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

2 stars for the deep research and thought that Perry clearly put into this work, deducted 3 stars because…well, at the end of the day, Perry comes from the same white elite background as the liberal feminists she’s critiquing, and her arguments stand on some extremely shaky ground and blind spots, leading her to a reactionary and ultimately harmful conclusion (spoiler: to get married).

Through the different interviews and sources that Perry pulled together, it’s clear that she tried to prove her point through as many means as possible (personal experience, témoignages, sociological reviews, some evolutionary bio reviews) and it makes for an engaging, compelling read. I broadly agree with her arguments that casual heterosexual sex leads to more harm to women, that prostitution is more of a moral bad than good as it disproportionately concerns women who are poor and oppressed, and that the consent framework that we have currently is not enough.

However, I found myself bristling against the core of her argument, which boils down to the fact that men and women are biologically different. I find this to be an easy excuse, another iteration of boys will be boys, so we girls just have to protect ourselves (which she literally says in the conclusion, offering her daughter the standard list of old wives’ cautionary words: don’t date anyone you wouldn’t marry, try to stay in a monogamous marriage, and don’t use dating apps). So after all of this rhetorical work, after the progress that we’ve made in gender equality that Perry even acknowledges, like the destigmatization of divorce and access to contraception, we’re supposed to just resign ourselves to a specific vision of monogamy??? And what is the role of the man in all of this—poor little Robert who can’t help but want to sow his seed, but through the pressures of conventional society will have to constrain himself to having sex with one measly woman rather than hundreds??? This is exactly the model that she criticizes, wherein the upper and middle classes stay in monogamous marriages and a small proportion of lower class women are sacrificed to soak up the extra sexual energy that men just have biologically. It’s the same move of putting the load into women to protect themselves from men’s misdeeds without addressing the real issue, Western patriarchy.

I also find the piece of advice of staying together and persevering through marriage to be incredibly insulting. Does she not think that people try to make their marriages work? And doesn’t she also realize that when people stay in unhappy marriages and still raise their kids together, those kids can still end up with as much emotional damage as children with single parents? Again, she herself points out that those who are upper-middle class have it easier because they have the resources to first enter a good marriage and then deal with the repercussions of a failed marriage. What about the rest of us, who have to deal with the repercussions of either choice nonetheless?

Of course, I’m not trying to say that we should default to the free market of casual sex that Perry takes to be the norm (which I feel like she’s over exaggerating—the AVERAGE number of sexual partners is meant to be high because it’s skewed by outliers; the majority of people aren’t going around hooking up with everyone they see—Perry clearly needs to revisit statistics class). I’m just tired of marriage being the solution when it’s clearly not and hasn’t been.

And perhaps this is a nitpicky point, but in her conclusion, she argues that societies with monogamous marriages are the most stable BECAUSE they are richer/more productive. So after all of this talk about human dignity, which has a very spiritual basis that this book is lacking, only to defer to an economic argument? It’s so well known that economic productivity only leads to happiness to a certain point—why can’t we address this?

My contribution to this discussion is to steer away from Perry’s biological argument which I find both insufficient and insulting to men and women. What if the problem is Westernization and colonization and not the biology of gender (which, again, under a lot of examination now)? After all, the institution of monogamous marriage/the nuclear family that Perry portrays to be soooo universal is extremely Western; all other forms of societies are simply cast aside as men investing their time into second wives rather than their economic production. AHHH. This is so detractive, incorrect, and Western! What about Native, Asian, African, etc. societies that relied on a communal model of child rearing that decenters the nuclear family and still isn’t polygamous? Perry is so dismissive of “gestational communism” because it detracts from the mother-child bond and skips right over its benefits because to her, it’s a zero-sum game where the mother MUST be the primary figure in a child’s life and all other relationships are flimsy and therefore unnecessary. She’s forgetting (or more likely, not aware of) communities where the grandparents, aunts, uncles, extended relatives, and friends are strong influences on the child, inherently decentering the nuclear family but not detracting from it. To be so attached to the supremacy of the mother child relationship is so selfish, which somehow Perry paints to be a good thing. Are we saying that to be a mother is to be inherently good? I can point to so many examples that this is not the case, and literally to my own life, where because the mother values herself so much, she ends up damaging the child.

To me, the core of the issue lies in the lack of love outside the self in Western societies and all other societies that the West has colonized. I don’t believe that men are inherently more sexual—I believe that they’ve been socialized to initiate violence against women and to never have the emotional intimacy that women form with each other. So then they seek love or what they think is love through sex. It’s because they’re so lacking in love that they perpetuate this violence, ignoring consent and pushing forward prostitution. And women in men’s circles can’t help but adopt this attitude too, also from a lack of love which in Western society they’ve been taught to seek primarily from a romantic relationship. We need to all learn to respect each other’s inherent value and how that affects relational acts like sex (as Perry argues)—and that can only be done through pushing forward an ethic of love, an all-encompassing selfless love. It’s time to introduce more Indigenous and non-Western thinking that centers community into this crucial debate because at the end of the day, if we keep centering one’s selfish desires, then no one wins.