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.

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

Care

Change

26 July 2024

6 min read

Are we forgetting how to care?

The profound act at the heart of nursing.

Helen Cowan

Helen is a registered nurse and freelance writer, writing for audiences ranging from the general public to practitioners and scientists.

A nurse bends beside a bed and talks to a patient

Marie Curie.

Recently, at a nursing leadership programme in Oxford, attendees focused on the fundamentals of care. Have we forgotten how to care? What can we re-learn from those who pioneered an ordinary yet profound act that affects millions?

Anam Cara is an old Gaelic term for ‘soul friend’, a person with whom you can share your innermost self, your mind and your heart. It is a term that Tom Hill, former chief executive at Helen House Hospice in Oxford, used to describe the relationship between his staff and the thousands of children and their families who passed through their ‘big red door’ in its first twenty-five years. The hospice (or ‘loving respice’ as it became known) had been founded by Sister Frances Dominica in 1982.

Other care in this country can also trace its religious roots. Between 1048 and 1070 in Jerusalem, the Order of St. John was founded for the purpose of helping pilgrims (“our Lords, The Sick”) who had become lost, weary, or beset by other difficulties while on their way to the Holy Land. Today, in the United Kingdom, the British Association of the Order has extended care to older people first in almshouses and later in care homes. A trustee for ten years was John Monckton, a man of ‘considerable talent, enormous integrity and deep religious conviction’; his tragic murder in 2004 led to the creation of the John Monckton Memorial Prize, which recognised and rightly celebrated commitment to care by care workers.

Today, across the world, seen and unseen, nurses, carers and families continue to provide compassionate care. “Assisting individuals, sick or well, in the performance of those activities contributing to health or its recovery (or to peaceful death) that he would perform unaided if he had the necessary strength, will or knowledge” is the very essence of nursing, captured by ‘architect of nursing’, researcher and author Virginia Henderson in 1966. Meeting more than basic needs such as breathing, eating, drinking and eliminating bodily waste (which are of essential importance), Henderson recognised the role of the nurse in enabling humans to communicate with others, worship according to their faith, satisfy curiosity and sense accomplishment.

In the desire for modernisation and professionalisation, have we lost sight of the core values and activities central to patient care?

An uncomfortable truth brought out in healthcare reports such as the Final Report of the Special Commission of Inquiry (The Garling Report) 2008, and the Report of the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust Public Inquiry (The Francis Report) 2013 is though that this type of nursing is too often done badly or even missed, leading to pressure injury, medication errors, hospital-acquired infection, falls, unplanned readmission, critical incidents and mortality. According to nurse scientist and scholar Professor Debra Jackson, “missed care occurs much more frequently than we might think”. She cites a systematic review in which ‘care left undone’ on the last shift ranged from 75 per cent in England, to 93 per cent in Germany, with an overall estimate of 88 per cent across 12 European countries’.

In one offensively-titled paper, “Shitty nursing - the new normal?” (in which the authors apologise for the title but not the questions raised), real-life pen portraits are drawn of patients lying for hours on hospital trolleys, immobile through infection or injury, ignored by staff. Whilst acknowledging contextual factors for poor care, such as a shortage of nurses and resources, the authors argue that circumstances cannot be the sole cause of missed nursing care.

A report published by the University of Adelaide, School of Nursing, has called for nurses to ‘reclaim and redefine’ the fundamentals of care. It asks whether the cause of the problem (of missed nursing care) lies “deep in the psyche of the nursing profession itself?” “Has something happened to the way modern nursing views and values caring?” it continues. “Indeed, is nursing in danger of losing its claim to care? In the desire for modernisation and professionalisation, have we lost sight of the core values and activities central to patient care? Or is this a broader social pattern where individuals are less inclined to show kindness, compassion, and care for others even if it is a necessary requirement of the job?”

Compassion, he emphasises, is more than empathy - and way "less fluffy" but much more measurable than kindness.

Writing in the British Medical Journal, Professor of critical care medicine Peter Brindley and Consultant in intensive care Matt Morgan wonder whether doctors also “too often default to high-tech and low-touch” when patients are dying – a time “when community and connection matter most”. They powerfully begin with a mother’s comment: “Humans are gardens to tend – not machines to fix.”

Professor Sir Al Aynsley-Green, the first National Clinical Director for Children in Government and former Children’s Commissioner for England, and past president of the British Medical Association, suggests that we as a society need a “momentum for compassion”. Struck by the extremes of compassion witnessed during his wife’s treatment in the last years of her life, Sir Al wants to see a cultural transformation in healthcare: for compassion to be a key operating principle in NHS and care settings, led by the Chief Nurse’s Office; for every organisation to promote the importance of compassion at the professional level; for the views of patients and families to be sought regularly; for much earlier and better focus on compassion in undergraduate and postgraduate teaching programmes for all staff; for compassion to be inspected against by the Care Quality Commission; and for a willingness to encourage staff at all levels to expose poor practice as well as celebrating excellent care.

Compassion, he emphasises, is more than empathy - and way "less fluffy" but much more measurable than kindness. “It’s putting yourself into somebody else’s shoes – and doing something about it.” Recently appointed the UK’s first Visiting Professor in Compassionate Care at Northampton University, at the age of 80, Sir Al certainly is doing something about it. He has made it his new purpose in life to “embed compassion into every aspect of care”.

Like Sir Al, Queen Elizabeth II, the UK’s longest serving monarch, espoused compassion, in word and deed. Living a life of compassionate service, the Queen made clear that her Christian faith was her guiding principle. She speaks of Jesus Christ as ‘an inspiration,’ a ‘role model’ and ‘an anchor’. “Many will have been inspired by Jesus’ simple but powerful teaching,” she said in her Christmas Broadcast, 2000. “Love God and love thy neighbour as thyself – in other words, treat others as you would like them to treat you. His great emphasis was to give spirituality a practical purpose.”

When nurses do unto others as they would have done unto themselves, and act as role model to colleagues, not only do patient experiences of care and their outcomes improve – but so does job satisfaction for nurses: a critical factor in nurse recruitment and retention – the biggest workforce challenge faced by healthcare organisations. Across the UK, there are currently more than 40,000 nursing vacancies, and thousands of burnt-out nurses are leaving the profession early. Whether nurses decide to stay or go is driven in part by their daily experience at work. The late Kate Granger, Consultant in medicine for older people, inspired Compassionate Care Awards in her name, envisioning that such a legacy would drive up standards in care - and surely also help retain nurses, through restoring a sense of pride, achievement and fulfilment to the nursing workforce.