In our last summer-break podcast two-fer, we’re re-running two very different conversations on sex and race, with two very different characters: Louise Perry and Glenn Loury. Next Friday we’ll be back with fresh Dish as the new season of Dishness kicks off after Labor Day with some great guests lined up for the fall.
We’ll also be introducing Weekly Dish 3.0! Stay tuned.
Louise is a writer and campaigner against sexual violence. She co-founded a non-partisan, feminist think tank called The Other Half, and she’s currently a WSJ columnist and the host of the Maiden Mother Matriarch podcast. In this 2022 episode, we discussed her book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century.
A polished transcript is here. Money quotes from Louise:
On sex drive: “The problem with our current straight culture is it encourages women to imitate male sexuality, and they don’t want to. I mean, men don’t want to imitate female sexuality either. But my feminist principle is that it’s better to be sexually frustrated than to have unwanted sex.”
On Tinder: “My argument is that the only people [on Tinder] who are really benefiting are the really high-status men, at least the ones who want to take advantage of all the pleasures offered by sexual liberation.”
On the biggest losers: “Is it men? Is it women? It’s actually children who are the main losers from the sexual revolution and the destruction of the institution of marriage.”
On BDSM: “I do wonder if part of the reason that BDSM has become common among straight people is because we live such gender-neutral lives … It is interesting to me that what BDSM is most of the time is an exaggeration of masculinity and femininity.”
You can find two clips on YouTube: on whether Louise finds it suitable to watch porn while married, and if gay promiscuity is more harmful than straight promiscuity.
Below is a ton of listener commentary we posted back then. To start:
Thank you for giving your full-throated defense of — no, paean to — masculinity and the male sex drive! That it had to come from a middle-aged gay man is a sad commentary on the cowed submissive state of the progressive heterosexual males of the Professional Managerial Class (PMC), especially the castrati of academia. They wouldn’t have DARED say out loud that sex is inherently invasive.
That observation made this next listener understandably uneasy:
I very much enjoyed your episode with Louise Perry. However, I became uncomfortable with the discussion around violence/violation as a necessary and desirable part of intercourse. From the perspective of a gay man, that may make perfect sense.
However, for most women I know, the very best kind of relationship is one where the greater strength of the man is acknowledged, but this is held in check and used gently out of respect and love for their partner. In my experience, what women most often love and admire about men is their ability to do this, both in intercourse and as part of the wider context of a man using his power to sustain and support his family, rather than to dominate and overcome them. You did not seem really to listen to Ms. Perry on this topic.
I am a rape survivor. So I felt this part of the conversation strayed uncomfortably towards the acceptance of violence in intercourse as normal. This is widely promulgated in our society, often through pornography, and I believe it needs to be forcibly challenged. In my view, this is one of the most damaging areas of misogyny in modern society and is hiding in plain sight. We can think, for example, of the messaging amongst Metropolitan police officers and the appalling crimes of Wayne Couzens, as well as the crimes of R. Kelly. This, in my view, is why Ms. Perry’s book is so important.
Of course I agree. But I stand by my point that the sheer act of repeated, rapid penetration of another person’s body — which is intrinsic to humans and not all animal species — is inherently a form of violence. All the more reason to be extremely careful with it.
Another on that theme:
Louise Perry and Jill Filipovic were on Bari Weiss’s episode entitled “Sex, Porn, Feminism: A Debate!” I commented that the next time the topic includes men, sex, and porn, it would be best to have at least one man to offer the male perspective. I think women have difficulty understanding men’s sexual appetite, porn, and masturbation. You challenged Perry way more than Weiss did, and that forced her to think more about her position and dig deeper into her reasons for the conclusions she makes.
Rod Dreher wasn’t a fan of my position:
What is astonishing — and depressing, as someone who likes and respects Sullivan — is how completely consumed he is by sexual desire, such that he believes the world should be ordered to fulfilling his sexual desire.
I’m not sure how Rod infers that I am “completely consumed by sexual desire.” It would be hard to put out the Dish each week if I were completely consumed by it.
I just don’t believe sexual desire and consensual sex with other adults is somehow inherently morally wrong. I know this is not in line with Catholic teaching, and I’m grateful Rod accepts that this conflict is between me and my God. Sex can be wrong, of course. It can be abusive; it can reduce a human to sex and nothing else; it can be compulsive and unhealthy. But it is also a source of intense pleasure — an intensity wired into our highly sexualized species — and this is a natural good. Christianity did not see sex this way, and saw it as a distraction from the divine and a surrender to lust or sin. Only monogamous lifetime marriage made sex morally permissible. While I deeply admire monogamous lifetime marriages, I think that stricture is way too tight for most people, and a little concession to our natural realities is prudent.
As to Rod’s view that I believe “the world should be ordered to fulfilling his sexual desire,” I really don’t understand what he’s saying. My only position on the ordering of the world is that gays and straights should have the same access to civil marriage; and that the state should stay out of everyone’s bedrooms, gay and straight. That’s not about my sexual desire. It’s about a liberal society.
As to the broader context, this pod episode was not my chance to explain my own sexual ethics or beliefs. I wanted to foreground Louise’s book because I think it has a lot of wisdom in it, expressed lucidly and well. My role on the Dishcast is to interrogate my guest’s views, to push back, to play the devil’s advocate as it were. So some of what I said was deliberately provocative. I was trying to air some views that are often privately expressed but taboo in public. That doesn’t mean I endorse all of them.
There can be some joy in fucking around — but also a lot of misery and loneliness if you can never attach sex to love and intimacy. And there is a mismatch here between men and women. Our entire civilization is testimony to that.
Another dissent from a listener:
Last week I disagreed with your comments about circumcision affecting male sexual pleasure. This week it’s about most of your comments about male drives in your interview with Louise Perry. I don’t much argue with your views on male sexual “drives”, but I do have a problem with your apparent difficulty “getting” that there are other “drives” — often contradictory, but equally often compelling among many heterosexual men: the desire to create and foster a family that gives them pleasure and purpose.
Most of my relationships with openly homosexual men have come in my dotage, and with men in their dotage. Most have taken advantage of recent changes in the law and married partners. My guess is that their organs, like mine, are no longer a great match with their physical desires.
Of course. Here’s another along similar lines:
As partnered men, we have a choice. Invest in what you’ve got and do what you can to make it better by building love around the body of your partner, however flawed. Alternatively, you could invest outside the relationship in search of better bodies and a more exciting sexual experience. Investing in your partner is costly but ultimately rewarding. Investing in your own desire for something “better” will ultimately be unsatisfying and will undermine your relationship further. I know — I’ve tried it!
Here’s a reminder of Perry’s views on married men who want to watch porn:
This next listener suggests that men can have the best of both worlds with their partner:
Your assertion that men are only briefly sexually aroused/satisfied by their wives tells me that you have, at best, limited imagination. Sex within a long marriage can be infinitely varied. It is also a man’s best chance of being loved sexually into his old age, wherein adjustments need to be made for infirmity or other age-related realities. Tenderness can be important.
What about the single men who have a high sex drive but don’t have the status or looks to compete in the sexual marketplace? A listener tackles the question:
I loved your interview with Louise Perry. As a pro-sex individualist who likes porn, I expected to be unimpressed by her. But in fact, she was consistently persuasive and made me rethink a lot of my views.
Whenever we talk about males having a greater appetite for promiscuity, the conversation always takes a tone that implies straight men have more sex than straight women. But this can’t be true. For every heterosexual coupling there is one male and one female participant. Add them all up and the total encounters by all straight men and total encounters by all straight women must be equal. Therefore, if it is true (and I think it is) that there is a population of horny men that has a lot of sex with a lot of women, it must also be true that there is a corresponding population of men that is having little or no sex at all. When you consider *all* men, not just the most successful, the fact is that the average man is no more promiscuous than the average woman.
But in fact we do consider just the most successful. Among media’s many systemic biases is that it pays more attention to the people at the top. When comparing men to women — whether it’s promiscuity, intelligence, income, or what-have-you — we’re usually unintentionally comparing just the top tier of men against the top tier of women. Inevitably that skews the picture. If we looked only at the bottom tier of men, all these comparisons would look very different.
Another turns to STDs:
A couple of instances during your Perry episode, you reference antibiotics as a reason why women can continue to partake in the sexual revolution. However, we must not overlook the issue of antimicrobial resistance. Due to AMR, patients and physicians are increasingly running out of treatment options. Drug-resistant gonorrhea is very much an issue, and it impacts both women and men (particularly painful among men) in our most marginalized communities.
Plus, we now have urinary tract infections that are resistant to antibiotics. Any woman will tell you that UTIs can arise from sex, and it makes sex far less pleasurable. This is not to mention the pervasiveness of drug resistant UTIs in lower resourced countries.
(In full disclosure, on behalf of private industry, I lobby for public policy incentives to address the market barriers for new antibiotics. Without continued innovation, we will encounter a situation where we cannot rely upon antibiotics as a countermeasure against STIs.)
By the way, I recently listened to Bari Weiss’s podcast, where she hosted a debate on liberalism featuring Patrick Deneen and Bret Stephens. There is an interesting alignment between Deneen (coming from the post-liberal right) and Louise Perry (from the post-liberal left) regarding the return to family as a response to the excesses of liberalism. Of course, their respective motivations are different, but interesting nonetheless.
Points duly taken. From a conservative Christian:
Louise Perry is a breath of fresh air. It seems you put your finger on a missing piece in her project when you asked what her framework was — natural law, Judeo-Christian morality, something else? Based on this interview and her debate with the camgirl Aella, Perry’s conclusions sound primarily consequence-based:
In an artificial world where women were never trafficked against their will, were always protected against violence, and never entered prostitution as part of a downward spiral into addiction and despair, Perry doesn’t clearly articulate any prima facie ethical reservations about paid sex. It’s just that we don’t live in that world; we live in reality.
Of course, I listen to Perry as a MNGA Christian (Make Natural-law Great Again) and I think to myself that she really is more or less reinventing natural law, but without putting the word “law” to any of it.
At the same time, I did find your side of the argument quite thin, particularly the discussion of porn. One element not touched on is the frighteningly young age at which children are now accessing and internalizing hardcore material. A very good friend of mine became addicted to porn in the era of Playboy magazine, then went on to make gay porn in the 1990s. It still amazes him that the kind of material he used to create in an obscure corner of the black market is now a click away for any 10-year-old with unfettered Internet. This alone seems like it should be sufficient reason to approve of a large-scale legal crackdown.
But beyond this, it should be clear that porn has a corrosive effect on the mind and soul of any viewer, which Perry unpacks quite capably, even though she seems as shy of the word “soul” as she is of the word “law.”
Also, tired as ever is your straw man of the Christian position as anti-pleasure. Just because Augustine over-corrected for his youthful hedonism doesn’t mean he gets the final word on all things pertaining to Christianity and sex. Yes, it is true that Christianity allows for only one context in which sex may be licitly enjoyed, but within that context, it is quite obviously meant to be enjoyed as much as lies within the couple’s power. Sexual pleasure is so strictly circumscribed precisely because it is such a potent and wonderful thing. Indeed, it was God’s idea to begin with.
On the discussion of gay male promiscuity, I can’t come up with a more succinct summary comment than this snatch of dialogue from Larry Kramer’s Faggots, so I’ll give him the last word:
“You don’t want to know why you do the things you do?”
“No. Why should I?”
“So you might stop doing them.”
“I like doing them. If I knew why I did them, I might not like doing them anymore.”
Regarding the listener’s point that sex is “quite obviously meant to be enjoyed as much as lies within the couple’s power,” The Onion articulated that position well in its classic piece, “Local Lutheran Minister Loves To Fuck His Wife.” But there’s also some data on how married couples have more sex than unmarried ones, which certainly implies they’re enjoying it.
Yet another on porn:
I found your interview with Perry very interesting. Please, please investigate and interview Gail Dines — she is the world’s leading expert on how porn has changed and the devastating effect it has had on our culture — men and women. (She also has lots of interesting things to say about trans women.)
I’m a straight white feminist and the mother of two sons. Porn and the pornification of our culture is my number one issue. And it is grossly misunderstood by the wider culture (yourself included). Today’s porn is not the porn we grew up with, nor is the access to it what we grew up with.
Being anti-porn does NOT mean you are anti-sex (a tired old stereotype) — quite the opposite. Porn is suffocating sexuality.
“The larger issue is technology,” another insists, “primarily smartphones”:
In the newest generation to come of age, the most important relationship people have is with ... their phones, not other people. People live in their phones. Yes, this has been made worse by the pandemic, but it was there all along. As a result, a lot of these newly-reported mental health issues stem from interpersonal social interaction. It’s a generalization, but Gen Z feels awkward around people. People don’t know how to talk to other people. As a result, people don’t know how to woo other people, date other people, and get engaged to other people in the same numbers as prior generations.
Sometimes the explanation to a mystery is right in front of your nose. In this case literally — your screen.
On the general effect of tech:
I have my quibbles with Perry’s qualitative and somewhat unscientific analysis, but I don’t disagree with her on much of what she says. Fortunately, despite the current post-liberal theme of the Dishcast, there are likely ways to regulate and deal with some of her concerns within a liberal framework, namely through regulation of social media platforms, of which most online porn sites certainly qualify.
Just as the problem with Twitter isn’t so much free speech as much as it is the amplification effect, the robots, and the opaqueness in what’s being fed to the reader and why, it isn’t so worrisome to me that people are fucking on screen — or even engaging in some of the less mainstream behavior Perry worries about, like BDSM. The bigger set of issues is that anyone — including 13-year-olds — can get porn; that all the incentives are aligned to make it more extreme; and none of the incentives are aligned to cause people any hesitation or effort whatsoever.
Your prior guest Jonathan Haidt has one suggestion that would translate well across all platforms.
One might imagine Twitter (or YouTube comments sections or Facebook discussions) as becoming better with age restrictions, identity verification, and transparency of how the algorithms select and promote content. The same is true of porn websites: If these content aggregators absolutely and authoritatively had to verify IDs, complete age checks, collect tax IDs of people uploading content, and so on, one might imagine at least some dampening effects.
Indeed, I’m in my 40s, so remember the Herculean (and yet arguably worthwhile) effort it took to hunt down a single Playboy. Or the deliberate efforts required to sort through but not noticeably disturb a friend’s dad’s closet … only to discover his dusty Betamax videos wouldn’t play on a VHS VCR.
Compare that to any teenager suddenly having zero barriers to hundreds of hours of every specialized fetish video imaginable. It’s not hard to fathom how a teen boy’s mind is nudged and shaped by being fed unlimited tailored content. And conversely, it’s easy to see how people might have a bit more hesitancy, modesty, or even shame when a verified ID is tied to an account, when comments are associated to a real person; when viewership records are forever linked to one’s account; and when the content one uploads has at least some more barriers to entry involved in the process — or in the case of teen boys, having to commit fraud to get on a site.
As is often the case, the concerns of the far right with the degradation of norms or morals are not unjustified, even to this lefty. There’s clear evidence that our worst impulses are being served by the advances in technology that amplify the effects of porn (or conspiracy theories, woke rhetoric, white nationalist rantings, et cetera). But as is often the case on both the far left and far right, there are too many with the impulse to clamp down on individuals as though we can regulate people’s libidos.
To Perry’s credit, she tries to avoid that trap by favoring carrots rather than sticks. But there’s more we can do than she might think — namely, in the case of Twitter, PornHub, et al, to regulate platforms rather than people. The technology to do this exists; though sadly, I’m not sure the political will or expertise is as plentiful.
Great points. I wouldn’t be against most of that.
From a single parent:
Reading your post makes me turn to you with this question: Are children raised by same-sex couples as “disadvantaged” as kids raised by single parents? (I don’t think there’s enough good science teasing out the variables (single/couple; married/common law; divorced/remarried; lesbian/gay/mixed sex; poor/financially stable), so am interested in informed, thoughtful opinion.)
I’m a staunchly independent, old, white, tomboy-type woman who likes men. I was raised Roman Catholic, left that decades ago, wanted a male partner but not a marriage, and I’m a single parent. While your views on the importance of a father in child-raising irk me, mine is an unscientific, emotional response. I do feel child-raising is much harder for a single parent. I most missed having another person’s invested, caring point of view when facing child-raising issues.
On the other hand, I raised a daughter. Had I birthed a son, I’m not sure I could have pulled it off.
I think the data are very clear that having a father in a child’s life, especially a son’s, is extremely important to the child’s future health and happiness. But there are countless exceptions to this rule. It’s quite possible for single mothers to find male authority figures to fulfill that role in part. Same-sex parents also often make sure that there is an adult of the opposite sex in their children’s lives.
Lastly, one more dissent:
Let me first say that I am such a supporter and fan. I have considered myself a Dishhead, and I value and respect your commentary, insight and perspective. But I end up feeling, often when you discuss female issues, an inability on your part to in any way try to have a perspective of what it feels like to be a woman (both biological and culturally, in this case).
Perhaps some women do enjoy rough sex and “get their rocks off” on being like a man. But you try to have it both ways in this episode — either portraying women as totally unlike men in their sexual appetites and sensibility, or, reducing them down to that when it suits you.
You cannot separate women’s attitudes about sex from the culture we swim in. From an early age we often feel violated and threatened by the gaze of men, the physical presence of men, their reducing us — as soon as we reach adolescence —to an object of desire. I don’t think you have any idea how dehumanizing that can be. I don’t think you try.
Even my ex-jock brother-in-law could, for one moment in his life, empathize: when he had a broken ankle and found himself alone in a bad part of Belize City. For the first time in his life, he felt what it was like to be physically vulnerable. And thus for the first time in his sexist life, he felt — he admitted, if only during that brief half hour — what women might feel. I wish you could too.
And I do try to feel what it is like as a gay man to be demeaned as a “faggot” and “queer.” And the worst insult they labeled you as? That you were one of us, a girl. So, yeah, that should give you some perspective about just what the pecking order is.
I won’t pretend I have the lived experience of a woman. I’m sorry when that means I’m occasionally tone-deaf or insensitive or just clueless. But of course I understand that sense of vulnerability and can empathize with it deeply. And I can invite women like Louise on the Dishcast to help me (and listeners) better understand and engage. My own immersion in a largely male-dominated subculture can be blinding — but it also offers a perspective into the male psyche outside the female presence that might be helpful to the debate about sex and liberation.
Listeners continued the debate (and TMI) here.
See you next Friday.
