Was the Sexual Revolution A Failed Experiment? Louise Perry Makes Her Case

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.7 • 855 Ratings

🗓️ 12 September 2022

⏱️ 96 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Louise Perry is just thirty-years-old, but she's written a book that's poised to take the wind out of more than half a century of feminist activism. The Case Against The Sexual Revolution: A New Guide To Sex in the 21st Century is a manifesto of sorts. But it's also a carefully researched, deeply considered interrogation into whether the sexual liberation movement was really as good for women as is commonly assumed. In this conversation, Louise explains why she thinks the feminist movement's disregard for certain fundamental differences between men and women—not to mention its glossing over issues around motherhood— led to unintended consequences that few are willing to acknowledge. She also talks about the effects of pornography, the brutal inequities of the dating economy, whether the tech economy has rendered physical strength less valuable in the workplace, and whether being a mother is fundamentally incompatible with being an individual.

Guest Bio:

Louise Perry is a writer and activist based in London. This year she co-founded a non-partisan feminist think tank called The Other Half, where she serves as Research Director. Her debut book is The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The thing that I find really interesting about BDSM is that it is presented very often as being
0:08.5	subversive, even being kind of queer in some way, like it's messing with gender or this like,
0:15.6	identity policy stuff. It doesn't do that. Like overwhelmingly, it's, it's women being really submissive in the
0:21.5	bedroom and men being really really dominant in the bedroom. I mean, actually what it looks like to me
0:25.0	is a really sort of monstrously exaggerated form of masculinity and femininity, kind of removing any of the
0:32.2	positive bits and just leaving this, a sort of grotesque imitation.
0:43.3	Music and just leaving this a sort of grotesque imitation. Welcome to the unspeakable podcast.
0:45.5	I'm your host, Megan Down.
0:47.7	My guest is author Louise Perry.
0:50.3	This is a really fantastic conversation, and you're going to hear it momentarily.
0:55.5	But first, I am obliged, I'm obligated to myself, I guess, to tell you a couple things,
1:01.5	make a couple of announcements.
1:03.1	If you haven't noticed already, the listener support piece of this podcast is now on
1:07.4	Substack.
1:08.3	And you're going to find that at Megan Dowm.substack.com.
1:13.4	That's where you're going to go to here, bonus content, participate in comment threads,
1:18.6	get discounts on merchandise, come to hangouts.
1:21.5	You can go there and find out about the different support tiers.
1:25.5	You can become a subscriber for free, of course,
1:27.6	but you can also become a paying subscriber
1:29.7	at just $7 a month.
1:32.0	I think that's a bargain, I got to say,
	...

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