coywolfling's Reviews > The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century

TW for discussion of r*pe

This book is essentially a 'gender critical' feminist manifesto, dressed up as evolutionary psychology, i.e. the science of rationalising personal biases through inductive reasoning about human nature; which can, will be, and has been used to support polar opposite positions. The author is not a radical feminist in the traditional sense, but she quotes and references plenty of radfems and this will take you through all the standard talking points of contemporary bioessentialist, anti-gender, anti-queer discourse — males and females have different brains; males are inherently more violent than females; sex work should be criminalised; BDSM is pathological; trans women don't belong in sports, being in all ways physically superior to 'natal women' [yes, she uses that specific terminology], etc. etc. If you're hearing these ideas for the first time, they might appear to be made in good faith and well-intentioned. They're really not.

To gain some perspective on the intellectual milieu this author is operating within, it's worth noting some of the titles in the goodreads 'readers also enjoyed' list:

- Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality by Hellen Joyce: 'Gender identity ideology is about more than twitter storms and using the right pronouns. In just ten years, laws, company policies, school and university curricula, sport, medical protocols, and the media have been reshaped to privilege self-declared gender identity over biological sex. People are being shamed and silenced for attempting to understand the consequences of redefining "man" and "woman".'

- Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism by Kathleen Stock: 'Material Girls presents a timely and opinionated critique of the culturally influential theory that we each have an inner feeling about our sex called a gender identity, and that this feeling is more socially significant than our actual biological sex. It makes a clear and humane feminist case for retaining the ability to discuss material reality about biological sex in a range of important contexts, including female-only spaces and resources, healthcare, epidemiology, political organization and data collection.'

- The War on the West by Douglas Murray: 'It is now in vogue to celebrate non-Western cultures and disparage Western ones. Some of this is a much-needed reckoning, but much of it fatally undermines the very things that created the greatest, most humane civilization in the world.'

Yikes on bikes.

Mrs. Perry starts off with identifying her ideological antagonists in the first chapter of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution:

'I’m using the term "liberal feminism" to describe a form of feminism that is usually not described as such by its proponents, who nowadays are more likely to call themselves "intersectional feminists".'

She gets her digs in at Simone de Beauvoir, often quoted for her contention that 'One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman', and Emma Watson, who incurred the ire of bioessentialists by showing support for trans women in response to Rowling's repeated attacks and anti-trans essay.

'Liberal feminism takes this market-orientated ideology and applies it to issues specific to women. For instance, when the actress and campaigner Emma Watson was criticised in 2017 for showing her breasts on the cover of Vanity Fair, she hit back with a well-worn liberal feminist phrase: ‘feminism is about giving women choice ... It’s about freedom.’ For liberal feminists such as Watson, that might mean the freedom to wear revealing clothes (and sell lots of magazines in the process), or the freedom to sell sex, or make or consume porn, or pursue whatever career you like, just like the boys.'

In chapter two, she attempts to use the hard science of biology to justify unfounded claims about human psychology, conflating the fields of sociobiology and evolutionary biology. Rape is a social construct, not a biological one, even if there does exist a biological drive to seek sexual pleasure; therefore an explanation for the human behaviour of rape is a question for the realm of evolutionary psychology or better yet, if you care about things like testable hypotheses, sociology.

Under the heading 'Rape as adaptation', she cites the text A Natural History of Rape, basically The Bell Curve of evolutionary psychology's contribution to discourse on rape, to support her interpolation of the 'obvious possibility: that rape is an aggressive expression of sexual desire', a premise which has, in the decades since the book's publication, curiously not yet not made itself obvious to most social scientists. 🤔

'Their analysis of rape then forms the basis of a protracted sales pitch for evolutionary psychology, the latest incarnation of sociobiology: not only do the authors believe that this should be the explanatory model of choice in the human behavioural sciences, but they also want to see its insights incorporated into social policy.'

Coyne, J., Berry, A. 'Rape as an adaptation'. Nature 404, 121–122 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/35004636

This contention, that rape is motivated more by the desire for sexual release than the desire to exercise social power, is important to making her case that men on the whole have near uncontrollable sexual urges that should be curbed by instituting stronger societal pressures to form lasting, monogamous marriages.

But to get to the bottom of this not-actually-very-controversial issue in social science, why not just ask rapists themselves why they rape?

'In a series of three studies, the authors examined whether the relationship between RMA [rape myth acceptance] and self-reported rape proclivity was mediated by anticipated sexual arousal or anticipated enjoyment of sexually dominating the rape victim. Results of all three studies suggest that the anticipated enjoyment of sexual dominance mediates the relationship between RMA and rape proclivity, whereas anticipated sexual arousal does not. These findings are stated to be consistent with the feminist argument that rape and sexual violence may be motivated by men’s desire to exert power over women; that RMA is a cross-culturally reliable and valid construct; the probability that males who report a high tendency to commit a sexual assault are more likely to rape a woman once they get an opportunity to do so; and suggest that the incidence and prevalence of rape and sexual violence could be decreased by educational interventions that minimize men’s tendency to associate sex with power.'

'Rape Myth Acceptance and Rape Proclivity: Expected Dominance Versus Expected Arousal as Mediators in Acquaintance-Rape Situations'. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Volume: 19, Issue: 4 Dated: April 2004. https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-lib...

See also 'Individual differences and attitudes toward rape: A meta-analytic review.' by Anderson, K. B., Cooper, H., & Okamura, L. (1997) and The Motivations Underlying Male Rape of Women' by Asha M. Yourell, B.A. & Mania P. McCabe (2014).

Perry's 'alternative research' paints a dim view of biological determinism.

'At the heart of this resocialisation project is a fundamentally utopian idea: if the differences we see between the sexes are entirely socialised, then they must also be entirely curable through cultural reform, which means that, if all of us, right now, could accept the feminist truth and start raising our children differently, then within a generation we could remake the world.'

What?? Nice strawman cum non sequitur. Literally nobody who understands gender socialisation is saying that. Although it would be neat if things did work that way.

She refers to herself as a 'gender critical' feminist while grasping at straws to malign everyone she can think of who has contributed to the development of critical theory.

'In 1977, a petition to the French parliament calling for the decriminalisation of sex between adults and children was signed by a long list of famous intellectuals, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and – that esteemed radical and father of Queer Theory – Michel Foucault.'

Their crime? Advocating for age of consent laws in France to apply equally to homosexual and heterosexual relationships. The age of consent at the time was 15 for heterosexual practices, which granted is really young to be having sex with 40-year-olds, but 21 for homosexual practices. Why the discrepancy? Apparently asking that question means you're a pedophile. And the fact that queer theory employs critical thought and deconstruction is clearly evidence of a queer, trans agenda to normalise pedophilia. Right? /sarcasm

So what does this book propose as the solution to rape culture the biologically hardwired tendency of males to rape?

'But while the monogamous marriage model may be relatively unusual, it is also spectacularly successful. When monogamy is imposed on a society, it tends to become richer. It has lower rates of both child abuse and domestic violence, since conflict between co-wives tends to generate both. Birth rates and crime rates both fall, which encourages economic development, and wealthy men, denied the opportunity to devote their resources to acquiring more wives, instead invest elsewhere: in property, businesses, employees, and other productive endeavours.'

That is a direct quote from the final chapter. I kid you not.

She laments the availability of abortion and contraceptive methods – 'When motherhood became a biological choice for women, fatherhood became a social choice for men' – and the legal recourse to divorce for couples that are unhappy in their marriages, because it harms the children, apparently more so than being forced to live in a loveless family.

The weird thing about her criticisms of 'liberal feminism' is that, throughout the book, she illuminates social problems that are common leftist critiques of capitalism, but repeatedly frames them as being caused by a cultural divestment from religious conservative values such as monogamous, heterosexual marriage, modesty and purity culture, and a return to traditional gender roles: 'There was a wisdom to the traditional model in which the father was primarily responsible for earning money while the mother was primarily responsible for caring for children at home. Such a model allows mothers and children to be physically together and at the same time financially supported.' Which is great if that's what you want in life. Not so great when you're being socially pressured into it.

She mentions communism only once in a quote characterising it as a totalitarian, statist ideology, then concludes, 'We have to look at social structures that have already proven to be successful in the past and compare them against one another, rather than against some imagined alternative that has never existed and is never likely to exist.' Louise Perry is not a radical, Marxist or a critical, intersectional feminist. She's not really any kind of feminist, defends liberalism (in the traditional, Lockean sense) while decrying liberal feminism, and doesn't even seem to believe in the possibility of social equality between the two immutable, essential genders. This text literally just repackages fascist family values as 'feminism' and targets vulnerable women who aren't familiar with this particular brand of rhetoric for ideological recruitment and right-wing radicalisation.

I'm not saying don't read this book, but I'd urge you to take the thesis with a mound of salt and supplement your reading with authors like bell hooks, Emma Goldman, Audre Lorde, Angela Y. Davis, Patricia Hill Collins, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Judith Butler, Julia Serano and Kate Bornstein. Hell, even Andrea Dworkin would have cringed at being quoted by Louise Perry.