Podcast

Culture

Feminism

S&U interviews

14 May 2023

4 min read

My conversation with… Louise Perry

Re-enchanting sex. Yes, you read that right. Belle Tindall reflects on her somewhat spicy conversation with Louise Perry for the Re-Enchanting podcast.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A woman smiles as she speaks into a microphone. In the background is Big Ben.

Louise Perry recording at Lambeth Palace Library.

Listen now

Watch now

Radical feminist. Counter-feminist. Arch-conservative. Progressive puritan: the name Louise Perry comes with a milieu of labels attached to it, and after spending a couple of hours in her company, I would suggest that not one of them can adequately contain her.

Louise has written and released an utter grenade of a book. Love it or loathe it, you simply cannot ignore it. The Case Against the Sexual Revolution is exactly what it claims to be, a thorough (and admittedly compelling) dismissal of the notion that the 1960s sexual revolution was a leap forward for the well-being of women. According to the book, the idea that it was/is some sort of feminist victory is simply a myth, or more sinister than that, a lie.

If Louise is wrong, she has boldly given us the opportunity to enjoy disagreeing with her and her provocative views. But if there is even an ounce of truth in what Louise is suggesting, then it surely needs to be shouted from the rooftops.

Personally, I found myself in both agreement and disagreement while speaking with her for the Re-Enchanting… podcast. I’ll start with the disagreements, of which I admittedly wish there were more.

Where I have tended to focus my feminist efforts on achieving equality among the sexes, Louise is promoting wellbeing.

Louise defines herself as an agnostic, I define myself as a Christian, we both define ourselves as feminists. And yet, in what is perhaps an unexpected turn of events, Louise sits in a more conservative space than I do when it comes to what that feminism tends to look like. Maybe that makes me the exact type of person for whom her book was written. Where I have tended to focus my feminist efforts on achieving equality among the sexes, Louise is promoting wellbeing. And, according to Louise, they simply are not always the same thing. A solution to a society where masculine attributes are always favoured is not, Louise suggests, to encourage women to assimilate these masculine attributes (for therein lies the ultimate flaw in the sexual revolution). Rather, we should demand that our society learn to value attributes that are distinctly feminine, such as motherhood.

In hindsight, I wish I had asked Louise what such a society would look like for me, who is not a mother. How can I be valued? Are women who don’t, for assorted reasons, fit the mould of wife and mother inevitably pushed to the margins of this kind of ideal? Is the discrimination that we may face simply a result of the un-traditional unfolding of our own lives?

There is so much truth in Louise Perry’s bleak diagnosis of our modern sexual ethic, it almost hurts to hear it. The thing is, it needs to be heard.

That, and her emphasis on evolutionary biology as the primary explanation behind sexual assault (something which, working at a rape crisis centre, she has witnessed the trauma of in close proximity), are where Louise and I come to a fork in the road and seemingly favour differing routes. Call it naivety, but I suppose I leave a little more room for redemption and innate goodness in my worldview (and therefore, a lot more room for the condemnation of societies that propagate male violence because I have decided to expect, and therefore ideologically demand, more from men) than evolutionary biology tends to allow.

Despite this, I would suggest that there is so much truth in Louise Perry’s bleak diagnosis of our modern sexual ethic, it almost hurts to hear it. The thing is, it needs to be heard.

We spoke a lot about ‘sexual disenchantment,’ something which she mentions in her book. In keeping with Max Weber’s definition of such, sexual disenchantment is the (very recent) idea that sex is meaningless; it is just one of the many social interactions we have on any given day, akin to making a coffee for a colleague in the office, or meeting someone for a game of tennis. There is nothing inherently unique, sacred, or distinct about it. At least, not if one decides there isn’t. Any meaning attributed to sex can be an added extra.

The interesting thing, according to Louise, is that while society may believe on some ideological level that this is true, most of us simply do not live like it is. Afterall, if there is no unique understanding of sexual activity, there can be no unique understanding of sexual assault. As Louise chillingly stated, if this were the case, rape would just be a form of theft. And yet- both instinctively and legally, that is not how we perceive it.

Therefore, whether we like it or not, Louise forces us to ask ourselves this deeply uncomfortable question: is such a disenchanted perception of reality truly benefitting women in the way that we have been told that it is? Or is she right, have we been sold a lie? Is it time to make a societal U-turn and re-enchant sex once again?

Listen to our episode of Re-enchanting… Sex with Louise Perry and come to your own conclusions. Whether you agree or disagree with what she says (or, as in my case, a little of both), you’ll be mightily glad that you did.

Review

Comedy

Culture

Film & TV

1 May 2025

4 min read

Last One Laughing: we’re less in control than we think

"Humour is human" and deeply strange.

Jonny Torrance

Jonathan is a priest and theologian who researches theology and comedy.

A montage shows a group of comedians trying not to laugh.

Amazon MGM Studios.

10 comedians shut in a room. Last one to laugh wins.

It’s a simple concept, and with the addition of a few gimmicks, including games and surprise guests, Last One Laughing delivers on it. The show isn’t creative – there have been at least 27 previous versions in various languages – but it is successful and is a much-needed boost for Amazon Prime, whose content has tended to flop recently.

I enjoyed the show. It amused me, which is what it was supposed to do. I didn’t necessarily laugh out loud, and I think I probably would have enjoyed all the comedians doing their own standup better. Some of the comics have made their infectious laughter such a part of their charm that it was a bit bizarre seeing them crack jokes without having a giggle (I’m looking at you Bob Mortimer).

But overall, I had a good time watching Last One Laughing. I was entertained and I would recommend it. Jimmy Carr is unusually likeable as a host, though I wanted to hear more from Roisin Conaty, whose role as co-host was almost non-existent. Richard Ayoade was his normal genius self. And there were a few genuinely standout moments: I think my favourite was Rob Beckett whispering to Joe Wilkinson “you’ve doing a really really good job of showing off, lots of funny bits."

In fact, as that moment suggests, the show is probably at its best when it gets a bit meta, as the comedians reflect on their own comedy and what it is like to be a comic. Moreover, there is a genuine warmth between everyone, and an appreciation of each other’s talents, which gives the show a particularly endearing tone.

It’s good, mindless, not particularly clean (definitely not family friendly!), fun.

So Last One Laughing doesn’t tell us much we don’t already know. It’s not supposed to. It’s light entertainment.

Comics are funny.

Often the unexpected makes us laugh.

Not laughing can be very hard.

This last point, though, is perhaps worth thinking about a bit further. It is familiar to everyone. Who hasn’t felt the physical pain of trying to restrain the giggles in a moment when we really must not laugh?

But this is one of those things that is so familiar we often miss how strange it is.

Philosophers since Aristotle have speculated that laughter is one of the things that makes humans unique, since we don’t know of any animals that laugh. Whether the claim about human exceptionalism is correct or not (and I confess I remain agnostic about this), it does seem that laughter is a practically universal experience of human beings. As Philosopher Simon Critchley puts it, “humour is human.”

But if this is true, then laughter as a phenomenon also highlights some of the eccentricity of our humanity. For, as Last One Laughing shows us so clearly, laughter is only ever partially under our control.

Our bodies, our spirits, even our minds, can betray us at any moment. That something we don’t want, even something good like laughter, can erupt from within.

We often like to imagine ourselves as rational beings, whose lives are characterised by making informed and free choices. We think we are in charge, at least of ourselves, and that we move through the world intentionally, with purpose and direction.

And yet, into this nice picture of a life under control, laughter breaks in, often uncontrollably. Our muscles spasm. Our eyes stream. Our vocal cords erupt in strangely animal snorts and grunts.

The fact that professional comedians and actors can’t maintain a straight face, sometimes in the face of their own jokes (take a bow Daisy May Cooper), should remind us that there is much in ourselves that is beyond our conscious control. Our laughter almost always has cognitive content. It involves our minds. We laugh at things.

But it is always embedded within a body. Laughter, with all its bodily shakes and muscle twitches, sometimes just can’t be kept in, no matter what our minds and consciousness tells us.

Christianity has long been aware of our lack of control. Paul, writing to the church in Rome, lamented that “I do not do what I want to, but I do the very thing I hate.” St Augustine, one of the greatest theologians of the Western Church, wrote in the fourth century that “I had become to myself a vast enigma.” Martin Luther, the sixteenth century German theologian, began the Reformation and changed history, in part over an insistence that we are far less in charge of ourselves than we like to think.

Yet such writers do not counsel despair. Instead, they allow our lack of control to point to our need for God and his help. Paul, a few verses after the previous quotation, cries out: “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

Now, for all these authors, the stakes are high – they are talking about sin, death and damnation. The comedians in Last One Laughing are playing a much more relaxed game, all that they stand to lose is pride. Yet they too, one by one, discover that they “do not do the thing they want.”

And so, they are learning a version of a Christian lesson – that we are less in control of ourselves than we might like to think. That our bodies, our spirits, even our minds, can betray us at any moment. That something we don’t want, even something good like laughter, can erupt from within.

Now most of us, most of the time, probably enjoy the uncontrollability of laughter. It’s one of the things that make comedy enjoyable, both to watch and to perform. But it should maybe make us aware of other, less benign losses of control. Or at the least it should remind us that there is much in us that escapes our attempts at self-mastery.

Last One Laughing reminded me that laughter is stranger than we think. Just as I am stranger than I think.