While the lexicon does invite ridicule, critics of the movement warn that far from being a joke, polyamory is a threat to a healthy society rooted in stable two-parent households. The rejection of any constraints on sexual freedoms has been described as a selfish individualism dressed up in therapy speak of self-growth. It is “literally just being a narcissist without any of the guilt or suffering or personal responsibility… it’s a deeply troubling anti-social behaviour,” say Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan on their podcast Red Scare. The contemporary philosopher Byung-Chul Han is more extreme, arguing that our era of capitalism is characterised by a narcissism so overwhelming that we are incapable of real love. Love is replaced by sex and the marketisation of dating creates a freedom of choice that threatens desire itself. In this view, non-monogamy is a product of capitalism, consumerism and individualism that is potentially unique to our time.

But non-monogamy is nothing new: romantic and sexual partnerships involving more than two people have been incredibly common throughout history. In G.P. Murdock’s canonical 1967 Ethnographic Atlas, an anthropological encyclopaedia of around 1,100 pre-industrial cultures from across the world, 80% of societies were recorded as allowing polygyny, the marriage of one man to multiple women (marriage meaning a long-term, socially recognised union that is not necessarily religiously sanctioned). Strict monogamy was a sizeable minority, occurring in 20% of societies.

It might appear, then, that while non-monogamy is not a radical contemporary invention, today’s style of non-monogamy — in which both men and women are free to seek additional partners — makes us a potential outlier in human culture. But while Murdock did record four societies as practising polyandry, the marriage of one woman to multiple men, he missed almost all of the 28 polyandrous societies in the Tibetan plateau alone, and the further 53 beyond it. And where polyandry is found, so too is polygyny, indicating that these groups have liberal sexual norms for both sexes, much like polyamorists today.

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By Olympia Campbell

There are plenty of reasons why a pre-industrial society would encourage non-monogamy — and narcissistic individualism is not one of them. For the Irigwe of Nigeria, for instance, a mixture of polygyny and polyandry may have served to create alliances between different lineages and tribal groups. Women have primary husbands but are free to seek out secondary or tertiary ones. Soon after she leaves, her first husband will show up to try and get her back, at which point custom dictates that he is offered beer by his wife-taker. “It is considered bad manners for a prior spouse to sulk…but he never misses a chance to criticise the quality of the beer.” Given the overlap between non-monogamy and alternative lifestyles, it is conceivable that polyamorous couples today might still be insulting each other’s homemade beer.

Non-monogamy is a useful solution to other practical issues. Among the Inuit, men would marry their wives to their younger brothers to protect them from being kidnapped while they were off on long hunting trips. Fraternal polyandry also emerged in Tibet, where sets of brothers were married to the same woman to avoid land being divided between multiple couples. The European solution to this same problem was primogeniture.

Being poly can also be a survival tactic in harsh climates. Take the belief in partible paternity — the idea that multiple men can be the father of a single child — once common across lowland South America, such as in the Ache of Paraguay or the Bari of Venezuela. In these societies, a woman would marry one man, but on the birth of her child would name all her lovers. It then fell to all of them to provide additional support, often through gifts of fish and game. By betting on multiple fathers, mothers ensured their children were more likely to survive into adulthood.

On the whole, men tend to be more relaxed about female infidelity in societies where women contribute a high proportion of wealth to the household, and where fathers aren’t expected to do much childcare. In these sexually permissive cultures, a husband also tends to move in with his wife’s family rather than vice versa, which allows women to retain some sexual freedom, as they are protected from controlling husbands and in-laws. This is perhaps most apparent among the Canela of Brazil, who celebrate extramarital festival days during which women have sex with men who are not their husbands. If a girl is lucky enough not to fall pregnant in her young adulthood, which would cause her to give up some of her freedom, she becomes mẽ nkrekre-re — “an uncatchable one” — comparable, as one Canela man put it, to a greased pig in a pig-catching game. Similarly, for the Himba of Namibia, men and women get married yet have additional boyfriends and girlfriends, with nearly half of all children fathered by someone other than their mother’s husband. The men are not being cuckolded and are well aware who the actual father is, yet they invest in their biological and non-biological children equally.

Should we call the Himba, the Irigwe, the Canela and 80% of the world’s non-monogamous pre-industrial cultures narcissists? So why do we accuse people of it today? Because in truth, the accusation conceals a complaint about the behaviour of women. Monogamous societies have always tolerated, even admired, infidelity by men — and yet we consider it “unnatural”, undesirable and selfish for women to do the same.

These examples may seem to have little relevance to our modern lives. Bride kidnapping is no longer, nor do we use polyamory to make peace between warring tribal groups. Yet these societies, while different, can help us understand two things about our own culture. First, that non-monogamy is not an aberrant behaviour and is entirely consistent with our evolved psychology. And second, that as humans try to rear children, pass on wealth or find love, they will engineer tremendously variable social arrangements to satisfy these impulses.

Perhaps the revival of polyamory is a sign of female liberation. Like the Himba, women today contribute greatly to family wealth. And like the Canela, a woman is no longer required to move into her husband’s home. Then and now, a woman’s independence may be a strong determinant of whether or not non-monogamy emerges. In this sense, maybe Tyler Harper was right when he wrote in The Atlantic that non-monogamy is currently a freedom that only the elite can enjoy. High earning women — who aren’t completely reliant on their significant other — can afford independence, flexibility and sexual freedoms.

Or perhaps contemporary polyamorists are seeking to create support networks in a difficult economic environment. Nine-to-five employment, increasingly expensive childcare and the loss of large networks of nearby family that were once a hallmark of human societies has made having children incredibly challenging. You would think this might lead to an emphasis on monogamy, as intensive parenting requires high investment and commitment. But we should remember the South American groups whose belief in partible paternity meant that multiple lovers helped to raise a single child. “Kitchen table polyamory”, in which all partners and their children have amiable dinners together, could be the modern-day equivalent.

Of course, there will be many ways in which contemporary non-monogamy differs from pre-industrial cultures. The rising number of childless individuals clearly changes the risks and incentives in seeking out additional romantic partners. And we are yet to discover what dating apps — offering seemingly unlimited choice in the largely anonymous context of urban life — does to the psychology of commitment. But to dismiss non-monogamy as a perversion of capitalistic individualism would be to misconstrue the patchwork of reasons that explain its emergence.

Florence Read: Louise, you have made a case against the sexual revolution. What is it?

Louise Perry: My argument starts from the somewhat controversial recognition that there are some very important physical differences between men and women. Women are the ones who get pregnant; we’re much smaller than men; we’re much more vulnerable to violence in any kind of heterosexual encounter; we suffer all the negative consequences of hormonal birth control.

There are also psychological differences between the sexes, which very strong evidence suggests are at least partially innate. On average, men are much more interested in casual sex than women are, and they’re also more interested in things like watching porn, buying sex — doing all the things that have become much more socially acceptable post-sexual revolution. 

The argument that I make is that even though there are plenty of exceptions to this rule, a culture of sexual hyper-liberalism suits men much more than it does women, in terms of their preferences. The sexual revolution encouraged women to imitate masculine sexuality. And that is not good for the well-being of women.

FR: Aella, you are a porn performer. Do you think that you are imitating male sexuality in your everyday work?

Aella: Yes. A lot of what you said I don’t disagree with. Porn is purchased mostly by men. Men are typically the primary consumers of the content that I create. Female purchasers of porn basically don’t exist. A good chunk of women do in fact watch porn, but don’t typically pay quite as much.

FR: What’s the problem with that? Louise, what is your issue with the male-dominated world of sexuality?

LP: One of the ways in which women are quite different from men is: we have a much lower sexual disgust threshold. It’s much easier for us to get “the ick” in a sexual encounter. Women tend to be much choosier about their sexual partners than men are. There’s a very obvious evolved reason for this: up until five minutes ago, we didn’t have access to reliable contraception, which meant that having any kind of sexual encounter could lead to pregnancy. So it makes sense that women have evolved to be choosy about who they potentially get pregnant from: is he going to hang around, is he going to be a good father?

And the problem with trying to override that choosiness — trying to have sex like a man and trying to regard sex as casual: just a leisure activity without any sort of innate meaning or specialness — is that it forces women to suppress that instinct. It often causes distress. There’s a whole genre of articles in women’s mags about how to stop yourself catching feelings — strategies that you can use during sex to dissociate almost, to not bond with your partner. It’s things like: don’t make eye contact, take certain drugs, get drunk. Just look at the orgasm gap: the fact that most women don’t orgasm in casual encounters; women are much more likely to orgasm with long-term committed partners. Often women talk about casual sex as if you have to run the gauntlet: this is a phase in your life that you have to go through, the hook up phase, on the route to a more committed relationship.

FR: Aella, you’ve described yourself as polyamorous. Do you feel that you are in distress?

A: No, not at all. Polyamory has been absolutely fantastic. But I feel like the crux of the issue is: what percentage of women are having a bad experience of casual sex? Is this thing inherently damaging? People are kind of unskilled at casual sex. I went through a couple of different phases of casual sex, and the first phase was pretty terrible, understandably. No orgasms. But if you are told often that casual sex is bad for you, you’re going to re-parse casual sex as having been bad for you.

I lived in a house full of cam girls for a year. We were very close: we worked together, we talked about our deepest hopes and dreams. And we didn’t hide anything; we bitched about it quite a lot. Fast forward almost 10 years. One of the girls happened to date a bunch of men who really don’t like sex work. And she, in my opinion, revamped her past in order to be like, “Ah, that experience was damaging for me”. And I was like: “Bitch, I was there. I heard you talking about it at the time. There was no hint that any of this was bad for you.” When you enter a culture that’s feeding you this idea that you should feel bad about what you went through, you’re going to reverse develop this narrative.

To be fair, this can happen both ways. A lot of people will try to tell women that casual sex was definitely good for them, and they should feel good about it. Any narrativising, trying to tell women what they should feel, is, in my opinion, bad.

My ideal would be to ask women: do you actually like what’s going on or do you actually not? To what degree are you just trying to conform to other people? I think that’s a message that would result in a lot of people realising that they don’t want to have casual sex. And maybe a lot of people realising that, in fact, they do.

LP: I do agree with you that the power of narrative is amazing, and we restructure our memories according to narrative. There is a phenomenon, though — I don’t know if this necessarily applies to camming — but, a lot of women who’ve done in-person prostitution (particularly the worst end: street-based, brothel-based prostitution) say that, when you’re in it, believing a narrative that it’s okay is the way you survive. It’s the way you get through what is a fairly terrible experience.

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FR: There are many jobs that people do that are unpleasant, and they have to do for money. What makes sex work any different, Louise?

LP: The idea that sex is like any other kind of social interaction — comparable to working in a factory, to shaking hands, to making coffee, going surfing — I call that, in the book, sexual disenchantment. It’s this idea that comes out of the sexual revolution, that all of the religious, bourgeois, traditional norms of the past had to be done away with. The idea of sex having any kind of special status, let alone sacred status, had to be done away with in order for people to shake off the oppressive shackles of the past. And I think the problem with that idea is twofold.

One, I don’t think people believe it in the vast majority of cases. They overwhelmingly don’t behave as if sex is like anything else. There are people who do polyamory well and enjoy it. There are also, on any given platform devoted to discussion of polyamory, people really struggling with jealousy — finding it really, really difficult to suppress that instinct to view sex as being unique compared with other kinds of relationships.

And the problem with trying to pretend that sex is just like anything else: if you can’t have a special status for sex, you also can’t have a special status for rape, which we do in law. We recognise that rape is worse than theft — instinctively, and also in our legal codes. We recognise that sexual harassment has a uniquely harmful effect on its victims.

FR: Aella, do you think that sex is sacred?

A: I agree that for some sections of the population, sex is treated very seriously, and in others, it’s not. My guess is that people are much more flexible along the spectrum than you might think.

I worked at a factory — terrible hours — and then I escaped into sex work, and eventually into prostitution. After I did this, I was shocked that people had placed so much meaning on sex, in a way that prevented me from escaping terrible jobs to begin with. Because I didn’t go straight into sex work because of that meaning that people placed on it. And then when I did, I was like: “Fuck that, that meaning that people loaded up on to sex, prevented me from living basically my best life.” And I know a lot of other sex workers who feel the same way. And I’m not saying that everybody should. I also know some sex workers who tried sex work, and they were like: “Shit, I can’t not have the meaning here”. 

My overall issue here is: people are pointing a laser eye at the non-standard, non-normal, deviant types of sexual approaches than they are at the conservative, socially-accepted ones. You’re correct that a lot of polyamory discussions are talking about jealousy issues, but monogamy also has dead bedroom problems. Both are relationship structures that require some sort of negotiation of your desires, and what you can achieve in your life. And both of them have pretty severe downsides. And as a sex worker, I see a huge amount of the downsides in monogamy, from men who come see me because of failures in their monogamous relationships.

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FR: If you were not there to service their needs, do you think they would turn back to their partners and have a frank conversation about their sex life? Or do you think that you are offering them a way out?

A: I would ask the guys that I saw: “Are you married?” And if they said, yes, then I’d ask: “So why are you seeing me?” The general sense that I got was that most of them had wives that weren’t interested in them anymore. Basically wives that had a bunch of kids, or had health issues, and their sex drive was zero. And sometimes I would ask: “Well, have you considered bringing it up with her? Have you talked with her about it?” And the majority of their responses — I’d say 60 to 70% — were horror. They were like: “I don’t want to destroy my entire life.” It was common for guys to be like, “If I bring it up with her, I think she would leave me.”

A lot of the men had been sexless for ten years before finally trying to find a sex worker. Most men don’t feel great about making their wife unhappy, potentially, to do this. A lot of them are risking damage to their life. Most guys I talked to, I got the impression that they had made at least some effort. Some of them, no — some guys were like, “Fuck it, I don’t give a shit. Our relationship is totally separate from this, and I’m just going to fuck other people, because that’s what I want” — but it was not the majority. In fact, I got the impression that seeing these men actually probably helped save them from divorce, because their other option was leaving their wife because they couldn’t talk. So it was this safe, tiny outlet that allowed them to maintain longer, more dedicated relationships.

LP: Presumably, their wives would have left them if they’d known though. So these were secret encounters. Monogamy clearly has its downsides too, but everything in the whole entire world has trade-offs. I completely take your point that there are some people for whom polyamory is great, there are some people for whom sex work is great, there are some people who are just temperamentally much more suited to non-conventional sexual lives. But I think the other thing that I’m interested in, and which is much more difficult to talk about within a liberal framework, is how this scales.

So one of the things that I write about in the last chapter of my book is the fact that there are all sorts of ways in which societies that have a monogamous marriage system do better than societies that don’t, even though only about 20% of societies on the anthropological record have been monogamous. They tend to be more affluent, they tend to have lower rates of crime, they tend to have lower rates of spousal abuse, child abuse, compared to polygamous cultures.

A: I’m not surprised that this is the case. I would guess that if you compared polygamous cultures to monogamous cultures, monogamous cultures would probably do better.

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FR: Is there an ideal when it comes to how we build our relationships? Louise, do you for example disapprove of Aella’s work as a sex worker? In your ideal society, would OnlyFans not exist?

LP: “Disapprove” is not a word I would use. I think that it is clearly the case that some individuals do well on OnlyFans. Most don’t. I think we agree on the fact that OnlyFans is insanely unequal. The vast majority of women who become content creators are not going to make any real money, and are likely to suffer negative consequences down the track. I think it would be better if OnlyFans didn’t exist. That’s not the same thing as saying that I think it should be banned, because there are obviously all sorts of downstream consequences of that kind of legislation, which might do more harm than good. I think it’d be very, very difficult to ban OnlyFans or similar sites. But I think, on balance, they have a net negative impact on society.

A: Would you agree with OnlyFans if, say, before signing up, a girl got like statistics on how likely it was for her to make various amounts of money? Like, “90% of creators make under $1,000 a month,” or something like this?

LP: I think that would be good. I imagine the platforms would not want to do that, because it’s obviously going to limit their profit-making.

The other thing that I would want a lot of naive young women to be aware of is the fact that even though men are less likely to admit to the fact that they still ascribe to the sexual double standard, they do. And I think that one of the worst consequences of OnlyFans for very many women, which isn’t talked about nearly enough, is the fact that it becomes that much harder afterwards to find a committed relationship, which actually most women say is what they want long term, because men are judgmental about it.

A: My guess is that this is very well-known in women cultures. I’ve joined so many discussion groups where girls are thinking about getting into OnlyFans, or already doing OnlyFans, and a huge amount of that discussion is centred around, “How much is this going to damage my mate prospects? How much should I hide it from my potential mates? How can I do OnlyFans in a way where it’s not going to leak to potential mates?” This, to me, is one of the top things, at least in practice that I have seen women consider. To me it doesn’t feel like an overlooked aspect at all. 

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FR: Doesn’t that suggest we should be driving towards a more sexually open society? Because I suppose if we got into a place where nobody had any taboos around sex work, then we wouldn’t have to deal with that problem.

LP: I think that the nature of human beings is such that we seem to have a very strong instinct towards regarding sex as being special. Men seem to have a very strong instinct towards mate guarding. Trying to dissuade people from feeling this way is a serious uphill struggle. Any kind of political project based on the idea that we can undo human nature is one that’s doomed to failure. I think that we do still basically have minds evolved for a hunter-gatherer life, because that’s 90% of our species’ history.

A: I think that this is probably why women are very into BDSM — because evolutionarily, and historically, you had to be aroused by powerful men in order to survive. But also, to some degree, a lot of it is quite cultural, too. We’ve seen a lot of different sexual structures throughout history. I do think that we have a little bit more flexibility.

FR: Both of you seem to be arguing there that there’s a certain amount of nature involved here and we’re trying to push against nature, and to impose social norms upon it. Is there an argument for letting nature run riot and just allowing people to tap into their most primal selves?

LP: I think the problem with absolute liberation — just allowing people to do whatever feels right to them — is the fact that some people have dark, destructive, horrible desires. Actually, probably a lot of people do. Human sexuality is not necessarily nice and pro-social at all. So you have to think about how you’re going to manage the desires of people when that desire is destructive to others.

The other problem is: one sex is much more vulnerable inherently than the other sex. How you manage that asymmetry is, I think, a question that all civilisations have grappled with. And no one has ever come up with a free-for-all as the best solution, because clearly it wouldn’t actually work.

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FR: Digital sex work might be an answer there, though. Aella is behind a screen: she is, in many ways, invulnerable to male violence, and she is being paid for sexual acts, which she finds pleasurable, I assume. And so, isn’t that a win-win?

LP: Or, a step further, sex robots. Then there would be no ethical issues in terms of consent. It would bypass all of the feminist arguments over sex work that’ve been going on for so long. The focus is normally on the effects on women, though. And I actually think that having a class of men who basically just spend all day indoors, playing video games, and having sex with their sex robots seems like a fairly bleak future for that portion of mankind.

A: It seems nicer if they can have access to real women. I would be sad. I used to do OnlyFans, but to be clear, I’ve also been an IRL prostitute, and have been subject to male violence. But out of all the sex-work forms that I have done, the in-person feels the healthiest to me, for both me and the men. The others feel like some sort of weird, warped version of human interaction that objectifies us both more. And sure, it’s safer to some degree, but you can take steps to be safe in-person. In my opinion, in the healthiest future society, the dominant form of sex work would be human to human, eye contact, skin contact, just like God intended.

FR: What about these sex robots? That’s certainly not what God intended, but it’s a lot safer for everyone involved, isn’t it?

 A: I like the idea of sex robots existing. I think if men can have an outlet that they need that is affordable and accessible to them, this seems good. I’m generally pro people independently pursuing what they want. And if that’s sex robots, then go for it.

FR: But do you think that the skin to skin contact, as you said there, is superior to this kind of digital sex work that we’re talking about?

A: Yeah, absolutely. Because it feels really dehumanising, like I said, for both parties. With OnlyFans, I’m not dealing with a man, I’m dealing with the collection of men. I’m dealing with the statistical likelihood of a man clicking on this thing. It’s very robotic. And similarly, this is encouraging men to treat women the same way. You have like a billion women, and it’s just like cycling through them. You’re not really developing a relationship with any of them.

And again, I am pro people pursuing what they want, in their own time. I’m happy OnlyFans exists. But I noticed it was much better for my mental health to do it in person. It just felt so much better and more fulfilling to be able to touch an individual person.

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FR: There used to be quite high barrier to entry for sex work, if you’re talking about street prostitution. Whereas now, with things like OnlyFans, the barrier has been lowered massively. Is it a good thing that more and more people have access to a sex-work career?

A: Yeah. I know a bunch of single moms or women with health issues — women who are struggling to feed their kids on their own — who said, “Oh, I tried OnlyFans, and it gave me, not even that much money, an extra $300 a month, but now I can pay my rent.” There’s a whole bunch of people for whom their lives are really drastically improved by that amount of money. Typically people who are really disadvantaged in some way. It disproportionately assists the poor, or people I would consider to be lower-class — people who were culturally priced-out of the better paying jobs — which is why I think this worked for me so well. I grew up very, very conservative, no access to education, and so a lot of people are like, “Oh, well you should just go to college and get an education, and then get a job.” For some people, their lives just don’t work like that. And for some people being able to have easily-accessible side income that you don’t need training for, or elite approval or credentials, is incredibly beneficial and life changing. And I’ve known so many women for whom this is the case.

LP: I take that point, although I do think it’s worth emphasising the fact that drug and alcohol addiction is extraordinarily common among sex workers. The OnlyFans end of the spectrum is clearly the much less dangerous, traumatic end of it. But it’s also not representative of the whole spectrum of sex work, some of which is dire. And it’s very, very common for women to end up taking drugs and using alcohol as a way of dealing with the emotional fallout of prostitution. And that means that you’re not actually ending up in a better situation at all: you end up potentially spiralling downwards and getting stuck.

I’m not really a radical feminist at all – I think I can comfortably speak for radical feminists, though, in that they tend to think no woman should be in a situation where she can’t feed her children unless she’s doing sex work. I do recognise that we live in the real world and there are situations where that might seem like the best option. The other problem is that because lay people’s understanding of the sex industry tends to be very poor, it can be very difficult to know how you will find prostitution until you’ve actually done it. So saying at the outset, “I think I’m well suited to this, I think it will be fine. I’ve read through my checklist of warnings, and I think it’s fine,” isn’t actually quite the same as actually doing it.

When you make a move towards normalisation, de-stigmatisation, and presenting this as a perfectly valid career route, you are going to end up with people going down that career route for whom it is an absolute disaster and it ruins their lives.

A: There’s a lot of talk about alcohol and drug stuff with sex workers – which I agree is true, they have much higher rates of drug use. But if, say, we have a world where we dramatically criminalise something like plumbing — like, plumbers are really stigmatised and if you plumb then people are like, “I’m not sure I want to date you”, and if you get assaulted as a plumber, you can’t go to the police otherwise they’ll put you in jail — I would expect the kind of people who would gravitate towards plumbing are people who are unsuccessful in other aspects of their life, and probably have problems with drug and alcohol use. My guess is correlation, not necessarily causation.

LP: I agree with you that clearly the stigma makes all sorts of things worse in all sorts of ways. But also, I’m not convinced that the stigma is an after effect of the law. I think that actually the stigma seems to stick to the sex industry, across time and place. And I think it comes back to this problem of the socio-sexuality gap requiring a prostituted class of women. Most women don’t want to be in that class. It’s very hard to persuade anyone to think that that isn’t a bad outcome for those women and the stigma flows from that.

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A: It feels like you’re implicitly telling women that they should feel bad for these things. I wish I could hear more, “Yeah, some woman are like that and if you’re not, it’s chill.” When you were talking about prostitution I was like, “Well, you should just try it once or twice and see how it works for you, and if you don’t like it, then stop.” If you have a bad experience, it doesn’t seem to me like it needs to be traumatising. But if we treat it with this level of like gravitas, then it’s going to create that trauma in people. And I wish that when I was in a really sex-negative culture, I could have heard more messaging about how it’s okay to be sexually promiscuous if you want to. If I had been surrounded by people giving me the kind of message that you’re giving me, I think I would have ended up with a lot more shame and guilt overall.

LP: I acknowledge that it can seem condescending and judgmental — the anti-porn, anti-prostitution feminism — but we all know that the really brutal attitudes towards sex workers come overwhelmingly from sex buyers. I’m sure there are exceptions, but we know that men who buy sex are more likely to be sexually aggressive, more likely to admit to rape outside of the sex industry. I think the problem with the effort to de-stigmatise, in the hope that we will somehow arrive at a sex industry that really is just like any other industry, is: it is basically based on theory. It’s based on the faith that all of the stigma is causing the problem, not that stigma is attached to the innate problem, which actually has much more to do with the fact that most women find prostitution very distressing and most sex buyers don’t treat the women they buy sex from with proper respect. 

FR: Louise, do you think that you are part of a new movement? Is there a sex-negative movement? You said earlier that you’re not a radical feminist — so what would you call yourself? Are you a conservative?

LP: The key way I guess in which I diverge from radical feminism is I don’t believe in the blank slate. I don’t think that the differences between men and women are a consequence of socialisation. I don’t think that they can be just dissolved away. I think that we have to deal with the existence of these differences on a psychological level as well as a physical level, and kind of progress from there. I’ve arrived at some conclusions which some traditionalists agree with me on — not all of them by any means. I guess maybe this is a materialist form of feminism, in the sense that it’s coming out of the recognition that these material differences exist and we have to make our peace with them.

We are reckoning with these vast material changes. The one that I’m primarily interested in, in my book, is the pill. I don’t accept this idea of the great woman theory of feminist history, where the thing that drives feminist change is particularly charismatic women. There clearly have been charismatic women, but I think the thing that’s driven change for women has primarily been technological — the washing machine, the tampon, whatever you want to name.

And the points, if you look at the history, when you see feminist thinking flaring up, tend to be at the points where you have some important material flux. So you have the internal combustion engine and you have suffrage, and you have the Second World War and the move away from industrial economy and then you have the second [feminist] wave. And I think now, possibly, there is another flare up, and there’s another reckoning with feminist ideas, because we’re seeing the next revolution, which is the online revolution. And it’s really important to be thinking about sexual difference in that space, because it may appear as if we are just these genderless economic units who can all participate in the knowledge economy on a completely even footing and stuff, but actually sexual difference exists. And it will persist until I guess the transhumanists finally have their way.

FR: And Aella, do you feel that you’re an agent of change in this revolution that Louise is talking about?

A: An agent of change? I feel like I just want to defend people like me. It feels, especially in recent years, like I’m fighting against this push of people disrespecting me solely because of my sexual promiscuity and the way that I like to approach sex. And it feels like there’s more shame and judgement about it. I don’t know if it’s just because I’m exposed to different places of the internet or if this is actually a movement, but I feel really protective of it. I’m like, “No, I am okay the way that I am.” And I really want to give that message to anybody who’s like me. Living like me can be a wonderful, healthy and fulfilling and you don’t have to feel shame, or like you need to hide. And so if there’s people like me out there, I really want to take a stand and have a bold, unapologetic ownership of that. And that feels like the thing that I’m fighting for.

The concept of the incel election first went viral a few months ago after a thoughtful piece by S. Nathan Park described the influence of People Power Party’s Chairman Lee Jun-seok – a conservative pundit and “anti-feminist” – on young men, and the potential impact of this demographic on the presidential election. Subsequent articles speculated not only about whether this victory signifies the end of gender equality in South Korea, but whether this election is a harbinger of things to come.

But before everyone gets carried away, a corrective. This election has nothing to do with incels; the voters in question were probably not incels; misogyny is not unique to incels.

It stands to reason that the high rate of “sexlessness” in Korean adults – particularly young men, though it’s high across genders and age groups which is probably indicative of a nationwide unipolar depression — may very well alter people’s overall sense of well-being, fulfilment and belonging in the world, and thus, their political beliefs as well. But there is no evidence that the issue of sexlessness or celibacy played any role in this election. Despite their best efforts, not a single journalist was able to furnish a quote from anyone hoping to finally get laid under the Yoon administration. So we’re really not talking about an “incel movement” at all. And when a term has implicit associations with violent extremism, flippantly using it to describe a group of young men whose views one finds abhorrent is ill-advised.

Unfortunately, the term has become shorthand for exactly that: angry young men with bad political takes. These are men who feel marginalised, who don’t have families, who are struggling to find purpose and their place in life. Many of them are unemployed, underemployed, or struggling in school. In the West, they’re often described as white or working class, and they live in progressive, economically developed societies. They probably also live in a society where income inequality is growing and unemployment rates are high.

That profile fits for incels, at least for the media’s portrayal of them, and it fits for the Proud Boys, and the Oath Keepers, and also for extremists on the far Left – such as Antifa’s Black Bloc. Details about race and class vary depending on the cultural context, but the fact that young men with nothing to lose is the demographic most likely to embrace a radical or subversive new political ideology is consistently true, and it has been throughout history.

In The True Believer, published in 1951, Eric Hoffer brilliantly described the conditions that compelled people to join “mass movements” of social or political protest with Twenties Germany as the backdrop. Mass movements appeal to people who feel powerless and unappreciated in their lives and who tend to externalise their frustrations rather than looking inward. The group most likely to embrace a radical new ideology is one Hoffer called the New Poor, who may in fact be middle class, but perceive a recent loss in income, social status, or security that was out of their control.

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Hoffer’s account was written in response to the turn toward Communism and Fascism, but extreme or subversive political movements have been drawing in a new crop of New Poor with remarkable agility over the past decade, with the aid of technology. Social media and alternative platforms have given independent content creators and their ideas exposure to a global audience of like-minded fans who can instantly communicate with each other. These platforms have also contributed to and benefited from a climate of hyperpolarisation by promoting provocative, contentious speech.

Indeed, most of the “anti-feminist” ideas espoused by Yoon and his supporters during the campaign should be instantly recognisable to anyone familiar with the online ecosystem known as the Intellectual Dark Web, or the Manosphere, or parts of the Alt-Right: the advantages of social programming and affirmative action in favour of women, the suggestion that the pay gap is not real but the result of women’s lesser contributions, the issue of false reporting of sex crimes, the fact that men are conscripted for military service.

When applied to the United States, some of these arguments may seem exaggerated — but they do have an essence of truth. Data about rates of false reporting are inconsistent, but it does occur, despite #MeToo’s directive to “Believe women”. Family courts often rule in favour of women; the criminal justice system gives men harsher sentences for comparable crimes. These facts are generally ignored by feminists and frequently cited by their opponents.

Anti-feminism, like the other identitarian ideologies that have risen to popularity over the past decade, is characterised primarily by feelings of victimhood experienced by the in-group, and hostility toward the structural powers and privileges afforded the out-group — rather than actual hostility toward members of that group, as in overt misogyny. Anti-feminist groups are not necessarily misogynists for suggesting that if equality is the goal, then it might be time for men to get a push in some areas. Thanks to gains made by feminists in the latter half of the last century, women are outperforming men in many areas where they once lagged behind, or were not even allowed entry, such as higher education, where women currently comprise 60% of students. Whether this is due to an inherent difference between the sexes that allows women to better utilise certain aspects of the system, or a structural difference that directly benefits them more is an interesting question, but it’s ultimately irrelevant. When the current system similarly favours men, we rightly recognise it as sexist, and wouldn’t call its opponents “incels”.

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Of course, in South Korea, where the deeply patriarchal society is already much more divided along the gender line, anti-feminist talking points don’t land the same way. The country has a 35% pay gap between men and women, and is ranked lowest among the 38 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on the “Glass Ceiling Index”. Two years ago, police uncovered a widespread network for trading non-consensual sexual images over Telegram, and Park Won-soon, the mayor of Seoul, died in a probable suicide amid rumors of sexual harassment complaint against him. Most troubling of all is the fact that despite a very low overall homicide rate, women in South Korea represent more than half of the victims, in stark contrast to the international average of 21%. High-profile events and statistics like these sit uncomfortably alongside tirades about how the wage gap and most sexual assault reports are all fake news.

Over the past six or seven years, populist candidates have been exploiting the grievances of young men all over the world, often with traditionalist messages that are underpinned by anti-feminist ideas. This resonates, in part, because most young people have issues with dating and the opposite sex, and unhappy young men almost certainly do. In Western countries with large immigrant populations, race and immigration are more potent issues than gender, partly because these countries have always had more equality between the sexes than traditionally Confucian South Korea, which has virtually no immigrant population, and where the reverse is true.

President Yoon is married and is certainly not an incel, and probably doesn’t really much care for this. But politicians opportunistically exploit the deeply held grievances of their constituents, appeal to their basest impulses, fears and prejudices. Not as a matter of ideology, but of political expediency. So Yoon pledged to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family in his campaign, which is unlikely to happen in a democracy like South Korea without a lot of bureaucratic gridlock, and even if it does, it’s unclear what programs would actually be affected or how. But, then, even his liberal opponent promised to remove the word “Women” from the Department’s official name.

Right now, though, there are more important issues to consider. Yoon, who was a prosecutor for 27 years and has no previous experience in politics, has voiced strong opinions about issues of foreign policy, expressing a hard line on North Korea, and a stronger alliance with the United States than with China, compared with the more diplomatic position taken by the previous administration that his liberal rival pledged to continue. Given the war in Ukraine, and current tensions with China, his position has been praised by the Washington Post as “a welcome turn toward the US”, and the Wall Street Journal as “an opportunity for closer security ties between Seoul and Washington”. Maybe in light of the recent eruption of conflict on the world stage, it is more important to focus on the foreign policy of the new “incel” president, rather than jumping to the conclusion that stunts from his campaign trail are putting human rights under threat.

Welcome to New London, we have three rules:
No privacy
No family
No monogamy

Everyone is very happy.

Or are they? 80 years on, few viewers will be unaware that, for the citizens of Aldous Huxley’s New London, true happiness is far from assured. In this totalitarian society, babies are all born outside of the human body in a state-controlled  ‘hatchery’, and a biological caste system determines the social role individuals are permitted to play: Alphas are leaders; Betas are elite workers; Gammas and Deltas are servants; and Epsilons form a drone-like underclass. All are kept docile through the ready availability of pleasure: endless parties, casual sex, an immersive form of cinema called the ‘feelies’, and the regular administration of the drug soma, available in pill or liquid form.

In this version, the protagonist Bernard Marx doesn’t work at the Central London Hatchery, but is instead employed as a soma peddler for the Bureau of Stability. His job is to keep everyone in a consistent state of contentment, topping up their soma dose as necessary with pretty multicoloured pills (“how about a yellow?”). Citizens carry with them a clicking soma dispenser, the same shape and size as a fountain pen.

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The prop allows the filmmakers to signal characters’ emotional distress with canny simplicity. Social anxiety? Click. Interpersonal conflict? Click. When the restless Bernard gets into an argument on a bus with a young Alpha, the other passengers are left disconcerted, unsure how to respond to an unusual display of social tension. Bernard the candy man dutifully proceeds around the bus, dropping pills into their trembling hands: click, click, click.

The true drama begins when Bernard and his sexpot Beta companion Lenina take a rocket across the Atlantic and return with John the Savage, a man born to New London parents, but raised in the ‘Savage Lands’. More like an Indian reservation in the novel, the Savage Lands are here cleverly reimagined as a theme park devoted to 21^st Century American decline. New London visitors load onto a tour bus and gawp at the ‘house of correction’ (a prison), the ‘house of monogamy’ (a church), and witness a reenactment of what is presented as the most important event in the savages’ calendar, ‘the annual day of black’ (Black Friday), in which shoppers tear each other to pieces in their lust for bargains.

I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen such a barbed attack on late capitalism on primetime TV.  A tour guide informs visitors cheerfully that the key elements of savage culture included “jealousy, competition, greed, and strife.” She’s not wrong, of course. The Savage Lands theme park is designed to demonstrate to New Londoners the perils of the old way of life, while its inclusion in the drama is designed to show us how tempting the 26th century could seem when set beside the 21st.

Unlike the other properly “conditioned” characters, John the Savage is burdened by unrestrained and unmedicated human emotion. He gets jealous, he hits people, he smashes things, and he feels grief and sorrow. His entry into New London proves destabilising because, for all of its emotional sterility, the restrictions placed on this society do work, in that they have managed to successfully rid themselves of conflict.

The lack of privacy ensures a lack of crime; the lack of family ensures a lack of in-group preference; and the lack of monogamy ensures a lack of sexual jealousy. The cost that citizens pay for all this stability is an emptiness that they find hard to put into words: a longing for meaning that soma can’t touch. And although we don’t see New London citizens pining especially for children, religion, or family – all of which are banned by the state – they do pine terribly for monogamous love, and sometimes attempt it, despite the state’s best efforts to stop them. With John the Savage on the scene, trouble is inevitable.

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Certain elements of the story been emphasised — and others down-played — for a 2020 audience. Of course, we have our Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons, all carrying out their various allocated jobs. But the new series represents the hierarchy as just a more explicit version of our existing class structure. The characters of this adaptation are more rebellious than those in the novel, and we see little evidence that they are innately biologically suited to their positions.

The series doesn’t engage with Huxley’s much more disturbing vision, in which people really are designed for either drudge or leadership, and really won’t resist, no matter how lowly their status. “We like cleaning up” chant the epsilons in the 2020 adaption, but we know they don’t really mean it. In the 1932 novel, they actually do. And at a time when technologies like CRISPR gene editing bring Huxley’s dystopia uncomfortably close to reality, it is curious to see how little interest the filmmakers take in this theme.

Instead, the element of the novel that’s drawn out – and effectively – is the numbing consequences of endless pleasure. In 1932, the culture of casual sex that Huxley described was a long way from reality in a Britain in which contraception was still primitive and abortion criminalised, meaning that sex and reproduction remained inseparable. Even elite eccentrics like the Bloomsbury Set, who famously “lived in squares and loved in triangles”, weren’t able to have truly consequence-free sex, given how many illegitimate children they produced.

But in Brave New World, Huxley had the foresight to imagine a society in which sex could be just one more consumable product among a host of other delights. The citizens of New London love novelty: no one wears the same outfit twice, new trends flash and fizzle within a matter of days, and sexual partners are just one more source of fleeting excitement, to be immediately forgotten.

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The censors who attempted to ban the novel soon after its publication could hardly have imagined that sections of the 21^st century elite would soon be openly enjoying soma-infused orgies and proudly tearing down bourgeois sexual norms, just like the Alphas and Betas of Brave New World. As Emily Chang puts it in a Vanity Fair piece on Silicon Valley sex and drugs parties:

“Many participants don’t seem the least bit embarrassed, much less ashamed. On the contrary, they speak proudly about how they’re overturning traditions and paradigms in their private lives, just as they do in the technology world they rule.”

Media references to Brave New World are often misapplied, typically used to refer to the arrival of new reproductive technologies. But what’s interesting about Huxley’s story is not so much the prospect of babies grown in bottles — still a long way off — but instead the far more immediate prospect of a population that has been stupefied by limbic capitalism: that is, the skilfully designed and addictive forms of entertainment that drip-feed us dopamine.

Porn, junk food, celebrity media, gambling, gaming, smoking, opioids: all of these products tap into our longing for nourishment, excitement, and pleasure, but do so while draining the consumer of health, happiness, and – most importantly – money. If there’s one thing that Huxley got wrong, it was in assuming that soma would need to be coercively administered by the state. As it turns out, private corporations are more than up to the job.

In his delightfully titled 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman recognised Huxley’s prescience:

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.”

In this adaptation, a designer of New London’s social structure speaks at one point of the ease with which the population were persuaded to adopt her new regime. These people embraced passivity, irrelevance, and trivia because they couldn’t bear to experience normal human emotion: “they would have done anything to avoid those agonising moments when there’s nowhere else to look but inside.” The designer offered consumers short-term pleasure over long-term happiness. Centuries later, and far too late, she regrets what she’s done.