The Future of Women and Fertility Rates

In this thought-provoking discussion, we are joined by author Louise Perry to explore the future of women in the context of declining birth rates.

We discuss artificial wombs, the importance of maternal bonds, and whether radical family structures could ever be wise. Louise argues that rapid technological change often induces a form of gender dysphoria, as modern lifestyles deprive women and men of their instinctive roles.

We also touch on the unique psychology of teenage girls, the stages of a woman's life, perpetually chasing maidenhood, and the need for cultural expectations around family formation. Louise offers her vision for a pro-woman future that supports femininity while also allowing some flexibility.

Overall, a nuanced look at where women may be headed and how we can build a society that enables them to thrive.

Louise Perry: [00:00:00] I, I'm kind of of the opinion that modern life induces something like gender dysphoria in almost everyone.

Malcolm Collins: I want to hear more.

Louise Perry: But, you know, the basic things I always think when you look at the list of sort of things. Ways to resolve depression and anxiety. The list of things that you're advised to do are basically the list of things that would comprise a standard hunter gatherer day, right? Like being outside, exercising, socializing with other people.

sitting around a campfire, you know, all this kind of stuff, which, which people, which people have hormonally respond to really positively, but which, which, which aren't a part of a standard modern day. And so for men, you know, that includes things like hunting and fishing and like being with male friends and all this kind of stuff, which, which they are largely denied. And similarly for women, like I, I, it is my strong intuition, for instance, that one of the things that is driving [00:01:00] the famed.

Poor mental health of teenage girls, it is Instagram and all of this kind of stuff. I agree with that. I think it's also that teenage girls historically would have spent a lot of time around young children.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: Hello everyone. We are super excited today to be joined by Louise Perry, who wrote the case against the sexual revolution, a book that really got a lot of people talking for the first time about things, just not really working for women. In addition to things not really working for men in modern society.

Plus she is the podcast host of maiden mother matriarch, one of the. Fastest growing new podcasts recently. So it's a great re listen and basically she has the best guests on. So please do check out that podcast as well as the book. But

Malcolm Collins: today, hold on, hold on. Just for framing for audience. If you haven't heard of her because you're just mentioning books and stuff, she's probably the.

most influential conservative influencer in the UK right now. In terms of like conservative social ideas, intellectualism, she's [00:02:00] the big wig right now. And she's really been moving the bar forwards on a number of issues. All right. So

Louise Perry: very kind. Hey, no, we

Simone Collins: were just in, in London for a week talking with a bunch of people who are in influential positions of society.

And when we talked with people about like, well, who is the public facing, you know, leader of, of modern conservative thought moving things forward. We heard your name.

Malcolm Collins: So the topic of today is going to be the future of women, like where you think the future of women is going. And this is in the context of fertility rates, because obviously the future of women is hugely going to be determined by the types of women.

Who actually have kids. So first I just love your initial thoughts. And we can talk short term, long term, right? Like I think we can talk like what works now for having kids, how we can, we motivate individual groups now for having kids and then we'll go into the future. Where do you think women are going to be in a hundred years?

Where do you think women are going to be in 500 years?

Louise Perry: I [00:03:00] did a debate recently in LA organized. By Barry Weiss and the free press about that sexual revolution. And Grimes, who was, I was debating against, had this great line, which we were just kind of running with the whole, was a sexual revolution good or bad for women?

And Grimes just said, you know, if women still exist, of course, and it's a good comment. Oh my gosh. And it was like a funny comment, but also an astute one, because obviously biotech is all to play for, except, I mean, as I'm sure you'll both agree, we are at this very. Difficult potential bifurcation points where we could go evermore down the biotech route and, you know, upload ourselves to the cloud or whatever, which I have my misgivings about, you know, and I've, one of the things for instance, I've, I'm, I'm skeptical of is some kinds of some kinds of repro tech.

I'm more open to others. We can get into it. That's one route that we might go down as a species, as a civilization. The other, as, as we all know, is that actually birth rate. The birth rate problem leads to [00:04:00] such economic stagnation, such civilizational decline that we never actually, we don't actually make any technological progress.

That actually we end up stalling at the end of going backwards. I don't really know which is going to happen. I mean, I suppose it's plausible that, that both might happen, that you might end up with kind of high tech enclaves in some parts of the world. That's our camp. Yeah. Which get ever more like a, like Byzantium or something, right.

You know, civilization retreating to very, very high tech and relatively stable and affluent. enclaves while everywhere else unfortunately experiences the effects of low birth rates. Maybe, I don't know, maybe that's the route. Either way, it's obviously going to have an enormous effect on,

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Here's a question I have for you, because I actually see a third path, right?

So I think that there are, there, well, I mean, there's, there's, I think you're going to have some people trying for each path. Like, obviously we, Simone and I are part of the cultural group this time for the ultra high tech pathway. [00:05:00] Whereas we see you and you can correct us if we're wrong as sort of, and, and, and we, we frame all of the different cultural approaches to fertility rates right now and family right now as hypotheses and, and, and time will judge which hypotheses are intergenerationally stable.

One that's very obviously intergenerationally stable, which you called out as well. Are these xenophobic, technophobic and, and generally economically unproductive cultural groups which they will definitely exist in the future. Just how much they matter depends on if anyone else still exists, but I sort of have always seen you as representing something quite in between the two.

Not the aggressively technophobic and xenophobic group, but if a group that represents sort of more wholesome, traditional values. And I'm wondering if you are representing that group, how do you see that group as, as sort of recruiting and staying stable in a world in which they [00:06:00] increasingly, and you could say this is, this won't happen, but I sort of see increasingly they won't have control over governing systems.

that they live under. So how do they protect themselves in environments where there's hostile governments, et cetera? Like, what are your thoughts?

Louise Perry: Yeah. So, I mean, I'm quite agnostic on this question and I think about it a lot. I think it's a very difficult one. And I guess it's partly because I am. I'm sort of culturally Catholic in the sense that I have an enormous number of Catholic friends and I, and I, I often find myself kind of circling back to Catholic ideas around that that feel intuitively true to me, but I'm actually an agnostic.

I wasn't raised Christian alone, Catholic. And so I don't, I, I therefore don't feel as if I'm completely beholden to what the Catholic church says on things. So for instance, I am I am sympathetic to IVF in particular instances, I'm, I'm potentially sympathetic to polygenic screening. [00:07:00] I'm much less sympathetic to surrogacy.

So I kind of, I, I, I go, I can go either way on some of these biotech questions. And I suppose that the question for me and the question for all of us, it's really difficult one is if you have a. So, so let's talk about polygenic screening, for instance, as far as I'm aware, the position of the sort of mainstream Christian position on this is anti because it involves the destruction of embryos, at least in its current incarnation.

And also because, you know, tinkering with the genome is something that a lot of traditional Christians. Yeah. are very suspicious of, but then I also figure that the reason that we've got to the point where polygenic screening may well be necessary is because we've done this miraculous thing in dropping infant mortality to almost zero from a species norm of maybe 40 to 50 percent, right?

And that's a wonderful, wonderful thing that medical technology has bestowed on the world. Also means that we have this crumbling genome problem, [00:08:00] which I'm sure you'll be familiar with. I'm sure. Oh

Malcolm Collins: yeah. And I'm definitely, we talk about this. Yeah. Something that I think a lot of when you're talking about people who aren't our audience, like the general public, they don't understand that, that just.

about three or four generations ago, about 50 percent of kids were dying before the age of one. Right. Like this is not distant history when you're talking evolutionarily. But anyway, yeah.

Louise Perry: So we're basically keeping the infant mortality rate artificially very low. And there are problems downstream from that in that you now, you know, if we were to suddenly whip away Western medical technology, which might happen if you have sort of catastrophic economic decline, loads and loads of people are actually not well enough to

Genes for disease propagation themselves in a way that they wouldn't otherwise. Right. And I think, okay, if you sit, how do, how do you say Christian principles that go back 2000 years contend with this kind of completely novel problem, which is, Which is a product of [00:09:00] technology. And I suppose my argument to people who would hold the more traditional view is, you know, I hear you.

I think that rapid technological change is risky and the precautionary principle sort of demands that we be, that we be very suspicious of rapid technological change as an, like an instinctive conservative, that's my position. But also the situation we're in is we have problems generated by technology that can only solve, be solved with more technology.

And so the choices we have to make, therefore, are like, okay, we, you know, take sort of basic Christian ideas, which I hold to, right? That feel instinctively true to me, but then we have to be trying to apply them to incredibly novel... Modern questions. So, so yeah, as you say, Malcolm, therefore, I guess in some sense, I'm somewhere between the two extremes.

Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and I think something that I always note was the IBF stuff is this is a really hard thing to, to make a call on when you look at especially the groups that are against it, when you look at how much [00:10:00] human fertility has declined in the last. 50 years, you know, sperm rates are down over 50 percent in the last 50 years, you know, testosterone is down 30%.

We've got endocrine disruptors in our environment, which are changing the way gender is presenting. Like it is dramatically harder to naturally have kids for us than it was for our grandparents. And it's going to be harder yet for our kids because it's the one blind spot that like the environmental movement just completely ignored, which is one of those things where, where it's, it's sad to me because I actually culturally really Like you, I feel simpatico with the groups that are even sort of antagonistic to this technology, but I do worry for them.

Yeah. Okay, so I'll propose a very I actually have no idea where you're going to fall on this question, because it was a really interesting thing. So, you guys might not know this, Louise Perry put together this conference, there was one of the key people at this conference called ARC, which was like a conservative leaning Davos.

Now, they don't say conservative leaning, they say just an alternative, but it was... It was [00:11:00] for a lot of thinkers in the space. And at one point during it artificial wombs came up. And somebody was horrified who I was talking to, cause they were a very traditional conservative woman. And they were like, well, if there's artificial wombs, then why do we even need women?

Like, that's the most anti feminist thing I could imagine. And I remember thinking, I was like, yeah, but like. Is that like, I, I, I, I guess I just didn't understand what was so existentially bad about that. Like I assumed that most people identify more with like their family or their culture than their gender.

But she very clearly was like, I am a woman first. And then my culture and family, like, what do you think about artificial wombs and what do you think about worlds in which it does turn out to be healthier to maybe just a, a baby outside the body? Like, what do we do in that world? And, and, and how do you, would you like restructure the family in any way?

Do you see that world as horrifying? Like, yeah, I'd love to hear more.

Louise Perry: I think [00:12:00] it was Jermaine Greer who wrote many decades ago that if we ever invent artificial wombs, then patriarchy will just sort of stamp women out of no need for us anymore. And we'll like, it'll be game over. I don't agree with that.

I'd say that's a very paranoid sort of reading. I, that's, that's not what worries me. I mean, the main thing that worries me about artificial wombs is I think that I think mothers are extremely important to not just, you know, physical developments of infants, but emotional development of infants.

And I worry terribly about, it just seems like. It's, it, it frightens me in terms of the, how much could go wrong during the experimental development of such technology. I mean, what, what, what, what may happen, right, is that we, we already are able to sustain embryos in vitro for quite a long time. You have incubators for, for, Increasingly premature infants, you know, maybe they eventually meet in the middle without the need for [00:13:00] any kind of radical experimentation so that, you know, and, and, and obviously there are good reasons to have both of those, both of those forms of technology.

Would I want to restructure the family? My, my instance is to say no. I mean, one of the things that sets me apart, maybe a little bit from other conservative commentators is that I, I'm very interested in evolutionary psychology. I think that evolutionary psychology has a lot to teach us in terms of how we reckon with rapid...

social and technological change, because my, my sort of guiding principle is that our environments might change enormously, but our minds don't change that much. And the more you learn about how the human mind works and how human relationships work and so on, the more you realize that actually sticking to the old ways.

There's normally a very good reason to do that, which is not to say that we reject change full stop. It's not to say we reject technology full stop, you know, going back to the infant mortality thing. I love the fact that I don't have to worry about, about losing young children to preventable [00:14:00] disease. You know, this is, this is, this is miraculous stuff, but I think that efforts to tinker with the family, for instance, I mean, like there's, there's so much fascinating data, for instance, on the importance of mothers and fathers to child development, the sort of instinctive stuff that you don't really know is going on.

Like, Erica commissar is coming on my podcast soon. She's so interesting on this and on the necessity of like fathers playing with children, you know, mothers doing the soothing browse stuff, all this stuff that we do instinctively is actually so essential to developing a healthy. Person, which is why efforts to radically alter the family so that you don't have maternal and paternal presence stably in the child's life are so unwise.

So, you know, maybe there's a scenario where we have artificial wombs available to relieve women of the. The pain and difficulty of gestation, but I still, I think that, you know, assuming that the child that comes out of that artificial womb is [00:15:00] psychologically normal, they also need basically a psychologically normal social experience going forward.

So I didn't, that means, I don't think that would be any reason to tinker with the family. So

Malcolm Collins: a side call question or related question to this, cause I asked my wife this. recently in a world where women just like assuming like we had artificial winters in a world in which we don't need women to have kids.

What are some of the things because you're talking about evolution or psychology that you think women do better than men? Like what areas would a biologically modern woman always outcompete a biologically modern man in terms of utility to society?

Louise Perry: I can't remember where I heard this from, so I might be getting it wrong.

But I, I, I believe that, um, in terms of the ability to read other people's emotions, and 130 IQ man is comparable to a 70 IQ woman, like an intellectually [00:16:00] disabled woman can read someone else's emotions better than, you know, a highly gifted man. Right. Just one example, but that the. That's that one that it really rings true actually it's funny when I talk to my husband because my husband and I are both quite typically feminine and masculine like the only way in which I'm probably unusual for women is I'm quite contrarian but apart from that we're both quite difficult and he will often have this scenario where I will like interpret someone's emotions and he completely misses it.

Because of that gap. That's, that's one example of that. I mean, I, I often say, right, the thing that has like undermined men the most in the modern era, the thing that makes men feel as if they are superfluous, because in a sense, sometimes they are, is not feminism. It's actually, it's actually economic change is actually the fact that we now have a service based economy, mostly, which doesn't need male muscle, but does need the conscientiousness and agreeableness that women tend to

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, we we have a [00:17:00] sales org within our company and women perform outperforming at least for us within the sales organization that we have.

And it's, it's something you point about, like, what are the, the male traits where I think pretty undeniably people would say men do better, you know, whether it's physical strengths or bravery or courage, like these are things that are not. As rewarded and in, in the industries in which they are rewarded, men vastly outperform women in terms of, and that's why you see these high death rates in these industries.

I also really like sort of your framing as women as sort of the emotional custodians of our species and, and our culture which is a very interesting take.

Louise Perry: I think that it's also a, I mean, it's, I'm writing an essay at the moment. It sounds like a joke, but

I, I'm kind of of the opinion that modern life induces something like gender dysphoria in almost everyone.

Malcolm Collins: I want to hear more. [00:18:00]

Louise Perry: So an example would be, you know, the male drive towards being, doing sort of outdoor physical stuff. Like the, the, I mean, you don't want to be too reductive about it. Obviously there are changes. There have been changes to our psychology since we left the savannah, you know, obviously we're not exactly hunter gatherers psychologically evolution can connect surprisingly fast sometimes.

Right. But, you know, the basic things I always think when you look at the list of sort of things. Ways to resolve depression and anxiety. The list of things that you're advised to do are basically the list of things that would comprise a standard hunter gatherer day, right? Like being outside, exercising, socializing with other people.

sitting around a campfire, you know, all this kind of stuff, which, which people, which people have hormonally respond to really positively, but which, which, which aren't a part of a standard modern day. And so for men, you know, that includes things like hunting and fishing and [00:19:00] like being with male friends and all this kind of stuff, which, which they are largely denied.

in a very gender neutral modern economy, which also in which the extended family has basically collapsed as well. That's something we can also go into, right? Cause that's very relevant to the whole birth rates question. And similarly for women, like I, I, it is my strong intuition, for instance, that one of the things that is driving the famed.

Poor mental health of teenage girls, it is Instagram and all of this kind of stuff. I agree with that. I think it's also that teenage girls historically would have spent a lot of time around young children. Like, one of the things that's very... One of the ways in which teenage girls are useful in a kind of traditional setup, not even that traditional, right, is in providing childcare.

And I mean, I, I'm not, I'll say personally, I'm sure you agree that I've been around little children is joyful, right? It's like it is hard work and everything, but it is joyful. Like it gives you an intense sense of satisfaction. I always find that days when I, I really [00:20:00] don't like traveling for work. I try and avoid doing it as much as possible because I don't like being away from my, my two year old.

And I always find that days when I have been just with him. Not doing any other kind of work. They're tiring, yes, but there's also a sense of, like, deep satisfaction. Whereas days when I'm not with him, when I'm, when I'm off somewhere else, I have this sense of, like, just kind of bubbling anxiety. And it occurred to me that this is gender dysphoria, basically, right?

Like, my, what, what my, what my mind and my body are longing for are being around my children. I, I, I, I don't want to compare it to the gender dysphoria that people like that, that trans people can be very, very cute. Right. And I don't doubt the existence of that kind of gender dysphoria. It's clearly real. What I'm talking about is a kind of. environmental mismatch, which causes mild anxiety and depression in both

Malcolm Collins: sexes.

So I think the term in the trans community that you're looking for is gender envy which is you might in your environment see idealizations [00:21:00] or even in your head have sort of an evoked set of idealizations of what it means to be a woman, but you're not able to enact those in your daily life, which is really fascinating.

Another thing that you said that really had me reflect on something I hadn't realized before is you're talking about teenage girls caring for babies. And it got me thinking, I was like, okay, when does this care for babies? response differentially begin to appear in women. And I think intuitively I'd assumed, okay, it's around the age they would probably be having kids, right?

Like early twenties. But then I thought, I was like, no, prepubescent girls have this desire. Prepubescent girls have baby dolls that they care for. Like it is a very intense desire from a very early age for women. Which I think backs what you're saying there that, that women are genetically sort of coded to care for kids, even at a younger age and that the desire to be away from kids really only seems to get loud in women during the period in which they're trying to, to distance [00:22:00] themselves from their families.

Yeah,

Louise Perry: I mean, there clearly are exceptions. There clearly are some women who don't have that kind of maternal instinct, which is presumably being heavily selected. Against right. Doing the current evolutionary bottleneck. Those women exist. Those women are also disproportionately found in positions of influence because they tend to also have more, one they don't have, like having children does delay your career progression.

It just does, like there's a straightforward sort of collision between , the FA family life in the labor market, but also because. they're likely to have other traits that are more masculine in terms of being more competitive and whatever, they're more likely to end up at the top of the tree professionally.

And it does, it is unfortunate because it means that, you know, one of my, one of my friends who works in politics likes to say that probably the least well represented demographic in all of British politics, and indeed, you know, I'm sure politics elsewhere are stay at home mums, because sort of definitionally there are no stay at home mums in parliament.

And it's also very rare to have, have even former stay at home mums. in Parliament. It's just not a group that you hear from. And so, the [00:23:00] women who would say, you know, actually, I basically get the greatest satisfaction what I really want to do is basically live a traditional, traditional life, you know, which doesn't necessarily mean, you know, let's, let's always remember, it doesn't necessarily mean the feminine mystique of isolation in the suburbs life.

It's more like the being, you know, being around your sisters and cousins and looking after children. Yeah. Right. And kind of incorporating that with other work around, around the, the household, like that, that basic lifestyle setup. I think actually a lot of women. enormously prefer that to the girlboy's life.

Malcolm Collins: This brings me to a really interesting realization which is that if you're like promoting feminism, if you look at where women are most discriminated in our society, like the category or traits of women that are most discriminated in our society, they are the traits that we associate with motherhood and with women who have gone down this motherhood pathway.

If you're at a company or [00:24:00] you're in Hollywood, right? Like suppose we're screening for. Who gets to be the next big female star, right? You know, they're looking for a woman who has small breasts and is aggressive and like, doesn't care about children. And like, like there's a very specific type that Hollywood is casting as the woman.

And then our society begins to build. This is what a powerful woman looks like, which is antagonistic to what I think many people would think of like a trad woman or a matronly woman or something like that, you know, mother matriarchy or your podcast name. And, this group of women is just completely ignored and discriminated against within even, even career environments because there's women who fall into these aesthetic and life choice trends, but who still have to work to support their family.

And I think in those environments, they're often held back from positions of influence or positions of being seen. And yet the modern feminist movement is not going to support those women or, or call out this level of [00:25:00] like, we have no heroes right now. We have no heroes who are mothers. If you look at the strong women in media, they are not mothers.

They are not taking on a feminine role. Well, or if they are

Simone Collins: mothers, they don't talk about it and they kind of have to not talk about it or they won't be able to advance easily.

Malcolm Collins: Listen, I want to hear more from you.

Simone Collins: One thing I'm really curious about, Luis, is what you think would be ideal for women in the future?

There's like a lot of dystopias that we're really afraid about, right? We're afraid about women's reproductive freedom being taken away as nations get desperate for taxpayers. You know, I mean, China's already starting to revoke access to vasectomies and... birth control and deportions. So like we're getting there.

We know what we don't want. And Malcolm and I have a vision for what we want, but it is much more extreme than, you know, generally your take. So we're curious to hear, you know, the reasonable person's take on what is an ideal, we'd say pro woman future, you know, in a hundred years or so in 50 years or a hundred years, is it more structured or less structured, more strict or less strict?

Are women in the [00:26:00] home, or are they given tons of choice? Like, what do you think would lead to the best outcome? And obviously, what's difficult about this is that sometimes that doesn't sound like the best or most politically palatable today, but like, try to, like, try to tell me what you think would be best for women's actual mental health thriving society, etc.

Louise Perry: It depends on the age, doesn't it? I mean, that's one of the, the, the... Reasons I chose the name for my show this recognition that women have quite distinct stages in their life cycles Which men don't have to quite the same degree like being a maid and being a mother being a matriarch are quite different states and I think one of the, one of the mistakes that, that liberal modern society makes in relation to both young men and young women, but I would say maybe more young women because one of the really distinctive features of say teenage girl psychology is being extremely impressionable.

Teenage boys tend to be. You know, reckless or like various, you know, they have their own, they [00:27:00] have their own challenges. Teenage girls, and I say this as someone who used to be a teenage girl are very, very susceptible to peer influence. And one of the mistakes that I think we make and that I wrote a lot about in my first book is, is, is granting actually too much freedom to teenage girls to do really self destructive things.

The challenge there though, and so many parents. Who I speak to, sort of like they, they do know that. They do know that actually a 15 year old girl cannot actually make good sexual choices. for instance, right? And it's kind of crazy to expect her to and we only let 15 year old girls make Independent sexual choices because we have access to contraception and abortion right in any other circumstance But what those sexual choices are likely to lead to a baby.

That's the community's problem Like there's so, there's so much more limits placed on your woman, right? But obviously there are enormous costs to that. I think you describe it in your book as the hard societies. Am I remembering? Yeah. Yeah. [00:28:00] Yeah. Like, yeah. Hard cultures are, are, are, are hardcore, right?

Like, and we, and I, and I very much enjoyed not living in a culture. I'm not. Where I'm not constrained, it's a really difficult balancing act because you need, you need cultural templates, you need guardrails, you need certain expectations that are kind of socially enforced, what you don't want is, you know, Iranian morality police or whatever.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and I think something that you're catching there when you're talking about the three stages of a woman's life is that organically a society, you know, you're talking about evolutionary psychology. Two men a maid, the maid stage of a woman's life is always the most valuable because that's the stage, like, if my wife died, the women who would be most attracted to me would not be women of her age, they would be women with the highest fertility window, like this, due to evolutionary reasons, right, so if I'm a guy and I'm going to get distracted by a woman in a billboard, it's going to be a young girl.

Looking woman, right? It [00:29:00] doesn't look like she's had kids with someone else because that lowers the woman's value to me as a, even a potential replacement for a wife that I've already had. So what they just sort of organically society is always going to promote that one stage of a woman's life and therefore women can think then to be a good woman, I must be the optimal made.

Louise Perry: Perpetual made. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think that one of the, one of the ways in which our culture is not well set up for family formation. Is that we do encourage perpetual maidenhood, even though it's not possible. I mean, it's kind of partly possible if you contraception and Botox and whatever, but like, not really like there is, there is a shelf life.

Well, you can't

Simone Collins: pull it off. Like an argument that I've had friends make to me that I think is really compelling is you can be, you can get the best plastic surgery. You can be have also just won the genetic lottery, but if you are a 45 year old woman. Who looks amazing. She's, you're still not going to beat a, you know, 23 year old, 21 year old girl.

Louise Perry: Yeah, [00:30:00] so it's a losing game. Yeah, there's no way to win. And I think it's a very psychologically damaging game to try and play, because you do reach a point when you're in, say, your late 30s, where you know that you're losing it, and you sort of have no other source of status. And, and, and a lot of this is to do with the fact that we don't assign enough status to mothers.

Yeah. Which completely, yeah, within feminism. There's no motivation, except that it's female, right? Right. Right, right, right. So a healthy culture would be one where There are life stage specific cultural expectations that are enforced through norms, not through laws, I suppose, because I, because the law is a very blunt instrument, whereas cultural templates can be potentially malleable, you know, I want there to be like, we, we, We, we all recognize, you know, like what's the Stonewall line?

Gay people exist, get used to it. Like that's true. You know, it is true that, that, that, like the homosexuality is present across human societies and indeed across other, other [00:31:00] species. Right. And you need societies that can say simultaneously. It's really good to get married and have children, but also not persecute people who don't because they're, because they're gay or lesbian.

Right. And that's a, that's a challenging balance. And it like you, you look around at cultures around the world and there aren't that many that managed to properly strike that balance. So like we have a real task. It's funny.

Malcolm Collins: You should mention this because we have culture warriors in our society that are doing this.

So when we were in London, we did a show with a Pearl Davis, a just pearly thing show. And one of the segments of the show. was just showing the audience pictures of women who were mothers or who were middle aged in and married in scantily clad outfits that they had posted to like Instagram and shaming them for it.

Simone Collins: It was really interesting. It was like seeing that, what that mechanism right there. And it wasn't even like them posing in a slutty way or anything. It was just like. You know, you are middle aged your mother, like, should you be wearing a bikini and [00:32:00] posting it on social media? It wasn't just wearing a bikini.

It was should you be posting a picture of yourself on social media wearing a bikini? I never would have made that connection. That's so

Malcolm Collins: funny Yeah, yeah Well, and she did it asking which I think was an important question and I think in a way, you know even more base than us because Simone even you were like Well, I think it's okay within the rules of our existing.

I, or I might've been that more Simone with a little more harsh. But, but she was pointing out, she's like, if they're posting something like this and they're already married, they're posting this for sexual validation from other men. Like, that's what this is about. And we do need to shame that as a society.

So that was interesting. Yeah.

Louise Perry: I mean, the, the, the painful truth is, and I'm, I'm kind of reluctant to completely spell it out because it, it, it does upset people rightly is that, you know, slut shaming, for instance, is a social, it's like a social technology, right? Like it's hard to persuade going back to the impressionability of teenage girls, right?

If you're trying, if you really, really want your daughter to [00:33:00] make good sexual decisions, because you have the recognition of how consequential those decisions are. Right. Even in a world with abortion and contraception, you know, going back to wrong guys flat could be potentially lethal. Aside from all the other distress that it can cause.

If you really want her to make good sexual decisions, you, you, you can try sitting her down and saying, here are all the terrible things that could happen if you make bad sexual decisions. But knowing teenagers as we do, we know that that's not very likely to actually make much of an impact on her decision making.

Or you can have a culture of slut shaming. Which is what, like, most cultures come up with, and it's enforced by other teenage girls. And, like, and it's, and it's quite, and it's, like, ugly and painful, which is why I'm, like, I'm reluctant to, like, endorse it. But I am saying that this is, like, that is why such, such social technologies exist for

Simone Collins: Yeah.

And there's this really big tension between what I see is like more liberal culture, you know, like let people have choice, let people do what they want to do. But then what is sort of become what [00:34:00] Malcolm is honed in on is like the progressive movement's biggest value proposition now subtly, which is that you.

Need never feel pain in the moment. Like do whatever makes you feel good. Now, if something triggers you don't engage with it. If someone's bullying you, we will stop them. And there's this insane tension where like you, you can't have a well policed society. You can't prevent people from doing bad things.

Without either having an insane law, which is probably not ideal because then you're actually taking away people's rights or shaming them like you say, and it does, it is really interesting to like, you know, here you describe on one hand, you know, like a very reasonable, like, let's, you know, socially police think policy and then like to hear.

Malcolm reminding me of this example of like someone on the internet who's seen is extremely controversial, like extremely controversial shaming women and like that feeling. So I remember sitting in the show, like at the moment being like, Oh wow, we're doing this. This is okay. This is I mean,

Louise Perry: it's crazy.

Yeah. I [00:35:00] mean, like sort of. Traditional slut shaming cultures combined with the internet is a particularly ugly products, right? Because, because it's enormously magnifying the, the the audience and the, and the consequent distress to the women. So, yeah, I mean, I'm not, I'm also not posting. Middle aged ladies bikini pics and kind of encouraging people to make fun of them.

But

Malcolm Collins: It's been wonderful to have you on. We'd love to have you on again. This has been fan tastic. And I hope all of you have a wonderful day.

Simone Collins: Yeah, and don't forget to check out Maiden Mother Matriarch and The Case Against the Sexual Revolution where you get a lot more nuance on these subjects.

So, if you liked the conversation, don't worry, there's tons more.