Bev Turner on her modelling career, feminism and the sexual revolution

And I know that you obviously have had your own experiences with sexual liberation. There's this great, someone sent me this great photo here that's gone viral recently. I'm Bev Turner, I'm the host of The Late Show Live on GB News. Is there such a thing as toxic femininity? If you look online you would say that this idea of women who believe themselves to be feminists but who have taken it to an extreme whereby what they articulate, what they're clearly feeling is hatred towards men, you could describe that as toxic femininity. But in the same way that I don't think toxic masculinity is a helpful phrase, I don't think we get much benefit out of that terminology because at the root of it, these young women need help, they need to not feel so frightened. And so my concern is when we label them as toxic feminists, we risk shutting down the debate. Having said that, I think it's great that you're doing this film and debating this issue because we do need to look at both sides of this coin because I think men have drawn the short straw when it comes to their character, an extreme version of masculinity being depicted as always a bad thing because I don't think that masculinity is something to be feared and to hate in the same way that I don't think femininity is something to be feared and to hate. And I think when we have these debates about what it is to be a female, what it is to be male, we've got to, above all else, find common ground to bring these young people together so that ultimately they'll have kids first and foremost. That's really important. In the media, there's a huge focus on the so-called manosphere. This is Andrew Tate and other influencers who have millions of followers and they're young men who are angry and maybe anti-women. But what about the other side? What about young women? Is there something else going on there with young women? The internet has given us so much and it has also taken away so much from humanity and I don't think that's an exaggeration to say that. And with the advent also of the algorithms which will feed to people more of what they look at. Why? Because it's great for advertisers, it's great for the tech companies if they can read what we're looking at and feed us more of it. And we've been caught napping on that because what it has created is a generation that get forced into their silos. And in fact, that's not just the young people, that's all of us. I know pensioners who are now wrapped up in the algorithm that only see the world one way. I do think a lot of responsibility with this actually lies with the tech companies. I'm not a fan of censorship but I think we need to be genuinely looking at the algorithms that's feeding content to individuals which is doing nothing but entrenching them in a place which is causing themselves emotional harm, is causing irreparable, horrible damage to relationships and to families and causing genuine emotional distress to these young people. So if you look at some of the women that you've interviewed, Stephen, they will have looked at maybe some content that was about the fact that women's role in life is more difficult in 2026 than it was previously. I have an issue with that as a starting point. But they've seen one thing. The algorithm has registered their interest and then it's fed them more and fed them more and fed them more. And they're vulnerable, a lot of these young girls. They don't necessarily have an outside world which is offsetting what they're seeing online. They're also from that generation who very quickly reach for the phrase, you can't say that. So they're constantly self-censoring. It would take a very brave person in the world of one of these extreme feminists with her multiple nose rings and her pink hair and her tattoos, it would take a very brave person to say to her, I think you're wrong because they're going to be met with aggression. And so they probably only ever find people who are like them. And unfortunately this generation are masquerading as strong and it is anything but strong. All of these emotions come from a place of fear and weakness and misplaced anger. And that anger is something I want to touch on. Why are so many young women angry and have negative views towards men? Look, women have always bitched about men, okay. We've always rolled our eyes, for generations men have often been the butt of the joke, whether it was in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, you can find that across the board. But it didn't used to be meant with such animosity, I would say. There's an anger now that underpins so much of the mental health space, let's call it that, that a lot of these young people occupy. Partly I think modern life is really hard. We all feel it every day, these incremental difficult moments in our day dealing with technology. Technology has so much to do with this. You're dealing with the app, you can't talk to a person. People are already at like, if 100 is your angriest, by the time you get online to talk about how you feel about being a woman, you're probably at 50 anyway. So the outside world, the conditions we've created are a perfect storm for people to have a short fuse. And so you've got these women who are in this state of frustration and they then seem to be channeling this, I think, towards men. Why? Because they've probably heard the messaging that the likes of Andrew Tate are evil. And there's no nuance left anymore, Stephen. Everybody has to believe in this or that. It's black or it's white. The space for debate is almost disappearing. Universities and schools and colleges are doing a terrible job of bringing people together to thrash out how they might feel about each other. When it comes specifically to how women are feeling about men, young women, the research seems to show this terrible disillusionment with the workplace. They don't think they're ever going to make any money. I think we all feel a bit like that, male or female, because of the advent of AI. We're not at schools and parents. We don't know what to tell these young girls about the future and what it looks like. Now, previous generations, as a woman particularly, you didn't necessarily feel that pressure to go into the workplace because you might marry and have children and that was also considered to be an option. And unfortunately, for so many women now, young girls, they don't see being a mother as being a good future role. We have reduced the value of being a mom completely. We've undermined it almost to zero now, which has caused a backlash with the tradwife, of course, trend. But whilst your contributions to society would be considered so low as a mother, you feel you have to lean into your professional career. And they're also hearing from almost my generation now who are saying, well, you can't have it all. We thought you could have it all. The women who came before me said, you can have it all. My generation going, no, you can't. You will have to compromise in some way. What we've never done, and this is a big part of the issue for me, is when feminism, first wave, second wave, third wave feminism, was making a noise about women being in the workplace. Nobody ever said men can also parent and you can also share the load. And for so many women, being a mother when you are highly educated is really boring. I'm going to say, I know it's controversial, but being at home with a small baby can be mind-numbingly dull as well. And I genuinely have always thought that the future, and I was talking about this at university 25 years ago, a future in which parents can exist in the nuclear family, which is very much a Western construct, but the best we've ever come up with. The future of the family involves men and women taking some responsibility for parenting. Under their own auspices, their own choice, of course, it should always be their own choice. But it feels like for so many of these women, they feel like if they have a baby, it's going to be entirely their responsibility. And every young man I've ever come across actually enjoys parenting more than they thought they might. They don't mind sharing the load a bit. They don't mind coming home from the office a couple of nights a week. They don't mind working from home or doing a four-day week. The workplace hasn't accommodated, I think should be, the requirement for happy, healthy family living. So women are looking at the men in their lives and going, well, you don't want to do any parenting. I'd quite like to have a baby. I'd also like to have a career. How am I going to do it? Just all sounds too difficult. I'm not going to bother. I'm not going to bother having children. I'm just going to work. And they're actually missing out on all the wonderful parts of being a parent as well. I wonder what messages they're getting as well from their own parents about a family life, because we've got so many broken families now, so many divorces now, that I do think that there are a lot of young people who look at their own parents and say, well, why would I want to do that? You've made that look really unappealing. And so I think it's a lot of women who say, I don't want to end up sad like my mum. I will just stay single. Opinion polling suggests that young women are less likely to want to have children than young men. Why is that? Is there a sort of stigma around being a mother? In the modern world, we have done something very dangerous to women, which is to detach them from their own biology. We've put decades of women on the contraceptive pill. And so they no longer understand their own physiology or their own biology. That's even before we talk about what those birth control hormones have actually done to their emotional maternal drive. I'm a huge believer that via pharmaceuticals, we've actually suppressed the emotional maternal driver in women, because it's real and we're meant to have it. We're meant to feel driven to procreate. Of course, if you've been on birth control since you were 16 years old, you're going to get to 30. I don't feel it. Of course you don't feel it. Your body, your normal cycles, your rhythms have been destroyed. You might come off that birth control pill and find actually you do have an innate biological driver to want to go and have a baby. But nobody's teaching girls this. They're not at school receiving any sort of education about their cycles. And similarly, with men, we have to, as women, accept that men have a driver to procreate. It doesn't surprise me at all that men are more likely to want to have children. They're not messing around with their systems with hormones, despite the fact that we've got more oestrogen in our diets and in our water than we've ever had before. And I do think that's playing a role in the suppression of male fertility. But I think we need to get women off birth control pills and find out what happens to their biological innate drivers because we've destroyed them. Opinion polling shows that young women are much more radically left wing than young men. Why do you think this is the case? You could argue that one of the reasons that young girls would consider themselves or define themselves as left-leaning is because they see that role as being a nurturing. It's caring for other people. Like, look how caring I am for the disabled, for the trans person, for the person of colour, for the gay person. Look how caring I am. Guess what? They might genuinely feel that because it might be that these women have a nurturing instinct that we haven't completely destroyed with pharmaceutical drugs and that they are not necessarily misguidedly but unconsciously channeling that need to protect other people, which is innate within us, onto disparate groups that are the latest trend at the time that they're seeing on social media, that they see as the victim. Factor in the idea that we have a whole generation that have been taught to be victims. They're encouraged at school, they've been encouraged through various charities and protest groups to always look for the person who needs saving, whether that's via Black Lives Matter or Me Too, and I'm not saying those aren't without some virtue, but what's happened is we've got a generation of women who have this need to care for other people. They don't have younger siblings anymore, the parents are having children older, they don't live in a kind of village community, so traditionally, with a traditional family make-up, you'd have had the nuclear family, but you would have had, it takes a village to raise a child, and that was so much more healthy for human beings. You'd have your mum next door and your auntie down the road and your sister there, so these women had other people to care for, even if it was just cooking dinner for the grandmother, they had things, ways in which they could channel this feminine energy, and they don't have that anymore, because they're not being asked to do chores at home, neither boys nor girls are being asked to do chores at home, they don't have anyone to look after, so they're kind of randomly looking around, so I think the instinct is good, but it's suddenly being misplaced into little subcultures, which are the latest trend at the time, and I don't think that's good for the women who are doing it. With this divide in politics between young men and young women, we've seen complications in the dating world, where data suggests that young women in particular are much less likely to want to date men who have conservative or republican viewpoints. How has this impacted the dating world? Very recently there has been this shift in attitudes towards your political beliefs and opinions, that it reflects whether you are a good person or a bad person. I trace this back to some degree, back to Brexit probably originally, then back to Covid, when we took a lot of these teenagers and we locked them in their rooms, and suddenly how you felt or your political view or ideological opinion at that time meant you were a good person or you were a bad person. You either wanted to kill grandmas or you didn't, and this younger generation were encouraged to see the person not as just opinionated, but that it rendered them good or bad, and so it is no surprise that we have now got a whole generation that would look at women who consider themselves to be left-wing, who would look at a republican man and say, I would never date you. It's so heartbreaking because it's just the most brilliant fracturing of love and relationships, and ultimately the family, you've got estranged, we've got more young people now estranged from their own parents than we've ever had before in history, and that is absolutely annihilating for the family unit and the future of humanity, and I think it's desperately sad and it makes people desperately lonely, parents and their children, and it's the same dynamic is at play, the same energy. I don't agree with you and therefore I'm going to literally display my virtue by escaping from this situation. They don't have the backbone to have difficult conversations, they are frightened and weak it seems to me, they don't have any resilience to deal with difficult things in life because we've protected a whole generation of kids from any sort of potential harm or emotional upset, and so the easiest thing in the world is to just say, I'm not going to date you, I'm not going to date you. It's easier, so much easier, it's a kind of, it's an emotional laziness and it's an emotional get out of jail free card, because relationships are the hardest things that any of us ever do, and we've got a whole generation of young girls and boys who've been protected. Sport isn't competitive, you don't get the winners and losers anymore, you can never look at the exam results of the other child in your class in case it upsets you, you know, you have a blooming pass the parcel and everyone gets a chocolate. This is a generation that, guess what, they're now older teens and young adults, they cannot cope with the fact that life is tough, you know, I always said to my kids, life is tough but you are tougher. No one's telling them that, they're just telling them, oh yes, it's really hard and we must protect you, and we've also had, and I, you know, I'm conflicted by saying we've got, we've got a generation of mums who went out to work feeling guilty still about going out to work and not raising their children, so when their children then want something, they get indulged. I've done it myself sometimes, you know, when you've, if you've spent all day with them, by the time they get to the end of the day and they say, can I have a chocolate bar, you go, no, not a chocolate bar, go and clean your teeth, go to bed. If you've not seen them all day and they say, mum, can I have a chocolate bar, your guilt kicks in and you're much more likely to say, yeah, okay, you can have a chocolate bar, and so the modern dynamic of two parents always working means that you've got indulged children and unfortunately indulged children never have to feel unhappy, and guess what relationships are? Relationships are being happy and being sad and everything in between it, and yet we've cherished this, these young kids, we've never ever made them do anything they didn't want to do, and relationships sometimes are about doing things you don't want to do. There was a piece in the New York Times recently in which mothers said that they regretted having their children. There's also this acronym called DINKS, this is dual income, no kids, who celebrate not having children and having excess income to spend on travelling and so on. Are you happy or do you regret having your children? Child number one for me was really difficult and I was 29 and my husband was an Olympic rower and I was shocked by how difficult parenting was. My mother was amazing, my mother-in-law was fantastic, but my mother lived 200 miles away, back to my point I made earlier about the fact we don't have a village to raise a child anymore, she would come up and down the motorway and help me out, incredible, but for most women who don't have that, the idea of being alone with a baby when you haven't been around other people who've had babies is really scary. I found the first one very difficult because suddenly it was a realisation that I couldn't have it all, I couldn't work and be at home with the child, which I naively thought I could do, and so it was really difficult and then I knew I wanted another one, I didn't want an only child and so I then had another one. By that point it was much easier, you'd made all your mistakes and had all the challenges with the first one, you knew you're doing a second time round and then I had another one very quickly afterwards because I was like oh okay this is quite easy this time, so I knew I probably wanted to have three and I was fortunate enough to have three. I don't regret it for a minute, they're amazing and as hard as it is, it's so difficult to be a working mother. I'm also fortunate, as I say I've still got my mum, who's still amazing, I have an amazing partner now who is the only reason I can be here in America is because my partner of the last seven years, he is at home with my teenage girls now, you start to get your independence back and I don't regret it for a second, but I do understand why young women aren't feeling that need. It wasn't a choice for me because I had such a strong maternal urge, I was so broody, I was so desperate to have a baby that I was pregnant at 29, which was the first amongst all my group. I genuinely married my husband then, who I adored, but I married him to have a baby, that was it, that was my sole focus and even though I was still career orientated, I thought I could have it all and I kind of, you know, I worked with, I ran antenatal classes for 10 years, one of my many jobs I've done over the years, so I would work with pregnant couples and I always insisted that the men came as well because I thought they need to be on this journey with you from pregnancy so that you share it together and we used to have these sessions where we talked about life with a newborn and they expected me to talk about like how you change a nappy and how does, and I always said I'm not going to do that, I'm going to talk about your relationship because when you have a baby, the first thing that will be damaged is your relationship to each other and so we don't, we don't talk about that enough, there isn't enough decent education on keeping families together and keeping couples together when they've got a newborn baby and that's I think another reason why it doesn't seem appealing to women because there's such a communication breakdown now, we've got a whole younger generation that have been taught like the platitudes of psychotherapy but I'm not sure they're actually really listening to each other or able to communicate and to start, you know, the I sentences rather than the you sentences, you know, they watch a lot of, you know, these kids also watch a lot of combative content online, so much Netflix that they're consuming where, and they have to understand that fictional stories are built on conflict, there is no story without conflict, so all they're watching is arguing, arguing, arguing and then they're surprised where they turn off six non-stop hours of a Netflix drama, they pick up the phone to their boyfriend, have an argument, they're mimicking what they're seeing online and yet they maybe aren't being taught the insight to recognise those behaviours in themselves. Since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, feminists promised that women would be much happier being sexually liberated, being sexually free and yet all the data suggests women today are unhappy, are anxious, are depressed, are worried about the future and I know that you obviously have had your own experiences with sexual liberation, there's this great, someone that's gone viral recently, so why don't you tell us about your own story of your own sexual liberation? That photograph has done the rounds recently, I hadn't seen it for like 25 years and suddenly it started popping up on things, that photograph was actually, I was a competitive swimmer, so I spent a lot of my life in a swimsuit like that and I think it was something like a sportathon, telethon, it was like some sport relief telethon event, so it was about 2000, 2001, something like that and I'd only just started working in TV and it was this charity said, would you come and do a photo on the trading floor about this sports event because I was a swimmer, they put me in a bloody swimsuit and I was like, yeah whatever, I'll do it, it didn't bother me because I'm thinking it's a sporty thing. Now you take it out of context, it looks ridiculous, I'm literally on the trading floor on the phone like this, like it's the most normal thing in the world, it even got liked by Brad Pitt that picture recently, that gave me a bit of a thrill, but so for me that image wasn't a sexual one but I was part of that FHM generation where I was like, one year I was one above Kylie in FHM's 100 Sexiest and the next year I was like one below Charlotte Church, I was like what happened there, but I could always take it with a bit of a humour really and I was always very careful about the kind of images that I would allow myself to have taken of me, I had this weird sort of fairly arbitrary and random kind of code whereby if they wanted me to have like a bikini top on then I would have like long pants on with it or if they wanted me to show my legs I would wear like a jumper with it, I don't know, but I was always trying to tread that line between it being sexy, I don't mind that, but also not being kind of depraved and sort of slotty, which I didn't like, I'd also been a model for years, I'd modelled from being 16, 17 years old, so I'd done swimsuits shoots all around the world, like lingerie shoots set for catalogues and stuff like that, Marston Spencer's, that kind of thing, so it was never like a sexual thing for me, but one of the most depressing, I think for me now, one of the most depressing aspects of modern culture which affects women is this idea of hook-up culture, that the sexual revolution, which apparently has been translated into women should just have sex with whoever they want, I think is one of the reasons we've got a generation of young women who are completely depressed, I think it's unfathomable to me, I don't mind saying I've never had sex with someone I wasn't in love with, I never have, now why? Because it was about self-esteem, because I was brought up to believe that my body was important, that my sovereignty, my autonomy, whatever you want to call it, my physical sovereignty was of value, and I didn't think that I should be going out and putting myself at risk, going home with someone I met in a pub, like I find that the risk, I'm also very risk averse, and so I find the risk taking of young women deeply depressing, and I think I genuinely, the older I get, I think sex, it isn't just physical intimacy, it is a spiritual experience, it should be, and I think for these women who see sex as a kind of sport, therein lies potential self-esteem annihilation. Now I have great friends who would have never lived like me, who will absolutely go out and did over the last 30 years and 20 years, and would meet someone and go home with them or whatever, and I'm not judging them, like their choice, but it's not what I would want for my daughters, it really isn't, and it's not what I would want for the younger generation I just think it's a sad state of affairs when you've got women who are just randomly going out and allowing a man to put his penis in their body and they barely know him. To be graphic, for that is what it is for women, I know I'm not giving you an education, you don't already know but for me that's something that should be cherished and valued, and not treated as sport. I feel slightly differently about men, funnily enough, I do feel slightly differently about men, but that's probably just because I'm seeing it from a woman's perspective. I do think it's much easier for men to be more promiscuous, men have that drive, it is within to have as many babies as they possibly can, I'm more forgiving, it's terrible, but I'm more forgiving of men who do sleep around than I am of women, and I don't mean that in a moralistic sense, I just think young women sometimes underestimate the damage that they're doing to themselves emotionally, spiritually, mentally, by having sex with multiple partners that they aren't in a relationship with. The Bonnie Blues of this world would say that they are sexually free, they're liberated, they're just having fun, they no longer have to abide by the strict social rules of the past, and they are strong independent women making lots of money. What do you say to that? I cannot remotely put myself in the shoes of the likes of Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips, these girls who've made money out of sleeping around, they're not sleeping, let's be honest, out of having sex with multiple partners sometimes within an hour. I think it is a terrible demonstration and symbol of moral degradation and sexual degradation and spiritual degradation, I would genuinely go that far as to say that, and as much as they can argue that this is about empowerment, this is about me making money, no, it's about you not valuing at all this one precious vessel that you have, which is your one body. I don't believe you can get away with that sort of behaviour and come away unscathed. There was that one shot of Lily Phillips crying after she'd had multiple men ejaculate over her face and her eyes were actually red, and it stayed with me because it was so grotesque, and the idea that that was a demonstration of her being mentally and emotionally well, it was quite clearly the polar opposite, and she's utterly deluded if she thinks that that is not going to catch up with her if it hasn't already. Not only is it a risk from a sexually transmitted infections point of view, it's just a risk because you're punishing yourself, you're hurting yourself. It's the most public display of self-harm that I've seen from a woman in my lifetime, and it also sets a terrible example to every man that thinks it's okay to go and ejaculate on a woman that he's never met and that he's only seen on the internet, and it's a terrible example to all those girls who might be just about discovering their sexuality and be nervous to lose their virginity, because you're meant to be nervous when you lose your virginity, that's normal, and they might be looking at that woman, girl, awful woman, those women, and saying, well what's wrong with me that I don't want to have sex with a thousand men? What's wrong with me that I'm not even that keen on having sex with one? So you've got this example of this extreme sexual... I really find it hard to articulate how problematic that sex culture is online. There's something just grotesque and depraved and almost demonic about it. What is your advice to young women today? I think my advice to young women today would be you matter. Your body matters. You only get one. Look after it. Your emotional well-being matters. Tap into who you are. Try and work it out. Work out what makes you happy, because it's probably not going out and meeting strange men and having sex with them. It probably doesn't make you happy. Like, develop insight. Be more reflecting on who you are without becoming a narcissist, because that is a fine line, Stephen. It really genuinely is. And I would say that all they can ever really plan for in life is a certain amount ahead. I think we've got a young generation who are constantly looking so far ahead. Where will I be in five years? Where will I be in ten years? They're anxious. They've got social media making them anxious. They're looking at these women with these perfect lives on Instagram. Most people don't have perfect lives. And I just sort of say to them, it's old-fashioned. Sleep well. Exercise. Work hard at school. Try not to worry what other people think about you. Try to maintain good friendship groups. Try to be around people whose company you enjoy. Look for someone that you can fall in love with and marry and have children with. And don't be frightened of doing that. And it might be painful. It will be painful. You'll have to kiss a few frogs along the way. And it will be painful at some point. But life is about having some pain in life. That's normal. We're meant to be upset about certain things. But I would say to them, rather than being necessarily upset about Gaza, and upset about what are the other key issues for them, the green environmental stuff. Wonderful. It's great to feel politically engaged. Be politically engaged. Be politically aware. Absolutely. It makes you more interesting as a person. But don't sacrifice your own future because you're angry at stuff thousands of miles away. Or angry at anything you can't control. I have on the wall at home the serenity prayer. I had it on my wall at university as well. I'd forgotten that. And I kind of found it again. And it really genuinely has led me through life. Which is, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. The courage to change the things I can. And the wisdom to know the difference. If you can master that, life becomes quite easy actually. We've got a whole generation of young women who are trying to change the world. And they won't change the world. And they're not having the wisdom to work out the difference between the things in life they can affect. And they're giving up on agency over their own future. And their own bodies. They see themselves as the victim of society. You're not a victim. You decide if you're a victim. You can cast yourself in your own story as the victim. And I'm afraid there's a whole generation doing that. Because you know what Stephen? Like genuinely if you can find a great man. And there are great men. But you need to communicate with them. If you can find a great man. And you can get married. And you can have children. That is a great foundation for life. And I wish more women were able to find that.