Ross Douthat of the NY Times interviews Louise Perry, a British writer who has argued that the sexual revolution was a mistake.
Perry: Heteropessimism is a word sometimes used to describe particularly women’s feeling of antagonism and disappointment toward heterosexual relationships with men and the feeling of just wanting to opt out, which is often a product of being burned by hookup culture.
And I think that a lot of this is downstream of lack of friendships with the opposite sex. I think also it feeds into women not necessarily having had any positive close relationships with men until they are inducted into a sexual culture which assumes that the default initial relationship will be casual.
I think that is a lot of what explains heteropessimism, that if your only experience of men is within a sexual culture that favors their interests, it’s not surprising that women are feeling negative. And it’s not difficult to find women raging against a culture of casual sex. . . .
Douthat: As you were saying about heteropessimism, there’s just much more hostile discourse between men and women, coming from the feminist left, obviously, coming from a kind of masculinist right. I think it’s the negativity that is really striking to me.
And again, lots of this especially in the States, but I’m sure in the U.K. as well, has focused on men and male alienation. But there was a really good essay in The New Statesman about female alienation, that women are moving left out of a profound cultural alienation and deep pessimism about the whole social structure. Hostility to capitalism and hostility to young men seem to go together.
And then you obviously have something very powerful happening with younger men, who are deep into forms of right-wing politics that are tangled up with misogyny, as well as forms of racism and antisemitism.
How much of this do you think is just digital conditions? Just as the pill was a revolution, how much of it is just that the internet is bad for relations between men and women?
Perry: I think quite a lot. One of the things that the internet does is that it exposes what the other sex is saying about you all the time.
Douthat: OK, go on.
Perry: So what would previously have been locker room talk or would have been women gossiping among themselves is now public and exposed in a way that it was never historically. And I think that type of talk ought to be private.
It’s perfectly normal and natural for people to have mostly homosocial kinds of friendships and to say vulgar or unkind things in private. But now, of course, the internet blasts this out into the public domain. I think that is part of the problem. And this has been much commented upon; the extent the internet encourages people to double down on their ideologies is also part of the problem.
I’m sure that this is a big part of what’s going on with young women. Young women are very mimetic — human beings are very mimetic, but young women, I think, are more mimetic.
For instance, young women are often the originators of new slang. They’re very socially sensitive, and fashions and so on often originate among young women. And that ability, which is both good and bad, is turbocharged online because the internet is this remarkable tool for mimesis. Hence why I think you see actually greater political radicalization among young women than among young men.
Obviously, the young male political radicalization is more commented upon because young men are more dangerous. It’s probably the main reason. We’re more worried about violence that they might commit.
I think the manosphere is unlikely to encourage young men to be violent and dangerous. I think it’s quite likely to encourage them to be lonely and sad, and that seems like a problem.
But in terms of who has actually changed politically over the last 10 years, it’s young women who are veering left and young men who’ve actually stayed relatively still — at least the median young man has stayed relatively still.
Bedell: I notice two things, the high overall level of misery in our society, and the way the internet makes this worse by constantly exposing people to the worst people and the worst opinions. but Perry sees hope.
Perry: One good thing to say for our current era is that if you have sufficient agency and strength of will, you can almost have it all, pretty much. We all have the capacity actually to resist all of the negative trends that we’ve spoken about today, which maybe wasn’t so true for our ancestors. So in that sense, maybe the modern choices available to us are a good thing.
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