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

This book is not free of flaws, but I’m galvanized by its opposition to the cult mantra-spouting zeitgeist. Over the years, I have been coming to terms with the latent (and today, manifest) hypocrisy of liberal feminism. I like the description “choice feminism” better, as it tends to sidestep the gut reactions of the types of people who are in an unhappy marriage with the simpleton ideology of “liberal = good.” I say, with a whisper and a look over my shoulder, that maybe it is not always good.

The first inklings I started to get that not all was right in the world of liberal feminism was my inability to find unity with two mantras: “men are trash” and “women are liberated when we act like men.” Why, instead of encouraging women to act like the sex we are told is “trash,” do we not encourage men to act like women? Why does women’s behavior make us weak, and why is it something we must change and adapt to meet with men’s behavior? It reminds me that there are women in this world who believe it is progressive to refer to ourselves as “non-men,” defining our material reality not as femaleness, but a lack of maleness.

Were women liberated by the sexual revolution? Louise Perry writes that the adulation of “progressive” men in the 1970s for women’s lib, abortion rights, and, in particular, the rise of The Pill was a self-serving, false lionization. Here were men like Hugh Hefner, who had nothing to lose and everything to gain for the rise of his empire by the pseudo-extermination of the fear of pregnancy, which Perry describes as “one of the last remaining reasons for women saying ‘no.’” Perry is not suggesting that we regress back to the Dark Ages where women lived in fear of pregnancy; she is saying that we ought to be mindful when our wins are convenient to the promulgation of men's desires (women as orifices, on demand). Women are clearly still suffering, in spite of pharmaceutical and technological advances. The liberal feminist reaction has been to say that this is because the sexual revolution is not finished. “Thus they prescribe more freedom and are continually surprised when their prescription doesn't cure the disease.”

Over the past few years, I have been distressed over the frankly insane amount of wisdom we attribute to young people. Never before has Western society been so deferential to these all-knowing saviors, who will obviously cure every ill that has existed since the dawn of humankind, in spite of adulthood and independence being entered into at later and later ages. Perry discusses C.S. Lewis’ concept of “chronological snobbery,” or the idea that the intellectual climate of our own time is uncritically accepted, and “whatever has gone out of date is on that count discredited.” This is such an important topic that I am always trying to shoehorn into the (now rarer and rarer due to people's heightened sensitivities to opposition) political conversations I have, because we are making legislation and policy today on the sole directives of youth culture’s prerogatives, seemingly failing to consider how wrong we were - and know we were - as children ourselves. Perry concurs: “The fetishisation of youth in our culture has given us the false idea that it is young people who are best placed to provide moral guidance to their elders, despite their obvious lack of experience.” But the point is that this chronological snobbery is one of the key components in the rise of the “fuck like a man” mantra. In the early 2000s, when I came of age, adults wouldn't have dreamed of deferring to my uninformed hot takes. Now? “Well, I certainly wouldn't have dreamed of sleeping with multiple men over the holidays in the 1980s,” thinks the older woman. “But my brilliant, wise twenty-year-old daughter says it's liberating, and after all, I'm just old.” No one wants to be Karen. Perry pushes against MLK's famous “arc of justice” vision, writing that “the ‘progress’ narrative disguises the challenge of interconnectedness by presenting history as a simple upward trajectory, with all of us becoming steadily more free as old-fashioned restrictions are surmounted.”

Perry moves into what are probably the most controversial takes of the book when she discusses how “consent culture” (my coinage) has failed. Firstly, that things like “consent workshops” do not prevent rape, because rape is not, as I used to parrot as a self-righteous libfem in the early 2010s, about power. It is about sex. And if we really want to stop women from getting hurt by men, we must stop pretending like educating would-be rapists about consent will stop rape. It is all nice and good to say that men should just stop raping, and it’s hard to combat that line because it is true. Speaking about intoxicated women in a nightclub, Perry writes, “Is it appalling for a person to even contemplate assaulting these women? Yes. Does that moral statement provide any protection to these women whatsoever? No.” She's right, and she decries the collateral damage of women in service to a dogma that says encouraging women to protect ourselves is victim-blaming. Rape is not a philosophical exercise. It is a material reality that women and men experience every single hour of every single day.

And secondly, that “consent” to any given action does not make it moral or good, her thesis to a chapter on the ethics of BDSM. Perry points out that, contrary to the popular line that BDSM subverts gender roles, the majority of its advocates fall into the expected lines. In a survey, most women identified with masochism, while most men identified with sadism.

In the fourth chapter titled “Loveless Sex Is Not Empowering,” we come to the crux of Perry's argument: “hookup culture” is not empowering, and is, in fact, disempowering. To take this personally, I know that what Perry says is true because I lived it. Agonizing over casual sex with men we “caught feelings” for made up entire drinking session conversations with my friends. We had years-long pseudo-relationships with men who had no idea we would have provided the getaway cars for their armed robberies on request. It was never suggested that we should fess up, not once. But Perry has an uncomfortable, unbelievably unpopular explanation for this, and one I would have denied in my youth and now understand to be undeniable as I age: men and women are different. She uses the now unfashionable field of evolutionary psychology to evidence her claims: “A society that prioritizes the high sociosexual [defined as a person's interest in sexual variety and adventure] is necessarily one that prioritises the desires of men, given the natural distribution of this trait, and those men that need to call on other people - mostly young women - to satisfy their desires.”

These are hard sells to today’s handmaidens of capitalism (I have recurring nightmares featuring the amorphous female blobs of today's commercial art), liberal feminists. There will always be women who claim they enjoy things others tell them are bad for them, and right behind them will be men cheering on their identification as the cool girl who doesn’t show any emotional needs of her own, happy to be just a hookup. Perry notes that prototypical cool girls Carrie Bradshaw of Sex and the City and Stella Gibson of The Fall “have loveless, brusque sex with men they don't like... the pursuit of the encounter... is psychological gratification.” Perry notes that both characters claim to have “fucked like a man,” but she believes this is “purely reactive,” as liberal feminists have a laser-focus on “advising women to work on overcoming their perfectly normal and healthy preference for intimacy and commitment in sexual relationships.” This is satisfying to hear; I wish I had understood that “catching feelings” for men who paid me sexual attention was normal. It is not a deficiency, nor something to be metaphorically beat out of women. “Demisexuality” is the pathologization of average female desire.

Perry moves back to the failure of consent culture in a chapter on pornography. She notes, and I agree, that the libfem appeal to consent “cannot account for the ways in which the sexuality of impressionable young people can be warped by porn or other forms of cultural influence.” I am reminded of how women consistently talk about the emotional tolls of keeping up with the social media Joneses, while simultaneously brushing away the idea that pornography being a click away may have the same sort of power over men.

There are two things I take umbrage with in the book: the first is that Perry is incredulous that a woman can be turned on by the ubiquitous “dick pic.” Without oversharing, I have indeed been turned on by these photos sent to me (consensually) by men. “I know of no women who would masturbate” to these images, she writes. I would argue: yes, you do. But I can understand why the libfem preoccupation with the “unsolicited dick pic” would have her believing this can't possibly be true. I also disagree with her later advice that women should not have sex with men if they would not make good fathers; she states that this means they aren't “worthy of your trust.” There are plenty of men who would be bad fathers, but good partners. A lack of parental instinct does not make one a bad romantic partner. Perry should have outlined the traits of this “good father” and applied them as such, not relied on an unformed feeling women are supposed to have that men would be good fathers.

Perry might lose readers in her final chapter, which extolls the twin virtues of motherhood and marriage (she never once says that either is necessary for an individual woman’s liberation). But I must admit that I identify with her conclusions. Hookup culture took up a large part of my romantic (unromantic) life, and my friends who did not partake, anecdotally, seem to be happier, healthier, and more grounded. I am now a married woman myself, and I am very happy to be.