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.

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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.

Article

Art

Culture

Film & TV

21 January 2025

5 min read

The constant pull of David Lynch’s direction

What made the director’s films so universally resonant?

Sonny Tindall

Sonny works creatively with videography, graphic design, fashion, and photography.

Lynch painting.

At the age of 16, initially wanting to experience the infamous performances of actors, John Hurt and Anthony Hopkins, I decided to watch The Elephant Man (1980). This was the film that opened up the weird and wonderful world of director, David Lynch, a world I immediately wanted to dive headfirst into.

I did so by watching the film that became the catalyst for world-renowned director and producer, Mel Brooks, offering Lynch the chance to direct The Elephant Man. The film in question? His very first, Eraserhead (1977).

It was, and remains to this day, the most singular cinematic experience of my life.

I’m of the opinion that almost all filmmakers fall in to one of two categories; those who become artists through the medium of filmmaking, and those who are already artists who choose the vehicle of filmmaking to create their art. David Lynch is, for me at least, the ultimate embodiment of the latter. Proof of such can be found in his status as a renaissance man.

Originally a painter, a practice he continued throughout his life, his desire to transition to making films was borne out of wanting to see his paintings move. He was also an actor, a musician, and sound designer. Not to mention, a furniture designer who regularly built props for his films, author of several books and designer of his very own comic book.

The television show, Twin Peaks, is perhaps the best example of just how impossible it was to bind Lynch to a single artistic form. The seminal TV show revolutionised what television could be, as it was the first show to stray from the episodic storytelling format, instead choosing to follow one continual storyline through an entire series.

David Lynch exists within an exclusive category of artists, those whose names have become an adjective. Lynchian, similar to Kafkaesque, Brechtian or Daliesque, is recognised as an official word in the Oxford dictionary. An eponymous adjective is an honour reserved for only the most unique and distinct of artists.

Although it could be argued that the term – Lynchian - is now too loosely applied to anything deemed to be somewhat counter-cultural within mainstream cinema, its true meaning relates to the often indefinable style and voice of the man himself.

He invoked the spiritual depths of us, the existential longings and cravings, the questions that seem intrinsic to the human condition, the wonderings that feel as though they originate from somewhere deep within us, our souls, perhaps.

I’ve come to think that it’s the ultimately the spiritual essence of Lynch’s films that make them truly unique, and him a worthy recipient of an eponymous adjective. Lynch’s films exist within their own world, frequently reminiscent of a dream.

Sometimes euphoric, often a nightmare.

He was an avid practitioner and advocate of transcendental meditation, so it’s perhaps not too surprising that when speaking on his creative process, Lynch attributed many of his creative ideas as emerging from his own subconscious through the practices of meditation and daydreaming. He’s often compared ideas to the act of fishing, they aren’t created, they already exist, you’ve just got to have the right bait to catch them.

I wonder if this process is what makes the worlds housed within Lynch’s films unlike any others. He invites us into his own subconscious, by allowing it to bleed out onto the screen.

Despite his allusivity in style and format, what I’ve always found most confounding about David Lynch’s work is its universality.

I feel as though the term ‘fringe artist’ has scarcely been better applied to anyone other than Lynch.

How has a man who’s created some of the boldest, most avant-garde and, at times, downright disturbing art of the last century picked up four Oscar nominations (and an honorary win), a Masterclass and a Disney movie (The Straight Story)?

Surely translating your own subconscious, something we view as idiomatic to each individual person, onto the screen is a guaranteed recipe for alienating your audience?

So why does Lynch’s work, instead of pushing us away, so consistently pull us in?

I could pontificate on the different potential techniques Lynch employed to keep his work just grounded enough to allow us to relate to it. His films being rooted in instantly recognisable symbols of Americana, for example. Or perhaps his deployment of easily digestible genres and conventions, Twin Peaks is a melodramatic murder mystery TV show, Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Drive (2001) are, at their core, noir films and even Wild at Heart (1990) is a textbook road movie.

But Lynch’s work has taught me to dig far deeper than that.

He invoked spiritual depths of us, the existential longings and cravings, the questions that seem intrinsic to the human condition, the wonderings that feel as though they originate from somewhere deep within us, our souls, perhaps.

That, for me at least, is the answer to his universality.

But how did he do it?

As has already been mentioned, it’s by mining his own subconscious and the spiritual within himself, and allowing it to flow into the worlds he created. But, most importantly, he never definitively characterised these things, he simply let them exist, depicted them. His work doesn’t come to us with the answers, it comes to us with questions. David Lynch’s questions: questions about the world. Questions about himself.

The very same questions we all ask ourselves on a daily basis: is evil within us or is it the product of what is around us? How can we allow light to prevail over darkness?

His work allows us to sit, ruminate, and respond to those questions.

I didn’t anticipate how profound of an effect David Lynch’s passing would have on me. It’s undoubtedly the strongest feeling of loss and grief I’ve felt from the passing of someone in the public sphere.

So deep were my feelings that I felt I needed to process it through the writing of this piece.

And despite the myriad of feelings and thoughts that have been swirling around my head since originally reading the news headline, I find myself continually returning to the very first thought I had. It was a quote from American comedian, Theo Von. When mourning the death of fellow comedian, Norm Macdonald, Theo said,

‘It feels like you’re losing a book that nobody has copies of.’

I feel despair that I’ll never be able to see the world through David Lynch’s eyes again. But I find great comfort that he, through his art, has passed his vision onto us, ensuring that we’ll always be able to see the Lynchian in our world.