Louise Perry’s Counter-sexual Revolution

The Unspeakable Podcast

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.8 • 784 Ratings

🗓️ 24 April 2025

⏱️ 68 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Writer and podcaster Louise Perry returns to the pod to discuss her new book, A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century, in which she takes ideas from her 2022 book The Case Against The Sexual Revolution and adapts them for teenagers and young adults. In this conversation, we pick up from where we left off in our 2022 interview, catching up on the evolving discourse around the winners and losers of the sexual revolution and trying to parse what’s going with the “online right” and its Little House On The Prairie fantasies and overall fixation on homestead life. (News alert: People on the American frontier did suffer from depression. There was even a name for it: Prairie Madness.) We also talk about the 4B movement (what does “B” stand for anyway?), conservative matchmaking initiatives (has Louise crowdsourced her own yenta business?), and the need for a more interventionist approach to relationships and family life.

Guest bio:

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

Transcript

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0:00.0	I think that the experiment has been run, not just in relation to the sexual revolution, all sorts of things, a whole kind of progressive package.
0:06.0	The experiment has been run.
0:10.0	A big part of the reason that the experiment was run was not just ideological, it was material.
0:15.0	And that's something I spent quite a lot of time arguing in the book, right, that actually, you know, yes, second wave feminism was radical
0:21.2	movement, etc. But the thing that really changed relationships between men and women was the pill.
0:27.1	And then also the washing machine and the internet and all these other material changes that
0:32.3	we've seen to our lives. Like technology is the real spur of history and ideology kind of jogs
0:36.8	along in its wake.
0:37.6	But there's ideology there as well, right?
0:39.2	And I think that there are the true believers of the boomer generation
0:44.6	have been largely proved wrong just by events
0:51.9	because it took some time for the consequences of tearing down the old guardrails
0:57.3	to become evident. And I think this is why we're seeing Gen Z very much reacting against that
1:04.9	politics. Welcome to the unspeakable podcast. I'm your host, Megan Down. This is a conversation with author Louise Perry. Louise was on the podcast in the fall of 2022, talking about her book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. She is back to talk about her new book and what she's been doing since then.
1:28.8	Before we get to the interview, I just want to tell you a couple of things, as you may have
1:33.2	noticed. I haven't been posting regular pre-recorded interviews as much lately.
1:39.6	I've been kind of trying to get myself together over these last couple of months since the wildfires
1:45.2	here in L.A. And I've been doing live streams, as you may have heard. I have launched
1:51.5	officially a twice a week live stream on Substack. It is called the Unspeak Easy Live. It does not
1:59.9	necessarily have to do with the unspeak easy online community.
2:03.5	It is just the name of the live stream. And in fact, I'm going to start transitioning over this
2:10.4	podcast, the unspeakable, and calling it the unspeak easy. It will be the same format, same deal,
	...

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