Is it Time for a New Sexual Revolution?
6/25/202655 min
The growing alienation between men and women is, to my mind, one of the biggest stories of our time.
It’s warping our politics and culture through the rise of misogynistic influencers on the right and a growing sense of feminist despair on the left.
My guest this week believes that our problems today can be traced back to the sexual revolution. She argues that it reset relations between the sexes in a fundamentally negative way and ultimately benefited men. Louise Perry is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal’s Free Expression section and the author of “The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.”
- 0:00 - Intro
- 01:28 - “The Case Against the Sexual Revolution"
- 16:20 - What is reactionary feminism?
- 21:30 - The effects of the digital revolution on men and women
- 30:29 - The tradwife phenomenon
- 34:58 - What about premarital sex?
- 43:38 - Can female emancipation and sexual restraint coexist?
(A full transcript of this episode is available on the Times website.)
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsSpeaker 10:00
[gentle music] I'm Jonathan Knight, and I'm the General Manager of New York Times Games. Our puzzles are human-made every day with the standards you'd expect from The New York Times. And this matters because when you choose to spend time with our games, it should be time well spent solving puzzles handcrafted for you. We think that's something worth investing in and something worth paying for.
Louise Perry· Guest0:21
Subscribe now for a special offer on all of our games at nytimes.com/joingames.
Ross Douthat· Host0:28
Are the trad wives successful reactionary feminists? Are they Louise Perry readers- [laughs] ... who've taken, who've taken the right, the right point of view?
Louise Perry· Guest0:39
[laughs] Yes, who found their inner ideology and doubled down.
Ross Douthat· Host0:42
[upbeat music] The growing alienation between men and women is, to my mind, one of the biggest stories of our time.
Speaker 40:53
I'm choosing to continue to be celibate.
Louise Perry· Guest0:55
I have zero interest in dating ever again.
Speaker 50:57
I'm not dating nobody. It's not worth it.
Ross Douthat· Host1:00
It's visible in our politics, where the sexes are more polarized than ever before, and it's visible all over the culture, in a feminist and progressive mood that seems to despair over heterosexuality itself, and in the rise of toxic online misogynist influencers on the political right.
Speaker 51:21
Women exist for sex.
Speaker 41:23
You guys need to be able to stand up to your woman and tell her, "Shut the [censored] up," okay? Females don't have independent thought. They don't come up with anything.