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

About to be a long one (ha). This book wasn’t written from a religious or even conservative/Republican point of view, but instead from a woman who worked at a rape crisis center and gave consent workshops. The beginning was a little technical and outlined different political things but the book got so so good, while also being so heartbreaking. She basically makes the point that as our culture has tried to make culture more open and free for women, it has in turn hurt them worse. Many times I gasped or felt so angry/fired up about certain issues.

“I propose a different solution, based on a fundamental feminist claim: unwanted sex is worse than sexual frustration. I’m not willing to accept a sexual culture that puts pressure on people low in sociosexuality (overwhelmingly women) to meet the sexual demands of those high in sociosexuality (overwhelmingly men), particularly when sex carries so many more risks for women, in terms of violence and pregnancy. Hook-up culture is a terrible deal for women and yet has been presented by liberal feminism as a form of liberation. A truly feminist project would demand that, in the straight dating world, it should be men, not women, who adjust their sexual appetites”

“One of the most important differences between the sexes is that men are higher in the quality that psychologists call ‘sociosexuality’ – the desire for sexual variety. This means that, on average, men are much more likely than women to desire casual sex. This sexuality gap produces a mismatch between male and female desire at the population level. There are a lot more straight men than there are straight women looking for casual sex, meaning that many of these men are left frustrated by the lack of willing casual partners. As we have seen, in the post-sexual revolution era, the solution to this mismatch has often been to encourage women (ideally young, attractive ones) to overcome their reticence and have sex ‘like a man’, imitating male sexuality en masse. The thesis of this book is that this solution has been falsely presented as a form of sexual liberation for women, when in fact it is nothing of the sort, since it serves male, not female, interests. But one of the points I have been keen to stress throughout is that, although our current sexual culture has significant problems, this does not mean that the sexual cultures of the past were idyllic. All societies must find some kind of solution to the sexuality gap, and those solutions can be anti-woman in many diverse ways.”

Chapter 5 was specifically on porn and how it has shaped society and the effect it’s had on the sexual culture for men and women. She specifically writes about the abusive and domineering nature porn has taken. The author points out how the leftist feminists have been silent on this issue, but instead choose to support it. A few quotes that were powerful:

“In fact, the most committed defences of porn come nowadays from self-described ‘sex-positive’ leftists who claim that any criticism of the industry must necessarily be a criticism of its workers (funnily enough, they do not make the same defence of industries that rely on sweatshop labour). These apologists are aided, in part, by the efforts of the industry to sanitise its practices. Pornhub, for instance, runs a smoke and mirrors exercise it calls ‘Pornhub Cares’, with campaigns against plastic pollution and the destruction of bee and giant panda habitats (‘Pornhub is calling on our community to help get pandas in the mood. We’re making panda style porn!’) But a far more effective counter to any criticism of the industry is the sexual liberation narrative, always available to comfort any porn user who feels a squirm of discomfort at what they’re funding. Kacey Jordan, Jenna Jameson, Vanessa Belmond and Linda Lovelace all gave some version of this narrative at the height of their fame, responding to anyone who asked with a dismissive ‘of course I’m consenting.’ All of these women later changed their minds, after the porn industry had had its fill of them, and after the damage to their bodies and psyches had already been done. Taking a woman at her word when she says ‘of course I’m consenting’ is appealing because it’s easy. It doesn’t require us to look too closely at the reality of the porn industry or to think too deeply about the extent to which we are all – whether as a consequence of youth, or trauma, or credulousness, or some murky combination of all three – capable of hurting or even destroying ourselves. You can do terrible and lasting harm to a ‘consenting adult’ who is begging you for more”

“The porn industry would not produce content depicting abuse unless there were a demand for it. There is a darkness within human sexuality – mostly, but not exclusively, within men – that might once have been kept within a fantasist’s skull, but which porn now makes visible for all the world to see. The industry takes this cruel, quiet seed and makes it grow”

“But we all know that in the real world that doesn’t quite work. If we recoil from Norfolk’s account of fifty men queuing up to sexually violate a teenage girl who had been abandoned by the state services tasked with protecting her, how can we then watch video of a young woman only a few years older, looking just as much like a child, being violated by even more men, without a similar response? The sore, torn orifices are the same. The exhaustion and disorientation are the same. The men aroused by using and discarding a young woman presented to them as a ‘teen’ are also much the same.”