Is life worse for women now than in the 1950s? In a recent interview for The Free Press, author Louise Perry and journalist Bari Weiss muse on just how much women have lost since premarital sex was normalized, the pill reduced sex to consequence-free hedonism, and Roe v Wade rendered abortion as common as going to the dentist. Perry calls this “re-paganization,” delivering an eloquent longing for a lost golden age of female subservience as Weiss nods along and smiles. It’s all very heterodox.
Or is it? No mention of the impacts of Project 2025, the dangerous ascendancy of Christian Nationalism, or the deadly crisis of women’s health in full swing.
Julian analyses their conversation to pinpoint how digital new media dresses up traditionalist right-wing talking points as if they’re open-minded, edgy, and brave intellectual insights.
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As you say, I came from a secular background.
I came from quite a left-wing background, very much a feminist background.
This was not motivated reasoning, okay?
If anything, this was quite painful reasoning to actually...
I almost reconstructed traditional Christian sexual ethics from the ground up.
I kind of like painfully and reluctantly ended up reaching the conclusion that actually the sexual culture of the 1950s was pretty good.
Actually, I think we did it pretty well right up until the sexual revolution when we threw it out the window.
That was the voice of Louise Perry in her interview from February with Barry Weiss for the Free Press.
The title of the 75-minute video on YouTube is 1950s Sex Culture Got It Right.
Now, if you're not familiar with Barry Weiss, which you probably are, she's the Columbia graduate, former op-ed columnist at the Wall Street Journal and then at the New York Times, from where she very publicly resigned in protest.
Over the controversy about that paper publishing an op-ed during the George Floyd protests of 2020 that was written by Senator Tom Cotton, and it suggested that Trump should send in the military.
Weiss would then go on, after resigning with a public resignation letter, to found the Free Press, which presents itself as a bold and independent new media bastion of open-minded, heterodox, non-partisan news and opinion.
While still being overwhelmingly funded by right-wing billionaires and trafficking in endless culture war pablum dressed up as serious journalism.
So I wanted to get that out of the way because that's the context here.
She's the person platforming, hosting, interviewing Louise Perry.
So who is Louise Perry?
Well, as you probably noticed, she's English and has that kind of well-bred London accent.
That is as easy on the ear as it is suggestive of intellectual clarity and education.
You're likely hearing the audio version of this, so let me just add here that Louise Perry is also conventionally attractive with a ready smile and a warm, thoughtful demeanor that goes with her evenly paced delivery.
She's 33, has a bachelor's in anthropology, And made a big splash with a 2022 book titled The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.
According to the publisher's description, the book argues that the amoral libertinism and callous disenchantment of liberal feminism and our contemporary hyper-sexualized culture represent more loss than gain.
The touchstones in Louise Perry's interviews and public speaking Include things like the importance of recognizing differences between men and women and suggesting that since the 1960s in the West, we've tried to pretend that those differences weren't real and that the act of sex itself is nothing special.
She calls this the disenchantment of sex and says that the sexual revolution actually told women to be more like men.
Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I am Julian Walker, and this is a brief titled Smooth-Talking Anti-Feminism.
All right, so let's get into it.
I am mostly going to comment today on excerpts from Perry's most recent free press.
to examine both the implications of our ideas and how they've found resonance in the new Christian curious online media space that advertises itself as heterodox while leaning invariably to the right.
If you're not terminally online like we are, the term heterodox largely came into popular discourse around 2015 from the mouth of Jonathan Haidt.
You may know him.
He's the psychology professor who's done fascinating research on and written books about how the differences in underlying moral psychology between conservatives and liberals can help us make sense of politics, how understanding those differences can be helpful.
And during that period, he argued for the importance of stepping outside of an almost religious political orthodoxy so as to be able to have open conversations about taboo and highly charged topics and thereby come to more mutual understanding.
So the opposite of that kind of orthodoxy where people are locked into their political camps and filter bubbles is to be more heterodox, which sounds good.
Haidt's usage of that term made a lot of sense and was well-grounded in his research.
But like many otherwise good ideas, the internet turned it inside out over time.
This is a complex topic that you can probably tell I'm itching to explore in more depth.
But suffice it to say that because of the perception that liberal and progressive ideas were culturally dominant, During that heyday of cancel culture and campus safe spaces, I'm going back to like, you know, 2014 to 2017, shall we say.
The contrary countermeasure of emphasizing transgressive free speech, which over time then extended to pseudoscience and conspiracy theories and sane-washing Trump.
All of this got bundled up into a style of heterodoxy, which is now uniformly anti-woke.
While welcoming, usually uncritically, a lot of ideas and figures from the right.
The free press is probably the most lucrative example of this dynamic.
But let's get back to Louise Perry's free press interview.
She comes across at first as a typical representative of the liberal intellectual elite.
the accent, the vocabulary, the grounding in anthropology, and her self-described progressive upbringing and feminist university experience.
As you'll hear at some point, she simply found over time that conservative attitudes about everything from birth control to divorce to abortion were largely the correct ones, But...
It's complicated.
There are situations in which I would want an abortion for myself and I would want it to be legal, you know, and I would want an abortion for my daughter and I would want it to be legal.
I'm not in any way, like, absolutist on abortion, but I do think that this, a casual attitude towards it, the idea that it's just like pulling a tooth, which you will hear from some activists, I think is expressive of that kind of repaganization.
Okay, so it's hard to listen to that.
And not hear some version of abortion for me, but not for thee.
She would want it for herself and her daughter under certain circumstances, but all of those other women who treat abortion really casually, like pulling a tooth, no, no, no, not for them.
It sounds to me like she's perhaps implying...
That there should be stringent laws forbidding abortions that she would deem as mere acts of convenience.
And to be fair, maybe she doesn't mean legal restrictions.
Maybe she's talking more about cultural norms.
But because she doesn't say more about this, we're left with the impression that she probably only endorses medically ending pregnancies associated with rape or in which the mother's life is at risk.
This is supported by other statements she makes about how corrosive premarital sex without consequences has actually been in the West.
But did you notice how she used the term repaganization?
Let's rewind a little bit to hear that again and then see what she says next.
A casual attitude towards it.
The idea that it's just like pulling a tooth.
Which you will hear from some activists, I think is expressive of that kind of re-paganization.
And actually, I think that a big part of the reason why abortion is such a vexed political issue in America in particular and elsewhere is because it is precisely this.
It's a battle about de-Christianization.
Like, are we a Christian society or aren't we?
Well, I just have to say we are not politically and legally in Christian societies anymore since the separation.
Of church and state.
And that's a crucial aspect of living in a democracy.
So no, we aren't.
And yes, it does sound like she's arguing that we should be, especially if Perry thinks the sexual morality of the 50s got it right.
Because the Roe versus Wade decision didn't happen until 1973. It should not be lost on us here that her book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, No discussion here of the consequences of returning to a time of back-alley abortions,
women and girls being forced to give birth to their rapist babies, or the criminalization of doctors who provide non-obstetric care that might still endanger unborn babies, leading to even Worse outcomes for patients.
What about birth control?
I have used a lot of hormonal contraception.
I'm using hormonal contraception right now, right?
I think that the pill is really useful at the individual level.
It's only when it scales that it causes problems.
And I think that actually if I was going to go back to any moment in time in terms of hormonal contraception, probably the best arrangement was actually a...
Once again, Perry has a reasonable-sounding start, which then turns kind of self-serving and then exposes what I can only describe as an underlying moral disgust and reactionary idealization of the past, which...
It takes a while to get through the smoothness of her delivery and her presentation to start to really detect this enough times to see the pattern.
This even-handed sounding rejection of social progress also extends into dating.
And marriage.
Whereas in the past, and indeed in other cultures, my first degree was in anthropology, so I always come at this with the mind of the anthropologist and thinking, what is it about us that makes us different from other cultures?
and other cultures invariably have much more formal ways of doing things in terms of matchmaking young people and getting them married and getting them starting families.
And we don't.
And in some ways that's good, right?
It does mean that the outlier people, the unusual people can be experimental and can have more freedom and can have more options.
And that's really good for them.
But I think for most people, actually, it just produces a degree of passivity.
And almost flailing.
I think that that's so much of what we see actually among young people now.
There's a kind of, there's this profound uncertainty.
And we see that in the data.
Yes.
Other cultures have much more formal ways of doing these things.
I think it's called arranged marriage, Louise.
It sure sounds like it.
And then there is this ironic turnaround in her analysis where she says, Young people complaining of the overwhelming deluge of potential partners to choose from on dating apps are rendered flailing and, here's the important word, passive.
Now, to my mind, there's nothing more romantically passive than having your parents pick your spouse.
But I guess I'm just one of those soft-headed progressives.
This is actually an example.
of a criticism that came up for me throughout their sense of view.
And it's typical of a lot of this kind of heterodox media discourse.
The incredible prevalence of false dichotomies.
So, in this case, Perry says the data shows that young people are incredibly uncertain.
They're spoiled for choice, which we've already established in terms of bodily autonomy is not a word she values, choice.
And they are lonely.
And disillusioned.
This may well be the case, and it is certainly something worth researching.
Like, what is causing this phenomenon?
It's true that millennials and Gen Z are dating less, they're getting married less, and what she doesn't say is they're having sex less than Gen X and boomers did at their age.
And there are many interesting hypotheses to explore about internet culture, socioeconomic factors.
How they were parented and so on.
But for Perry, this seems to suggest that we've lost that crucial practice from non-Western cultures and from days gone by at home, arranged marriage.
Or if I really lean into not wanting to put words into her mouth, more formal ways of matchmaking young people and getting them married were her exact words.
While I'm being fair, she did also say that the absence of this arranged marriage may be a good thing for the outliers, the unusual people who want to experiment and have more options, even though apparently this doesn't work for everyone else.
So she does this false dichotomy thing on the next topic too.
When there are no established rules, and not least, right, and I know that this is a controversial issue, when premarital sex is completely normalized, women's leverage is reduced.
Dramatically.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it does become the case that if you're a high-status man and you're attractive and you do really well on the apps, which is true for a minority of men, you...
You don't have to do really anything that women ask of you, right?
Because there's like an endless supply of new women available and there is no stigma attached to leading them on, right?
Well, there's all of these interesting studies that show that there's a tiny percentage of men that basically get all of the women on the apps.
And then all of the rest of the men are sort of left with nobody.
Yeah, and I'm miserable about it.
All I can really hear is the bog standard conservative argument that you won't want to buy the cow.
It completely fails to acknowledge, as does Perry every time I hear her interviewed, the widespread convention of serious relationships in which people have monogamous premarital sex as a kind of prelude test run to eventually getting married if it works out.
There's also this hearkening back to This mythic, she calls it back in the day, where you just couldn't have premarital sex.
Which, if we take her at her word, also means the period where young women who did have premarital sex, and they would get pregnant more often because of a lack of contraceptive technology, would then be ostracized.
And shamed.
And they would often be forced to give up their babies for adoption after carrying them to term.
This happened to an estimated 1.5 million women in America in the 1950s, according to Ann Fessler's book, The Girls Who Went Away.
Now, the kinds of maternity homes to which these unmarried young women were sent and where they were encouraged to give up their babies for adoption, they're on the rise again in the U.S. in the wake of overturning Roe v.
Wade.
And, unsurprisingly, they're usually associated with anti-abortion Christian organizations.
But then, did you notice that piggybacking on all of this is the much less smooth-sounding language of romantic and sexual economics and hierarchies?
Language that's often used by the red-pilled manosphere types.
You know, high-status men, high-value men.
Hypergamy, which is women seeking out wealthier and in the mouths of those red-pilled dudes, more powerful men.
This interview with Perry also references data from dating apps as illustrating a terrible cultural trend of high-status men getting all the female attention and so not having to commit to monogamy.
While all the other guys languish in loneliness, and this is often used as a justification for incel culture and for why young men are so angry and are turning to MAGA. Like many on the right, Perry and Weiss will often bring up survey data that shows that Gen Z is dating less and, whispered, having less sex.
Which always sounds kind of hollow to me, because on the one hand...
They, or should I just say Perry, is anti-premarital sex.
But on the other hand, it's such a shame that Gen Z are not doing it.
You'd think that actually celebrate this trend, but there's a lack of consistency here.
I also just want to say Gen Z are roughly 13 to 28 years old right now.
So I'm neither surprised nor alarmed to learn that the younger half of that demographic may still be relatively romantically and sexually inactive.
And look, the thing is, it is the case, I think.
It is certainly the case that back in the day when you couldn't have premarital sex and when the expectation was that you would get married and you would have children and it was rare to not do so, there were women who probably felt as if they'd kind of settled.
And felt like they were married to men who were, you know, dissatisfying in various ways.
Like, I think that we have to face up to that.
That clearly was the case.
Having said that, I do wonder if our modern, our very, very modern conception of what marriages ought to be like is in a sense unhealthy.
There's this, Eli Finkel wrote this book called The All or Nothing Marriage.
Some years ago, it's a great book, about the stages of marriage in terms of looking at American history specifically.
And he kind of modelled it on Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
So when you're living in a society which is very strained materially, say you're living on the frontier, right, in 19th century America, really your priority is living.
Yeah.
So you want a partner who can like chop wood for you, grow food for you.
You know what I mean?
Like it's very much a union of survival.
And of course of reproduction and then allowing your children to survive as well.
But then as society becomes more comfortable, more affluent, people start to actually expect more from their marriages and they think, well, maybe I also want someone who's actually kind of fun to be around.
Maybe I want someone who I have a real romantic connection with.
And you get to the point now in 21st century America and other parts of the West where actually we expect so much from our marriages.
We don't just expect them to be...
We expect them to be sites of self-development and of authenticity, you know, all this stuff, which frankly, some marriages can meet that threshold, but most can't.
Okay, so let me get this straight.
Economic and social progress leading to climbing Maslow's hierarchy of needs and therefore expecting more compatibility, fulfillment, intimacy, and shared personal growth from marriage.
That's a bad thing, especially for women.
This is more misguided, lost, golden age stuff.
But here's the kicker.
And the nodding smile from Barry in the video is telling, too.
Listen here for her hushed yes as she supports what Louise is saying, because this is how the pipeline maps out.
I kind of ended up almost...
As you say, I came from a secular background.
I came from quite a left-wing background, particularly, you know, my early 20s when I first started thinking about this stuff.
Very much a feminist background.
This was not motivated reasoning, okay?
If anything, this was quite painful reasoning to actually...
I almost reconstructed traditional Christian sexual ethics from the ground up.
From looking at data, from looking at cross-cultural studies, from thinking really deeply about some of these contemporary issues, I kind of painfully and reluctantly ended up reaching the conclusion that actually the sexual culture of the 1950s was pretty good.
To the extent that you can solve some...
Profound and eternal human problems through social technologies.
You can't always.
Everything has trade-offs.
Every culture has its flaws.
There isn't a utopia.
There's never been one that isn't going to be one.
But in terms of balancing these different challenges, actually, I think we did it pretty well right up until the sexual revolution when we threw it out the window.
Next, Barry asks about Andrew Tate.
Do you remember him?
He's the outrageously misogynist millionaire online influencer who targets young men and boys and who flaunts having gotten rich by manipulating women who are falling in love with him into doing sex work.
He's the guy that the Trump administration just pressured last week, just pressured the Romanian government to allow to essentially escape to Florida.
By getting them to lift travel restrictions around their pending human trafficking criminal charges.
You know, the really crucial difference between John Peace and Andrew Tate, there are obviously lots of differences, but the one that I think is most salient to this issue is John Peterson is basically preaching a Christian message, and Andrew Tate is not.
The more I think about it, the more I think that actually that's really the key dividing line if you're thinking about American culture in particular.
And again, this is one of these, like, I've argued myself into this position almost against my will, but actually I think there is...
You're like, I am a Christian fundamentalist.
I don't want to be, but I am.
The facts, Barry, yeah.
There you have it.
The only difference between the Tate brothers.
And Jordan Peterson is that Jordan Peterson is a Christian.
And so now, here's Barry asking what she calls a crazy question.
Is our smooth talker, who's actually, as it turns out, very conservative on abortion, premarital sex, contraception, and who, by the way, believes in abolishing no-fault divorce, because just as with supposed casual abortion, and let's just say it, Slutty women who want consequence-free sexual pleasure by taking the pill.
No-fault divorce is really just about convenience and usually for trivial reasons.
Never mind the fact that if we go back to the time before the sexual revolution and even after it for a good 10 years, there was no such thing as marital rape.
And it was much harder for women to leave abusive marriages.
So is our...
Smooth-talking and well-bred, very bookish anthropologist, a Christian?
This is crazy.
I can't even believe I don't know the answer to this.
I assume the answer.
Are you Christian?
Oh, good question.
I would call myself a Christian agnostic.
Okay.
I go to church quite a lot.
Cultural Christian.
Yeah, I guess so.
Well, I keep going to church in the hope that I might suddenly believe and it hasn't really happened.
I can make a very strong sociological defense of Christianity.
Yeah.
But that's not quite, you know.
You need to believe the Jesus part.
Yeah.
I'm told by Catholic friends that that's me being very Protestant about it.
It's me thinking, like, I have to have, like, a super strong, authentic inner belief in order to be a Christian.
And I can't find it.
And I think, oh, no, like, something wrong with me.
Apparently, that's not necessary, they tell me.
We wouldn't call it this, but do you think we live in a pagan society?
I think increasingly, yeah.
And that's...
And I'd say that our increasing acceptance of assisted dying is a sign of that.
I think that our increasingly casual attitude towards abortion is a sign of that.
Did you notice, Barry, talking over Louise insistently to try to establish what I think of as a dog whistle, which has become common amongst the public figure atheists who've slowly made common cause with the religious right in recent years?
The term, cultural Christian?
To me, this is just a marriage of convenience.
And it's also purely motivated by intellectual laziness.
I believe X, Y, and Z, and it turns out that those beliefs fit with certain traditional religious values.
And even if I don't believe the underlying metaphysics, they invite me on their podcasts and I speak at their conferences.
They pay my bills.
And importantly, they provide a God of the gaps basis for my ideas being true.
Surely, if they are rooted in an ancient religious source, they must be wise.
They must have emerged from some core truth about the human condition.
Okay.
Don't get me wrong.
I can anticipate the objections.
I want to be fair.
I don't think of Louise Perry or Barry Weiss as ultra-conservative religious extremists.
I'm not saying that.
Weiss has, in fact, recently warned about how fringe online bigotries on the right can easily migrate into the mainstream, and me thinks that horse has already bolted.
But she still is erroneously under the impression that she can shut the barn door, even as she moves in circles of horse thieves and has been made wealthy by their funding.
But I also don't think the smooth, heterodox reasonableness of what they present is true either.
They're not just centrist intellectuals who are willing to have the brave conversations that censorious lefties supposedly forbid.
contextually, culturally, politically, they are situated on the right.
For this not to be true, they'd have to be doing a much more nuanced and thoughtful job of differentiating certain observations, which may have some merit, from a more centrist or left-leaning stance, that have to be differentiating those with lots of from a more centrist or left-leaning stance, that have to be differentiating those with lots of caveats about the crucial importance of female equality and choice from the reactionary, traditionally religious, and conservative agendas that
Like, this interview is not Perry and Weiss discussing the incredible dangers to women that accompany the breakneck implementation of Project 2025 or of an ascendant Christian nationalism.
It's, And then thoughtfully discussing what they think the left may be missing or what cultural trends to which Project 2025 and Christian nationalism are decidedly not the answer may tell us about the current state of marriage and relationships and the equality of the genders, for example.
This is the irony.
Because the entire heterodox project prides itself on nuance and data and adopting points of view that are not beholden to political conformity or convenience.
So they say.
Now yes, Weiss is a Jewish lesbian who claims some center-left positions.
And yes, Perry has some less conservative attitudes about...
Exceptions for abortion, say incest or protection of the life of the mother or rape.
But those facts seem to me to serve practically, even if that's not the intention, mostly to launder what are anti-feminist, anti-choice, pro-patriarchy talking points that not only gloss over what was actually terrible for women before the 1960s,
In America and other places, and how much has actually improved, it not only glosses over that, but also the real-world impacts of the kinds of legislative policies that ride on these outdated cultural attitudes about women and their place in our societies.
Here's my prediction, though.
I think That these types of figures are extremely useful to the right, and they have a lot of influence over centrists or people disenchanted by the woke excesses that the right has cynically amplified, generalized, and smeared, to the extent that people like Weiss trumpeted those excesses before the election as being much more dangerously authoritarian than MAGA.
But as useful as they are, their day will come when they suddenly realize that the audience they've catered to has a much larger percentage of misogynists, anti-Semites, and homophobes in it than they idealistically imagined. and homophobes in it than they idealistically imagined.
Just search YouTube for gay MAGA convert Dave Rubin's amazement that his good friend, and supposedly more tolerant than the woke, Ben Shapiro, told him point blank during an interview that no, He could never come to an anniversary party for he and his husband because he believed that gay relationships were against his religion.
Or what about the live stream feed of hateful anti-gay and fundamentalist religious condemnation when Rubin announced to his audience that he and his husband were going to adopt two kids they had fathered through surrogacy?
Surrogacy is also, by the way, something that our smooth-talking If you're curious to dig into this more, go and watch the public debate held at an L.A. theater hosted by the Free Press with Barry Weiss moderating from about a year ago.
It's titled Has the Sexual Revolution Failed Women?
It's a complete disaster of a debate.
With Perry, of course, on the side of, yes, the sexual revolution has failed women, coming across as the most prepared, calm, and reasonable participant while making the same case I've been critiquing here.
