YouSaid · the spoken record

Laurie Penny

lines on the record: 55
first: 2022-04-01
most recent: 2022-04-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think that one of the things I'm optimistic about is that I don't think it's ever going back in its box. What a lot of these neo-masculinists and far-right movements really seem to want is a return to traditional values, which means women in their pledge. It means marriages forever and there's no divorce and there's no, you can't be gay, you can't be queer, you definitely can't be trans. And women who have sex outside marriage are sluts and all of those things. And it means they want Gilead basically. And I just don't think it's ever going to happen without massive, massive social change, which I don't think the public has a stomach before that is not going to happen. But I think it would just be a hard to live in that tension for the next few years. They're fantastic”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“like to think that if I didn't have that sense of like I gotta watch it that I would that I would have come to that naturally and that I'd be the kind of person who would just automatically have learned all the things I've had to really learn really fast but I don't know I don't know that and who can like and I think it's It's cowardly. I think people who are people for whom, as somebody who's been cancelled multiple times by multiple different kinds of groups, I think people who use that as an excuse to not even try to change, I think that's cowardice.”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Highly publicized rape case in Stubeville in the US. And I said, I think I believe I said that this girl, this is the new Emmett Till, if you know who Emmett Till is, you know, the victim in the civil rights movement, very young boy who's lynched. And that was a really just culturally ignorant, messed up thing to say. You could tell what I was getting at, which made it worse. And like, and there was a huge backlash to that. And I've also been backlashes I've had backlashes to things that I've said that have just been massively taken out of context and I didn't even say. And that has been painful every time. And I'm also less racist as a result. And I take more, I would like to think, and I do like to think that if I weren't kind of terrified of what people of color on the internet will say to me if I get something wrong, I would.”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there should be more of that. And I think right now we don't have the answer because unfortunately the kind of what people call cancel culture or mob justice or the sort of public shaming aspect and the idea that nothing that there will never be forgiveness for making a mistake, that kind of creation of consequences has been its violent and ugly in some ways and it has also been the only thing that has created change. I mean for me I think I put this in the book, but like I have had several times over the past 12 years of being like a sometimes a young and dumb person on the internet really trying hard to learn everything I could. I've had several times where I've really messed up and said something really foolish about race, not necessarily racist, but not racist because of ignorance. You know, I think I once 10 years ago there was a”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wrong there apart from just mess up a debate and make a fool of myself. I stand by what I actually said. I just should have pronounced it better without just breaking down. But the sense that nothing bad that you have ever done will ever be forgiven or forgotten. That is a new one for people in certain positions of power. But people of colour are certainly incredibly used to it. Women are used to it. The more power you have in society, the more you expect a certain automatic forgiveness. But I also believe that there should be more forgiveness for everyone. I think there should be amnesty for everyone. I think everybody, currently we don't have an answer within culture for how is anybody supposed to be allowed to change and grow and say, well, maybe this thing I did a few years ago was really fucked up. Sorry for swearing it intelligence, but maybe this was like for saying like, I did some shitty, awful things. Or I just said to all was wrong. I think there should.”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's true for lots of different people. And I've, you know, look, I've certainly had many, many moments when I've been very, very glad that I wasn't on Twitter before I was 24. I'd got most of my real crazy stuff at the way. But look, like once upon a time, 10 years ago, I did an event with David Starkey where it was the worst event I've ever done. I was underslept. I was jet lagged. David Starkey came up and yelled at me and rather than being a smooth debater, I cried. I think I actually cried. And every day, every single day, somebody tweets that video at me, multiple times. Like that was over 10 years ago and I'm never ever allowed to forget. And I think the sense that your sins will find you out and anything you ever do that was ignoble. I didn't do anything.”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think white heterosexual gender able-bodied men are, I don't think they're the most endangered. I think they feel they are the least used to having their identity questions and being under. Franklin Leonard has this line, when you're used to privilege equality feels like intact and it's not. I think There is definitely a sense, and I believe that this is, I truly believe that this is partly an affect of technology as much as gender relations. And there's other writing I'm going to be doing about, oh, my substack, which people might want to join is because it's some new stuff I've been working on since I handed in the book, but there is definitely a sense that nothing you can ever do will ever be forgiven. And that's not just true for men. It's true.”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Never any plot, there's never any human drama, it's just this sort of weird factory of people just hammering each other into submission. And that's not the nature of pornography. That's the nature of a certain kind of modern porn. I consume pornography. The pornography that I enjoy is mainly written by nice, it's written and it's mainly about vampires, fairies, werewolves, vampire fairies or werewolf vampires and set in the Victorian age and it's gay and it's wonderful and like that is still pornography, but it's not that's not what we're talking about when we're talking about, well, I hope not. If they come from Ompire Werewolf fairy poor, then we'll be held to play.”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Might not really work the way we want it to. That's not a lot of complete answer. Just saying this thing won't work. I absolutely understand what you're trying to get at, that there is something really dark and scary happening within pornography. And I know a lot of people who have made porn or been involved in as porn actors. And every one of them I know would agree that there is something happening. And Stoya, who was a wonderful activist as well as some former porn actress, has this line where she says trying to learn about trying to learn how to have sex from watching porn is like trying to learn how to drive from watching monster truck rallies. Right. And part of the problem is that we're actually quite a sexually conservative culture apart from pornography. And so there is this disconnect where everyday life is like this weird, you can't talk about it and porn, it's like sex happens in this weird porn world where there's never any mistakes.”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That kind of work. I know a couple of people who do it. I can never do it myself, but I'm like, go with God. Absolutely, Mrs. So-and-so. Great. But the restrictions on it, it's complicated because a lot of the restrictions that are put in place around things like pornography, things like even things like online fraud or cybercrime are sort of ways for governments to justify broader surveillance technology. And there are lots of big cultural differences around this, but you will often see, funnily enough, the only time that right-wing governments ever tend to care about online violence against women, online harassment of women, is when that's brought up as a reason to make sure nobody can ever be anonymous online. I don't think there's an answer. I think like just saying curbs on pornography”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Often the weirdly I did actually did a couple of reports on this when the most recent porn laws were coming through was just after the in the first coalition Tory-led government. But there was a weird obsession with cracking down on SNM sites, particularly with cracking down on female domination sites. Like if you looked at the list of like the first list of the first few hundred websites that were taken off and blocked, a lot of them were like they weren't what you think of when you think of like an evil pornographer. They were mistress so-and-so who in the daytime has a job in a shop and works from her bedroom getting men to telling men they're terrible people which they enjoy and then making them buy her shoes which she will then sell to pay her rent. Like it's deeply respected.”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I'd be interested in who's asked this question. Thank you for it. Again, the short answer is no, but that's too simple an answer. There are already curbs on online porn. And of course, there are rightly criminal statutes in place for people who are engaged in pornography involving or featuring children in any way, which is, yeah, I do believe that there are some forms of pornography which not just depict violence, but they cause violence to be done in making them and which can never ever be ethical, ever, ever, ever. But in terms of online pornography, there have been a lot of movements in the past 10 years to restrict online porn. And none of them are freely worked, particularly because the pornography that they usually target is not actually the porn that's doing the”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Focusing on a different kind of life that can create social change on a far more wide reaching long-term scale than the angry insul. And I am aware that that's a much longer answer than yes and kind of, but that's the point of the book.”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, women are just being selfish and don't women owe men something fundamentally. Why are all these men so miserable? Whereas women and queer people have generally been socialized to believe that their violence, if they were to dare to be violent in any way, it would not go very well for them, for us at all. And women and queer people are not shooting up schools and they're not electing fascists and they're not refusing to play in that very loud tantrumy, angry, violent way. What they're doing is just walking away from relationships. They're just not getting married, not having kids and focusing on trying to live the best life they can understand. And that itself, that is far more revolutionary than the angry incel boys. It is going to create far more long-lasting social change. It's already done. Just look at the amount of people my age who would just, they'd not had kids, they're never going to have kids. They've not got married, maybe they might not ever get married.”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our generation. And I think there is at the moment a huge who blinks first happening within men as a whole are sort of refusing to budge, refusing to step up, not doing the work, electing fascists, voting against abortion, going on rampages, shooting up schools, not as a whole, but honestly the treatment of incels and the reaction to that has been very, very telling over the last few years because although obviously we all condemn the violence and we wouldn't go that far, but there is a sense in which those young men are sort of saying the quiet bit out loud and you saw kind of respectable columnists in newspapers and across the world saying like well obviously these young women are very troubled but they have a point kind of like isn't there something to”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's hard because I'm talking for a position of somebody who is in a very happy relationship. I've got married a couple of years ago, which was very unexpected. Whole different story there. But I look around and I see a lot of just the straight woman I know. I see a lot of them. It's just a little bit too late in terms of model patriarchy to live the lives that they were kind of promised. And I see a lot of people having to make decisions under duress and people who are facing things like, well, maybe we could have kids within the next few years if we were prepared to date absolutely anyone, including people who might be violent, including people who we just don't get along with that well. And, you know, I'm seeing, I think it will, I think change will come, but it may not come quickly enough for some of.”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a longer answer than yes and kinda but yes and kinda is kind of the answer there. So yeah, it's absolutely it's happening. It's been happening for many, many years now and look if you, I am optimistic, but I'm not necessarily optimistic for the immediate future, the very short-term future. I think it's still going to get a little bit worse before it gets better. But if you look at, for example,”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Their best to create and to live, like Alistair Gray says, it was work as if you lived in the early days of a better nation. And I see the young women around me, well, my age, youngish. I see the young women around me doing that and trying to live in the world's, even the World Book were promised as kids where there is genuine gender inequality. And I see if I think of people who are not stepping up and not doing the work, it's not women and queer people I think of. I think of women and queer people as not only stepping up but also having to fill in the gaps where most cis men are not stepping up and unfortunately that does give most cis men a bad rap and that's kind of the part of the point that's how masculinity works if you're if you're one of the few exceptions then you've broken the rules of fight club”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An interesting question, thank you. I don't believe that I'm trying to find a nice way of saying this, okay? I'm trying to find a nice way of because it is a valid question. And I'm not saying that women and queer people of all genders and identities don't have to have any responsibility as people in life that we're somehow like helpless babies and we can't be held responsible for anything to do with gender and inequality. But I honestly don't believe, I think of course we need to step up, but we already are. And what the crisis is coming because men and in particular white cis men are just refusing to meet us. Women are even if we just talk about women in here, like looking at women my age, they are doing the most. They are burned out and exhausted and they are”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So many modern masculinist leaders are offering people a sense of restored pride and they're offering to bring back, to give back something that was taken.”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then there can only be so many winners. And if it's a system of winners and losers, then it's also a system that creates an enormous number of losers. And there is really no answer for what you're meant to do in society if you are a loser under the terms of modern masculinity. And a lot of the rage that's boiling out of the new far right is a reaction to that. One of the reasons that frustrated entitlement and that sort of that despairing energy that is so loud in modern masculinity. One of the reasons that is linked to the far right is that there are really no other options. There's nothing offered instead. If dominance is the only language where masculinity can express itself and violent dominance, then there is no, yeah, there's no answer for how to be for what you're meant to do when you have lost in the terms of that deal.”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But when we talk about the mainstream rhetoric of the porn, it is straight porn, is very, very violent and Boys think that that is now what's expected of them more and more, and people who've done studies and talked to. God bless the researchers who go out and manage to actually talk to 14 year old boys about what they think about sex because they're all, everybody who's ever managed to write a successful book of that has like deep mom energy, which I really, really love. Peggy Ornstein, I completely love her as a philosopher and a writer. That sense that modern masculinity is a Like modern capitalism is a system of dominance where the prize goes to the biggest bastard basically. It's a ponzi scheme because if it's based on dominance, then you can't.”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Firstly, it's very upsetting to realize that you live in that kind of world and not certainly not all men and boys feel comfortable with it. It's a terrifying world to be raised in as a little boy. I've talked to a lot of men who have told me, you know, that masculinity frankly scares them and always did when they were little that they were expected to be this, you know, powerful, dominant thing, particularly younger men right now. If you look at how younger men are reacting to there's a lot of chat about pornography and how we probably don't have time to go into porn culture, but what is it? What young men think is expected of them from watching mainstream pornography, by which I mean the porn that you can get on Redsheet for free, not the actual, every kind of porn you can imagine is on the internet.”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you can cheat other people and humiliate other people, that's an acceptable part of a sense of modern moral values. You just look at the leaders we elect. I mean, look at the people at the heart of government right now. These are people whose, the ideal and the logic of dominance. It's not about decency or strength or fair dealing. It's about what can you get, what can you treat other people out of, and how can you be the strongest and the richest and the most powerful by flattening everybody else. And that is...”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think you're completely right to draw out the bit where I strongly believe that masculinity and capitalism are linked in the way they're formulated and that modern capitalism, the ideals of modern capitalism and neoliberal capitalism, a post-neoliberal capitalism. The highest ideals are dominating with the people, cheating other people is fine with modern capitalism. It didn't used to be part of the kind of logic of masculinity in capital, but it is now. That's why we love a scammer. Scammer's a hero. been watching inventing Anna and it's fantastic it's all the industry”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A crisis, and like I know this in myself as a sense that nobody is allowed to make mistakes ever again and any mistake that anybody makes will be like sort of swooped on and you'll be publicly shamed and so it's it's not worth even trying and there is a there if you see what I mean like it's not untrue that all kinds of culture not just progressive culture can be quite Puritan can be quite there's a sense of hunting for sin i would say that that isn't it's not just the left that does that but um when the center right and when uh traditional institutions of power act like puritans and uh punish wrong think and shut people out who don't look right or don't sound right that it doesn't register as cancel culture and it doesn't register as moral justice that's just how the world is”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Called the telling. She's a fantastic, fascinating writer and she loves to talk about different alien societies because she's an anthropologist and she just loves to make up different societies and ask how life could be. And she's invented a mythology system where heroism isn't based on violence and it isn't based on great fleets of conquests. And the most important thing you can do as a hero, the word for hero in this made up alien culture is the same as person who has atoned for a great role. Like for me, to me, that is heroism and that kind of genuine attempt to address and to change the world both within yourself and within society around you. That is worth far more than just never doing anything wrong. And I think that's, I don't know if this was a note behind your question, but one of the things that does produce a sense of...”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Within all of these conversations, and I respect most in general, aren't the men who have never, ever, ever, ever done anything wrong because they don't exist. Like everybody who is raised within systems of oppression, so everybody in the world has at one time or another done something messed up by accident to somebody else. It's the people who are really trying to think around it and trying to not center themselves as part of that conversation and just sitting with their own guilt and their own pain and not making that somebody else's problem as well, not lashing out because of a sense of guilt and actually listening to it, listening to what it's telling. And that is not something that men and boys are ever taught. I was reading recently, I'm a huge reader of science fiction and was recently reading a book by Ursula Le Guin.”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To go too far, why don't you put it a bit nicer? You know, why don't you behave more respectfully? You had the same thing around the Black Lives Matter movements. Like, why you're just out of control? Why are you so angry? Why are you attacking us? Because there are lots of people. And I think this is, I honestly think for various reasons this is particularly true in Britain that being made aware of harm and damage that you have participated in even against your will, even without your knowledge that is received as an attack. So when I say to you, Shahade, you did something that really hurt me, if we're talking about this, you ask me a very hard question, it hurt me so much. Like that is perceived as, you know, if we're talking within that framework, that's perceived as an attack on you. And it can't be seen in any other way. And I think the men I respect most.”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sense that women and girls are finally talking about suffering and about how unfair and difficult the basic deals of life and the basic formula of the gender binary has been for us for so long. Women and girls are talking about how shitty dating can be, how unfair domestic partnership can be. And suddenly we're talking about it in a way that men can hear and they can't ignore and we're talking about it to each other in public. One of the things about privilege and one of the things about being part of a privilege historically has been that you don't have to be confronted with what other people suffer because of hierarchies of oppression. And the thing that's why when people call for civility, what they're actually calling for is, and you heard this a lot around me, is that we're”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of yes, actually, and maybe this is I'm talking about men I know and men and boys I've met but actually a lot of this book came out of not just the meeting you think but my particular experience of the meeting movement which as I had my last book come out around that time and a lot of men and boys were wanted to genuinely not to obviously I got a lot of people yelling at me but I also you know people who would genuinely wanted to talk were genuinely confused about what to do because they thought they were doing the right thing and it turns out they were and that is very I've been thinking a lot about it recently but it is it is genuinely hard to live with collective guilt I think there was a sense of collective guilt not just I mean within white culture within certainly within modern masculinity”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is another hard question No, but actually, no, it's amazing to chat to people who've actually read it and engaged with me. It's like it's just wonderful, honestly. And I apologize if my answers are going into, like, I've had to ban, do you ever have to ban yourself from theory words? Yes, but I'm banned from hegemony. But the secret is I don't know how to say it.”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think it's unfair to Oscar writer to have any kind of workable political solutions for anything because if that was what we were best at, we wouldn't be sitting writing theory books. We would be doing other useful things”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Persuade the women to give them little bits of it. And that's just, well, firstly, it's about the least erotic thing I've ever heard, apart from the bit with the dragon, which isn't mandatory. We love dragons so maybe you found a bit more about me than I was intending to on this call. But it's also, it's really depressing. It's non-sect is something you do with other people, not something you can give someone as an object.”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Rules of consent are like you know, should you ask every time you want to do something new, but the ethic is and the principle is that women's sexuality is as valid as men's sexuality. And sexuality is not something that women own and control and men have to sort of wheedle out of women, which is still a fundamental assumption of heterosexuality. More and more in the last 30, 40 years of I know there'll probably be people who cringe when you hear me saying neoliberalism, but it means that a culture in which everything is reduced to the logic of the market, the sexuality itself has become something that men are supposed to just acquire, something that men are supposed to get from women within like the deal of heterosexuality. So women are sort of hoarding all the sex, like greeding dragons and men have to sort of somehow persuade.”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fully consenting, and there have been all these mad sort of ideas like, you know, an app where you can sign something. And it's blessed, like obviously it's terrible in some ways, but I do love there's a certain purity to a kind of like very earnest, well-meaning tech bros just trying to find an app that will fix this. If we could have fixed 2,000 years of messed up patriarchal nonsense with an app, it would exist already, but it's that bit bigger than that.”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's now a question with a more complicated answer partly because I don't know what you did in the pandemic and the sort of like alone in pandemic times. I had a good few months, but I listened to a lot of podcasts about political philosophy and the definition of ethics. So I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole, but I spent a lot of time down there. But in the book when I'm talking about roles versus ethics, I'm talking about rules as a set of instructions for how to behave and ethics as a set of principles. So if the rule is, for example, you always hold the door for somebody else rather than slamming it in their face, the principle is other people matter. And just because you got somewhere ahead of them doesn't mean you should slam a door in their face. So when that applies to consent, right? People, especially around the beginning of the Me Too movement, but still people ask me, like, what do I do? How do I make sure my partner?”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But rape culture as a disciplinary function means it controls women's behavior, it controls the behavior of girls and people of all kinds, all different genders. And it's part of a system whereby women's behavior and women's sexuality is instrumentalized as a form of economic dependence on men, if that makes sense. I believe that was a complete sentence. If so, it's pretty crad of myself.”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Has really no answer for violence against women and in particular for sexual violence against women and children. And what that does, it's not simply about sex. It's also about sex, but it's not just about sex. What rape culture does is it functions as a form of discipline. It controls the behavior of women and girls and children. It says that it is your responsibility to guard against rape. Rape could happen to you at any time. And it asks women and girls to behave as if any man is a potential rapist. The idea that all men are rapists didn't come from feminism. It came from patriarchy. And except feminists were the first people to name it. And that, again, A lot of conservative culture right now is made up of people who are just incredibly angry at hearing themselves accurately described. And I don't know.”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When we talk about rape culture, which obviously, again, a lot of this book is slightly it's 102. It's not 101, it's something like that. But this book explains stuff to some people may already know, but just in case you don't, rape culture isn't a culture in which rape is common. It's a culture in which rape is normalized and accepted. I know it can feel quite controversial to say rape is accepted in the society, but if you look at the figures for how many violent sexual assaults and rapes actually result in a conviction, even of those that are brought to the police at all, you will see that rape is functionally legal in a lot of the global war, a lot of countries. And people know that in many cases it's not worth bringing rake case to trial, but just the system.”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the sex strike that is happening already, I think, is not women straight women refusing to have sex, it's straight women refusing to have sex with men who are violent or don't respect them or don't treat them like human beings. And that is, that's a sex strike that's been going on for a while now as women just have more and more options. A couple of hundred years ago, women basically had to put up with the least violent man they could find. We don't have to do that anymore. And patriarchy still can't come to terms with that fact.”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, that is one way of reading what I'm saying about consent in the book, specifically. So what Alyssa Malona was suggesting is that until conditions are improven, until sexual violence stops happening, women around the world should just refuse to have sex with men full stop, which I think is both a bit of a silly idea and something that people won't actually do. People aren't going to do that. Let's be real. People don't want to do that. People want to have sex, all kinds of people of all kinds of genders want to have sex. And any sort of revolutionary movement or any movement that seeks social change that starts on the basis of controlling women's sexuality, which a lot of modern conservative feminist movements do. Alyssa Milano.”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The birth rates are falling in the US as fast as anywhere else. And the only solution, even under a Biden presidency, the only solution the American policymakers have is to ban abortion. That's it. And I don't think that's going to cut it.”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is already for people to raise kids in this kind of economic climate and in this kind of precarity go and just rather not. People who are ambivalent about having kids are now much likely to much more likely not to have kids than they were before. And that's something that generations of male policymakers have no answer for because it's not part of their worldview and it's going to cause a massive crisis. That's what I mean when I talk about revolution. And those changes, we barely even have the language to describe them in society, let alone figure out what we're going to do about them. Because, you know, in the US, they've just had another big round of debates where they've tried to finally push through as part of a raft of policies. They've tried to finally push through maternity leave, paid maternity leave, which they just don't have a right, a right to in the US. And it didn't go through.”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Less and less collective commitment to making sure that work of life making happens. For example, over the past 10 years and more in the UK, there's been an enormous cutbacks in terms of the welfare state, social security, childcare, all of the artifacts of life making that threat society together. And it took COVID in some ways to make us see how literally essential all that work has always been. But maybe COVID has made it possible for us to see that as a society, but there don't seem to have been many actual changes yet. And often there is that gap. And I'm 35 at the moment. I'm from a cohort of people who are having to make the big decisions right now about whether to have kids, about what kind of partnerships they want to live in. And a lot of people are just looking at the lack of movement and looking at how high.”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sexual contract. And that is changing everything. I think Paul Mason and his recent book calls it a reproductive shock. And it is a total change in how fertility is controlled in society and how reproductive labor is organized. And this reproductive labor for, I imagine most people know what that means, but just in case it means all the work of life making that is done in society, not just having kids or even just raising kids, but also looking after people who are not so able to look after themselves, maintaining households, domestic work, organizing, all of that stuff. There is a necessary work. There is a real sea change in who is coerced into doing that and who is able to say, no, I'm not doing that. Just at the time when more and more of that work is being privatized and there's less and less collection.”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Policy makers, but if you've been watching trends in the different choices that women and girls have been making in their lives and the resistance that people have faced when they try to do things like balance, paid work with childcare, would actually try to have a life. No woman with kids, I know, is actually surprised when you talk about the drop off in birth rates over the past. I know it's been going down steadily over the past decade, but over the past two or three years during COVID, it's just fallen off a cliff and is still, there's no uptick. And rates of divorce are increasing. And there has been a real solid sea change in women's choices and women's real options, not just in terms of legal choices when it comes to being able to simply walk away from the old deal of heterosexuality and walk away from what Carol Pateman calls the”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, when people think about revolution, they generally think of scenes out of Les Miz, scenes like great physical violence and people rioting in the streets. And of course, that's often part of revolutionary times and actions. But these say in the 60s that revolution is in the head. And I do believe that, not that I was around in the 60s. I'm trying to sound like I was there. I wasn't actually at Woodsilk. But I believe that revolution particularly feminist revolution often happens. There are a lot of change has happened without people noticing or naming it properly. And what this book seeks to do is just to name what's already happening. For example, one of the things that's coming up more and more as more and more statistics and reports come out is the huge unprecedented drop in birth rates around the global north. And that seems to have come as a surprise to a lot of”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like not my place. Like, if you're a white person, you're meant to, this is something that, you know, that's not part of normal politics still in the UK. I don't know it's meant to exist in all. I think that's interesting. I don't know quite if it's polite to finish that sentence. But yeah, I had that education slightly later and I had that mainly via the internet. So the first interceptional and anti-racist feminist writing I read was often from American writers, actually, before you had the great resurgence in British anti-racist feminist writing in about five or six years ago, which has been wonderful to watch.”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In terms of writing style, Germaine Greer and Greer Dwalkin, I discovered bell hooks, the late bell hooks when I was in late teens, early 20s, hugely influential. Oddly, also literary writers like Angela Carter and Jeanette Winderson were a huge, huge influence. I came to antimacist in intersectional feminism a little later and I came to it like I came to socialism and a sense of historical materialism through feminism was my entry point tool of these things because it in many ways it's not something a point I'm trying to get across in the book is that and I know there's been pushback on the fact that I write about feminism and race even though I'm a”
2022-04-01 · Intelligence Squared · Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT