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. Then 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, others. So all I'm saying is we need to balance the odds. That's it.
- [141:25]
Deborah Frances-White
Well, you have to make more spaces.
- [141:27]
Erica Komisar
Because if 60, maybe that's the solution.
- [141:30]
Deborah Frances-White
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 if there's less funding?
- [141:42]
Erica Komisar
I'm not great at math, but I'll say we can have 60 and 60. I don't mind 120.
- [141:48]
Louise Perry
Okay.
- [141:51]
Stephen Bartlett
Thank you all so much for being here. I just want to give you an opportunity just to summarise your thoughts on the sexual revolution in two sentences, if you can.
- [141:58]
Louise Perry
I'm going to repeat the insight of a great friend of mine, Mary Harrington, who's 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 changes, 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 of the digital revolution. So, so much has changed. So much is in flux. We're having this, like, renegotiation of how men and women are supposed to relate to one another. And this always happens. And I think that it's, it's good to talk about it. And one way or another, men and women are going to have to learn to get along long because otherwise we might reproduce the species.
- [142:44]
Erica Komisar
Erika 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. If 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 put 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.
- [143:29]
Louise Perry
You practice.
- [143:31]
Deborah Frances-White
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 a hundred years ago. We must fight for them. And I think everything is better when women are free. I think we can create our own structures 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 and that the next stage is to work together. Because if we divide as women and as feminists, there is no hope.
- [144:49]
Erica Komisar
Hope.
- [144:49]
Deborah Frances-White
There is so much coming our way from the far right, Christian nationalists. We must stand together.
- [144:56]
Stephen Bartlett
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 and echo chambers. So everyone's belief just ends up being reinforced, just confirmation bias, just doubles down on whatever you think. And it's not easy, easy to step into these environments when there's going to be people watching this that sit on different sides of this table in terms of their perspective. So 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. I mean, there's so many that I can't even put them all on the table or hold them all. But I'm going to link all of the books below. So if you want to 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. I'm going to link all of them below for you. And where else can we find you, Louise? Where's the best place to hear more from you about what you think?
- [145:55]
Louise Perry
So I have a podcast called Mademo Matriarch. Mmm. You can find it on YouTube or the other podcast platforms. I've had Erica on before. Maybe a Deborah anytime. You're 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.
- [146:17]
Stephen Bartlett
I'll link that below as well.
- [146:18]
Erica Komisar
Erika. Www.comisar K-O-M I s a r.com you can find everything I do on there. You can make an appointment with me cause I do virtual appointments. And I also started a nonprofit called Detachment Circles, which is an educational platform, but a community building platform.
- [146:36]
Louise Perry
So.
- [146:36]
Erica Komisar
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.
- [146:45]
Stephen Bartlett
I'll include that. Boswell and Deborah.
- [146:48]
Deborah Frances-White
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+ rights. And 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@greatlyfeminist.com and you will get the occasional email about the shows we're doing. But also Road to Gilead grassroots projects coming up.
- [147:34]
Stephen Bartlett
I shall link all of that below too. Thank you so much. This is a very long conversation, but it's exactly what I was hoping it would be. And I. I found my opinion shifting and changing throughout. So that's success for me. The Diary of a SEO is brought to you by Progressive Insur. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy. Just drop in some details about yourself and see if you're eligible to save money. When you bundle your home and auto policies, the process only takes minutes and it could mean hundreds more in your pocket. Visit progressive.com after this episode to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.