The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the ...

The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century
Ditching the stuffy hang-ups and benighted sexual traditionalism of the past is an unambiguously positive thing.
The sexual revolution has liberated us to enjoy a heady mixture of erotic freedom and personal autonomy.
Right? Wrong, argues Louise Perry in her provocative new book.
Although it would be neither possible nor desirable to turn the clock back to a world of pre-60s sexual mores, she argues that the amoral libertinism and callous disenchantment of liberal feminism and our contemporary hypersexualised culture represent more loss than gain.
The main winners from a world of rough sex, hook-up culture and ubiquitous porn - where anything goes and only consent matters - are a tiny minority of high-status men, not the women forced to accommodate the excesses of male lust.
While dispensing sage advice to the generations paying the price for these excesses, she makes a passionate case for a new sexual culture built around dignity, virtue and restraint. This countercultural polemic from one of the most exciting young voices in contemporary feminism should be read by all men and women uneasy about the mindless orthodoxies of our ultraliberal era.
Author says she moved on from her “liberal” views as she matured. Great direction, and I love the message, but - influenced by the godless elitist portion of British society in which she grew up, and where I lived for many years - she doesn’t seem to understand that without God as a primary source, nothing can have real meaning, especially when it comes to our fundamental relationships.
Even her practical advice remains untethered, because she has been taught (by her friends and social environment) to reject what she calls “religion and tradition”.
Writing with great intelligence, she struggles to build the right type of framework (marriage is good, porn is bad, etc.) from scratch and she gets to so many great conclusions that, without any metaphysical context, remain suspended in mid-air. This leaves her with a shell without an egg. Almost like someone who throws away the instructions, then works like crazy for 10 years to make up her own instructions, and then ends up with a book of instructions that “kind of sounds” like the original but is not: she still doesn't want to connect with the manufacturer, who is the only one who can give her the key to make the product work.
This way, all remains nothing more than an empty shell. Everything remains at surface level, without any anchor to the deepest hearts of women and men.
Sorry. You can’t write off God. He’s the fabric of our existence. We are wired to worship, and our hearts can only rest when they rest in Him.
No wonder the two strongest pages of the book are the ones where Perry quotes C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton.
This is a very well-crafted book, that carries such an important message. But it lacks depth.
Example: an element that could have been touched with more depth in the book is the concept of "freedom".
"Sexual disenchantment is a natural consequence of the liberal privileging of freedom over any other value, because, if you want to be utterly free, you have to take aim at any kind of social restriction that limit you, particularly the belief that sex has some unique, intangible value. "
What is this "freedom"? In the modern culture, this term is used to mean "the ability to do whatever pleases me", because we live in a society of teenagers. But for many, many centuries, "freedom" has meant something completely different. Within a religious context, "freedom" is the ability to become the best version of ourselves (to become saint) without impediments. Kind of different, right? And yet, that is the only freedom that a mature adult should strive for.
" From this belief in the specialness of sex comes a host of potentially unwelcome phenomena, including patriarchal religious systems. But when we attempt to disenchant sex [...] then there is another kind of cost."
To paraphrase: the sacrality that religions assign to sex actually sounds like the "right thing to do", but… ugh! I've been brought up, like my whole generation, thinking that "patriarchal religious systems" are the bad guys! How can I reconcile that?
You could reconcile that by trying a little harder to understand what religion actually teaches. The fact that some rotten apples within the Church have committed atrocities is often quoted to deny the value of religion, but that's intellectually dishonest. It's also completely irrelevant to this argument (I'm not saying this is Perry's point, because it is not, but it's a very fashionable retort to Christian faith).
As another example of misconstruing religion, Perry quotes evolutionary biologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy: " We are not ready-made out of somebody's rib. We are composites of many different legacies, put together from leftovers in an evolutionary process... etc. "
Hrdy probably ignores that the Church (both the Catholic and the Anglican ones) fully embrace evolutionary theories. Not only those, but also the Big Bang theory, which was formulated by a catholic priest.
Why am I going on about religion? Isn't it beside the point that this book is trying to make?
Not at all.
In fact, it should be the entire point.
If we really tried to apply "love of God, neighbor and self", as the main gospel commandments, this would be more than sufficient to solve every problem outlined in this book. “A really successful marriage takes 3 people”, Fulton Sheen used to say: “You, your spouse, and God”.
Toward the end, Perry inches close to this conclusion, when she talks about a vague "moral intuition". Fair, but moral intuition is such a vague thing, it’s almost useless.
Religion and the Church have never had a worse reputation than today. I know that.
But look into it more deeply, more seriously, because they do hold the key to our true happiness.
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.'
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.'
'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 thought this was a pretty good book. The author talks about “chronological snobbery” to mean the attitude that the past is out of date and therefore discredited (E.P. Thompson called it “the enormous condescension of posterity”). She also maintains that female and male sexuality are intrinsically not the same, which has always been obvious to me, though there are lately schools of thought that deny it. I grew up in the north of England at a time when the tradition was for young men and women to find a partner they could get along with and then go through a few stages of courtship, save up for a deposit on a house, then get married in the hope that the marriage would last a lifetime. I left there when I was 16 and didn’t have that kind of marriage, but a couple of my friends who did stayed married all their lives and apparently were happy that way. Aside from such happiness that they found in the marriage itself, it freed their energies to be productive in other ways and to build comfortable homes.
As far as “chronological snobbery” goes, I often try and understand and imagine what it must have been like to live in the age of Jane Austen or in the 19th century of the Schumanns and Brahms. Brahms was in love all his life with a woman he couldn’t have and yet nobody wrote better love songs or had deeper friendships with both men and women than Brahms. Are we missing something? Stephan Zweig writes in “The World of Yesterday” about this, he says when he sees young couples who have become lovers he thinks about Vienna in his youth and the terrible ordeals the kids had to go through if infected with syphillis and he definitely prefers the modern way, but he was writing in the 1940s long before the rise of Tinder and the modern omnicopulant freelance gonadista.
The writer ends with a recommendation to get married. I think that’s sound advice, even though I never quite managed it. The world of casual sexual encounters is becoming quite terrifying, not just for women, but also for men who can easily lose their reputation and profession if they do something that stranger lying next to them in bed wasn’t quite expecting. Maybe the greatest invention of mankind was not the wheel, but the wedding ring?
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.
Here’s some advice for your daughter and mine as they reach sexual maturity:
• Hold off from having sex with a new boyfriend for several months. • Don’t use dating apps. • Monogamous marriage is by far the most stable foundation on which to build a family. • Run a mile from any man who is turned on by violence.
These are just some of the conclusions reached by Louise Perry in her disturbing, riveting book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution (A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century).
A journalist who writes for both the right-wing Daily Mail and the left-wing New Statesman, and a former rape crisis centre worker, Perry is one of several fresh voices (Nina Power and Mary Harrington being other examples), who brave the hostility of their progressive sisters by acknowledging that men and women are different, that the differences matter, and that unbridled sexual liberation might not be the road to utopia.
Superficially, women are more liberated than their forbears, but are they happier? As you might have noticed, mounting evidence suggests not. Perry blames the supposedly liberating forces unleashed by second wave feminism. The book is counter-cultural; its punchy chapter titles have such an old-school flavour that they appear bracingly cutting-edge: 1. Sex Must Be Taken Seriously 2. Men and Women Are Different 3. Some Desires Are Bad 4. Loveless Sex Is Not Empowering 5. Consent Is Not Enough 6. Violence Is Not Love 7. People Are Not Products 8. Marriage Is Good Conclusion: Listen to Your Mother
Perry argues that the liberation of sexual behaviour that came about through the contraceptive pill, legal abortion and the Divorce Reform Act has benefitted men (though only high-status ones, and only superficially) by providing greater opportunities for no-strings sex. But there have been negative, unintended consequences. As Perry’s grandmother puts it: ‘Women have been conned’. While the pill has ostensibly liberated women, it has led to more single mothers. The pill is apparently not as reliable as is widely assumed (100 women taking it will get pregnant in a year.) But with legal abortion as a back-up, it has killed off the shotgun wedding.
“When motherhood became a biological choice for women, fatherhood became a social choice for men.”
Nor does the state adequately compensate. It doesn’t supply the love and emotional support of a father, and in many cases doesn’t even supply the cash. In the UK, less than two thirds of non-resident parents (most of them fathers) are paying child maintenance in full. (Perry doesn’t mention an additional, systemic flaw in the Child Maintenance Service, which is that it provides a financial incentive for mothers to reduce the number of nights a child stays with their father to zero.)
The sexual revolution has attempted to sever sex from emotion, a process of ‘sexual disenchantment’. But this appears to be impossible for women in particular. Forget Sex and the City – the evidence shows that casual sex makes women miserable. Despite attempts by some magazines to advise women on how not to ‘catch feelings’ (Don’t look him in the eye! Take methamphetamines! Think about someone else!), it seems that sex is a deeply emotional experience after all. Most of us know this instinctively, but there are profound cultural pressures that want you to think otherwise.
One of these comes from pornography, which emerges as the book’s chief villain. The explosion of online porn is rendering men incapable of the real thing. Erectile dysfunction now affects between 14 and 35 per cent of young men, compared to two or three per cent at the start of the century. Men appear to be catching some dangerous kinks from porn, which young women feel pressured to indulge, hence the increase in injuries and deaths from choking during sex.
And while a minority of women might make a morally dubious living from OnlyFans, the vast majority of those who attempt it end up with a measly handful of followers for hours of wasted effort, having jeopardised any future long-term relationship with a man. Despite our supposedly relaxed sexual mores, apparently men don’t tend to marry former sex workers. Who knew?
It might be some consolation if the proliferation of porn, the erosion of marriage and the ubiquity of dating apps meant we’re having more fun, but no. Not only are we staring down the barrel of an economic recession, we’ve been living through a sex recession for years.
“Put simply, the porn generation are having less sex, and the sex they are having is also worse: less intimate, less satisfying and less meaningful”.
And more dangerous. As well as the more violent elements of porn culture creeping into the bedroom, the liberal feminist notion that sex differences are trivial has also put women in danger. It’s easy to forget, if you work in an office, how much men and women differ physically. Perry puts it bluntly: “Almost all men can kill almost all women with their bare hands, but not vice versa. And that matters.”
(I’ve seen disturbing evidence of the failure to grasp this fact. Teaching at a school in a deprived part of the country not long ago, I had to intervene to prevent male pupils physically assaulting girls – slapping their faces, grabbing them by the neck. What shocked me was that the girls complained when these boys were punished for their violent acts. Is violent attention from a boy really better than no attention? Or, raised on a diet of kick-ass superheroines and fatuous bromides about gender equality, are today’s girls dangerously oblivious to the physical inequality of the sexes?)
You might think the solution to male violence is to teach boys to respect women, and remind them not to rape. But while Perry sees some utility in consent workshops, they are an inadequate means to tackle male violence. The problem is that while most men are not by temperament potential rapists, some are (the psychological consensus puts this at about 10 per cent), and these men don’t care what feminists have to say.
“Posters that say ‘don’t rape’ will prevent precisely zero rapes, because rape is already illegal, and would-be rapists know that. We can scream ‘don’t rape’ until we’re blue in the face, and it won’t make a blind bit of difference.”
The solution is to reduce opportunities for potential rapists. And that, sadly, means that some women might need to moderate their behaviour.
And yet the advice from popular culture is for women to act recklessly. Perry cites an astonishingly idiotic piece of advice from Dolly Alderton, responding to a letter in the Sunday Times by a woman concerned that she was drawn to misogynistic men.
Instead of advising her to give such men a wide berth, Alderton encouraged her to seek them out. “You need a kind, chill, respectful boyfriend in the streets and a filthy pervert in the sheets. They do exist. I hope you have fun finding one.”
If liberal feminists such as Alderton underestimate the dangers of the darker side of male sexuality, their second-wave forbears underestimated the protective function of marriage. In characterising marriage as a tool of patriarchal oppression, they appear to have scored a whopping own goal. It is no coincidence that the most influential of the second wavers were childless, and had little to say about motherhood. Those who came before them, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, recognised that men had a higher sex drive, and therefore a responsibility to contain themselves. ‘Votes for women, chastity for men’ is a suffragist slogan we seem to have forgotten.
“A monogamous marriage system is successful in part because it pushes men away from cad mode,” writes Perry. “A society composed of tamed men is a better society to live in, for men, for women and for children.”
It’s impossible to read Perry’s work and not wonder if more freedom in sexual matters might do us more harm than good. The author’s primary concern is the well-being of women, but the trends she identifies make me worry just as much for my son. Some thoughts on what young men can do to navigate the dating environment with dignity would have made for a more rounded book.
Older readers might be asking why we need a new book to point out what your mother could have told you. Because yet another dumb thing about modern culture is the way we dismiss the wisdom of our elders. Older women are ‘Karens’ who are told to ‘educate’ themselves. We nod along to the apocalyptic rantings of Greta Thunberg, even teaching them in schools as models of fine rhetoric. Mature women who know that biological sex is real, and say so, are pilloried as ‘Terfs’. The young dismiss the advice of their grandparents – ‘Okay, Boomer’. But how is this attitude working out for a generation beset by rising levels of anxiety, depression and self-harm?
There is now a heart-breaking tendency for young women to try to mother themselves. Perry cites a viral TikTok video by a young American woman, Abby, who pulls up images of herself as a child and asks, ‘Would I let her be a late-night, drunk second option? Would I let this happen to her?’ Abby is trying to mother herself, and the thousands of tearful, grateful replies to the video suggest many other young women want to do the same.
Perry concludes, “They’ve been denied the guidance of mothers, not because their actual mothers are unwilling to offer it but because of the matricidal impulse in liberal feminism that cuts young women off from the ‘problematic’ older generation … Feminism needs to rediscover the mother, in every sense”.
I have deducted one star because this book is a bit repetitive in places, but it’s well-written, reasoned and thought-provoking. As the author says, it should be compulsory reading for young women. I’m somewhat younger than the likes of Germaine Greer, but it depresses me that so many years after those ground-breaking early feminists, women are still willing to view their lives through the prism of what men dictate they should do/feel/think. We’ve been sold a pup, ladies! And now, trans women (mainly those who either still are, or formerly were, men - let’s not forget) are attacking our very identity. When will we gain the confidence to say “er, no, I’m not buying this”? And actually mean it? I don’t hate men. I’m happily married to one. Like Louise Perry, I acknowledge there are real differences between the sexes, and always will be. But I refuse to believe that having XY chromosomes automatically entitles a male to be my master. I hope all who read this book arrive at the same conclusion because only then will we achieve true equality … and respect for each other as human beings.
This book seems to go over topics and themes that I'm interested in, but the approach is a mix of academic with a hint of judgmental, which then taints the academic portion of the message.
I wanted to like this book but I simply could not complete it. I'm 100% finished with it but I recognize it doesn't deserve anymore of my time.
One of the last sentences that I read in this book -- that perfectly sums up this book -- was her talking about how people have found out that "having sex like a man" actually meant "having sex like an arsehole." This is off-putting to me. Not because I'm a man, but because it is reductionist. This reads like something someone would want to hear instead of something someone needs to hear.
I feel like this is a safe book for those who are interested in this topic, but it's not something that actually pushes the topic further. This is a filler book that looks to solidify what you already know by referencing modern situations and media (like the Netflix movie Cuties) that are close to the topics being discussed. It essentially serves as an echo chamber where those who agree will continue to agree through confirmation bias, while others will bail after the surprisingly long introduction that was mostly about liberals (not their role in sex but literally what it means to be a liberal today).
It’s about time some feminists are finally realizing that the modern sexual ethic doesn’t empower women, but instead harms women while serving the interests of selfish and irresponsible men.
Perry reminds the reader the point of feminism is — or at least should be — to promote the wellbeing of women. By this metric the modern sexual ethic should be regarded as anti-feminist.
The current sexual ethic insists that as long as there is mutual consent then anything goes. Further, many feminists urge women to “have sex like a man” as some sort of badge of liberation, meaning that women should have frequent casual hook-ups pretending there are no consequences. Perry shows that this is horrible advice for women.
Because of innate biological differences, the consequences of sex have always been asymmetrical between men and women. The availability of the pill has fooled many into believing this is no longer true— yet 8% of sexually actively women on the pill become pregnant every year.
Thanks to this hookup culture men have been taught that it is completely normal and desirable to expect sex from a partner without having any emotional attachment. Because so many women subscribe to this ethic, there is an expectation that sex will occur very quickly in a relationship (often on the first date), but women who prefer to wait longer find that their pool of available men is greatly reduced. Meanwhile, women believe that something may be wrong with them if they start to develop romantic feelings for their “friends with benefits,” and that these feelings should be suppressed.
The modern ethic also promotes the porn culture, which in addition to creating a raft of other pathologies, teaches men that women are objects to be used for sexual gratification and then discarded. It thus contributes to the “rape culture.”
The modern mindset mainstreams the BDSM movement which is primarily about men deriving sexual pleasure by inflicting violence on women.
The modern ethic decreases the likelihood of marriage, which is demonstrably beneficial for the financial well-being of women, and provides advantages to their children in practically every measurable category.
So who then benefits from this culture? Well, it’s people that rate highly on the sociosexual scale, meaning those who desire to have sex with multiple partners and without commitment. This culture enables these folks to get what they want more easily and more often. The thing is, the vast majority of these people are men.
You don’t have to be a puritanical scold to believe that these ideas spawned by the sexual revolution are harmful to women in particular and corrosive to our society in general. In fact, Perry’s arguments are made from a humanist and evolutionary framework, focusing on empirical measures of human flourishing, rather than from any religious revelation.
The Left (correctly) argues that a political libertarianism can eventually lead to a society that gives the strong the freedom to dominate the weak. Therefore regulation and reform is required to protect those who may otherwise be crushed. Yet curiously, many don’t seem to recognize that this “anything goes” sexual libertarianism similarly sets up a system where men will tend to dominate and exploit women for their own gain.
Readable and gripping - clearly deeply felt, but also rationally argued, generally nuanced and compassionate and eloquently expressed, with moments of terrifying clarity, such as "it remains true that almost all men can kill almost all women with their bare hands, but not vice versa". It's also deeply depressing, because Perry is speaking good sense in a world gone violently mad, and it's hard to see the the tide turning anytime soon to anything more positive. She is commendably direct in her call to action from the reader, but also acknowledges that the trends she's discussing are broad, culturally ingrained and shaped by technology, the economy, academia, etc etc. She wants young women to read and be convinced by her book, but believes them to be the group most set at a disadvantage by the current sexual landscape.
Part of the issue, I think, is that I struggle to see this book changing many minds. Partly that's because arguments based on the premise of individual liberty and experience and the belief that things like gendered trends in sexuality or violence are socialised are so hard to argue with without appeal to some kind of external arbitration. Perry doesn't help herself on this - I think the book leans a little too much on "self-evident" truths and and statements like "no woman I know would..." which I'm not sure are convincing to those who don't already agree with her.
But ultimately, I don't think there's anything else she can do. She ends chapter 1, "Sex should be taken seriously" with this statement: "So I am going to propose an alternative form of sexual culture - one that recognises other human beings as real people, invested with real value and dignity." She is absolutely correct: this is attractive, and a traditional view of marriage and sexuality is better for society and for women. But why? She can't say. And she can believe very strongly and correctly that "Some Desires Are Bad" and men need to control their sexual appetites for the good of women - she's right - but she has no idea how that might happen. There's a massive hole in the foundation of this book, and I hope it convinces some people to stop selling each other a damaging lie - but without the truths that underpin the principles that create marriage, that control violent and selfish human beings and lead them to love people weaker than themselves, she's not going to change the world.
On the off-chance you read no further in this review, I'll share the most important counsel here, information that should be dispensed at freshman orientation. "While there is advice within these pages that could be helpful to any reader, it is worth repeating here the points that are most relevant to these particular young women...: • Distrust any person or ideology that puts pressure on you to ignore your moral intuition. • Chivalry is actually a good thing. We all have to control our sexual desires, and men particularly so, given their greater physical strength and average higher sex drives. • Sometimes (though not always) you can readily spot sexually aggressive men. There are a handful of personality traits that are common to them: impulsivity, promiscuity, hyper-masculinity and disagreeableness. These traits in combination should put you on your guard. • A man who is aroused by violence is a man to steer well clear of, whether or not he uses the vocabulary of BDSM to excuse his behaviour. If he can maintain an erection while beating a woman, he isn’t safe to be alone with. • Consent workshops are mostly useless. The best way of reducing the incidence of rape is by reducing the opportunities for would-be rapists to offend. This can be done either by keeping convicted rapists in prison or by limiting their access to potential victims. • The category of people most likely to become victims of these men are young women aged about thirteen to twenty-five. All girls and women, but particularly those in this age category, should avoid being alone with men they don’t know or men who give them the creeps. Gut instinct is not to be ignored: it’s usually triggered by a red flag that’s well worth noticing. • Get drunk or high in private and with female friends rather than in public or in mixed company. • Don’t use dating apps. Mutual friends can vet histories and punish bad behaviour. Dating apps can’t. • Holding off on having sex with a new boyfriend for at least a few months is a good way of discovering whether or not he’s serious about you or just looking for a hook-up. • Only have sex with a man if you think he would make a good father to your children – not because you necessarily intend to have children with him, but because this is a good rule of thumb in deciding whether or not he’s worthy of your trust. • Monogamous marriage is by far the most stable and reliable foundation on which to build a family."
The author draws upon her work in a rape crisis center to share her observations. Most of the sources she cites are popular articles from mass media, not peer-reviewed journal articles or academic monographs. I was frustrated by that and the feeling that she never quite closes the deal on any of the topics: • female and male attitudes toward sex are different, but our society has permitted the male attitude to eclipse the female and privilege the male; • sexual intercourse has a special quality, but society leads us to believe it doesn't, again privileging the male; • hook-up culture, pornography and BDSM ("simply a ritualized and newly legitimized version of a toxic dynamic"--choking and strangulation have been normalized) are harmful to women and men, but more harmful to women; • marriage is good--for men, for women, and for children. • People have "real value and dignity. It's time for a sexual counter-revolution" (20).
It should be self-evident that liberal feminists "have done a terrible thing in advising inexperienced young women to seek out situations in which they are alone and drunk with horny men who are not only bigger and stronger than they are but also likely to have been raised on the kind of porn that normalizes aggression, coercion and pain" (15).
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" (79). Magazines now direct women to "emotionally cripple themselves to gratify men" and to believe "that emotionless sex was the feminist thing to do" (81).
This book has been making the media rounds as some kinds of contrarian revelation. Maybe it is that to an audience of young women; there is nothing here that provoked in me any new way of thinking about the subjects, but I used to teach Women's Studies before the gender ideology took over. It is another entry in the genre of describing and to a degree prescribing how to cope with existence in "the nihilist moment of disillusionment and anger, after people have lost faith in the old stories but before they have embraced a new one" (Harari 2018). The Pill has been around for 70 years; Homo sapiens for 200,000. "We evolved in an environment in which sex led to pregnancy" and males attempted to mate with as many females as possible. We cannot pretend that contraception has erased millennia of adaptation. Perry made no mention in this book of the impact of contraception on women's bodies. From my summary and review of This Is Your Brain on Birth Control: The Surprising Science of Women, Hormones, and the Law of Unintended Consequences: "It is astonishing that so many women daily take a medication that "influences billions of cells at once from head to toe" throughout the body, without giving thought to the significant consequences these pharmaceutical have on every aspect of their being, how they think, look and behave, "how they see the world...and just about anything else you can possibly imagine." Your likelihood to divorce may even depend on whether you met when you were taking the pill or not. Hormones are powerful chemicals and their impact is far reaching."
In a nutshell: Women and men are not the same. Men liberated "their own libidos while pretending they were liberating women" with access to abortion and contraception. The unforeseen consequences and the sexual ethic that have resulted have privileged male sexual experience and innate desire for quantity and variety as desirable. Liberal feminists have unwittingly promoted male experience as normative in so many ways by encouraging casual sex, devaluing marriage, ascribing greater value to women's public representation and work outside the domestic sphere to the detriment of motherhood and home-making, and especially by adopting male attitudes toward sexuality rather than affirming the female need to be choosier due to potential for physical harm and pregnancy. Instead, we should be seeking to "promote the wellbeing of both men and women, given that these two groups have different sets of interests, which are sometimes in tension"? (10).
There was not enough discussion of the influence of the market, which benefits when individuals are freed from all commitments.
"This ideal liberal subject can move to wherever the jobs are because she has no connection to anywhere in particular; she can do whatever labour is asked of her without any moral objection derived from faith or tradition; and, without a spouse or family to attend to, she never needs to demand rest days or a flexible schedule. And then, with the money earned from this rootless labour, she is able to buy consumables that will soothe any feelings of unhappiness, thus feeding the economic engine with maximum efficiency" (9).
And, from Deborah Spar's book, “In purely economic terms,….women are not better off giving away something they once bartered. No, women do not gain by losing the power they once had to force men to buy their favors .... a trio of leading economists [found]…the advent of abortion and contraception in the U.S. may actually have worsened the fate of women, or at least weakened their ability to bargain with men. Specifically, they demonstrate that just as women gained the power to prevent pregnancy so, to, did they lose the power to commit men to marriage in the case of an unwanted pregnancy.” And, a young woman who wants a relationship but does not want to engage in sex will be at a competitive disadvantage to her willing peers.
Perry intimates and implies, but is just too subtle (a quintessentially British quality) for my taste. As a Weberian (my doctoral thesis topic), I confess Perry had me in the palm of her hand when she mentioned Max Weber on page 11. Weber described as "disenchantment" (Entzauberung) the condition of the modern world in which rationalism has stripped the world of magic, but not humans of the longing for the transcendent that religion used to fulfill, so they attempt to access it by sensual means (sex, alcohol and other drugs, food, etc.), which does not and cannot work. Sexual disenchantment means that "sex is nothing more than a leisure activity, invested with meaning only if the participants choose to give it meaning....that sex has no intrinsic specialness, that it is not innately different from any other kind of social interaction, and that it can therefore be commodified without any trouble" (11).
Right now, "consent is the only moral principle left standing under the reign of sexual disenchantment" (68).
"And the liberal feminist appeal to consent isn't good enough. It cannot account for the ways in which the sexuality of impressionable young people can be warped by porn or other forms of cultural influence. It cannot convincingly explain why a woman who hurts herself should be understood to be mentally ill, but a woman who asks her partner to hurt her is apparently exercising her sexual agency. Above all, the liberal feminist faith in consent relies on a fundamentally false premise: that who we are in the bedroom is different from who we are outside of it" (131).
We need "A sophisticated system of sexual ethics need to demand more of people and as the stronger and hornier sex, men must demonstrate even greater restraint than women when faced with temptation." We need a return to the "Chivalrous social codes that encourage male protectiveness toward women." These "are routinely read from an egalitarian perspective as condescending and sexist. But...the cross-culturally well-documented greater male physical strength and propensity for violence makes such codes of chivalry overwhelmingly advantageous to women, and their abolition in the name of feminism deeply unwise" (69). But the media and society encourage men in particular not to resist harmful desires, but to cultivate them.
"Why do rape and molestation cause more harm, if sex has no more significance than other acts?" (See https://americancompass.org/three-the... ). Perry is convincing when she indicates the many reasons that using consent as the basis for determining harm is useless. Again, sex is quite different from other activities and women, who tend to score high on agreeableness, convince themselves that their participation in certain activities is their choice. Many of the women who denounced Harvey Weinstein consented, but later repented, feeling violated. It is not until much later that hook-up partners, porn actresses, and prostitutes realize how profoundly they were damaged by their activities. False consciousness had taken hold. At the risk of allegations of a "nanny state," a stronger argument for the legal protection of women against ostensible consent would be difficult to find.
Further, young women criticize the stereotypical woman of the 1950s for pleasing their husbands, but eagerly read articles in women's magazine about how to please a man sexually. While "sharing the inside of their bodies was expected, revealing the inconvenient fact of their fertility felt too intimate. We have smoothly transitioned from one form of feminine subservience to another, but we pretend that this one is liberation" (20).
Perry mentions various times one of the many rifts between liberal feminism (which I have elsewhere described as emphasizing superficial "personal choice" devoid of analysis of the deeper impetus for those choices and how the illusion of freedom and personal choice affects society as a whole) and radical feminism, which is far deeper, more critical and eager to examine the bigger picture. Freedom for the predator is death for the prey. Liberal feminism promotes a carefree sexual ethic, which aside from the lack of consent, actually undermines the case that rape is a singularly traumatic crime. Radical feminism looks at how and why female experience of sex differs from the male and refuses to capitulate to patriarchy, the establishment of male experience as normative.
In the second chapter, Perry refers to evolutionary psychology and biology, but in superficial ways, mainly regarding rape. A Natural History of Rape revealed that rape is not solely about violence, as the liberal feminists have asserted for decades against the obvious; it is very much about sex. "Concluding that rape must be motivated by the desire to commit acts of violence because it involves force or the threat of force is as illogical as concluding that men who pay prostitutes for sex are motivated by charity." Great line. We are primates, so it's informative to see what is normative in other primates to ascertain biological proclivities, but that's not part of Perry's argument. Astonishingly, she never refers to the bonding hormone oxytocin that increase in women during sexual stimulation, while men get bursts of the highly addictive dopamine. That is one enormous oversight.
I had high hopes for this book, but Deborah Spar's Wonder Women(2013) is a better book for readers seeking a more academic treatment.
Nevertheless, this book would be an excellent discussion starter for a First Year Experience or an Introduction to Women's Studies course. It will be useful for young women or for those who haven't been deeply involved with the topic. Those who have been in the feminist trenches for 30 or more years will only be surprised to learn how far off the rails the movement has gone.
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.
An extraordinary book - filled with material that exposes the lie of the sexual revolution: "freedom is everything". Perry is not conservative, but exposes so many ways that liberalism has left society (especially women) worse off in the realm of sexuality. Her work is measured and well researched, and she is unembarrassed about being frank (and using language to match). At moments I was shocked, at other times simply grieved, to hear tragic accounts of how the cultural shifts of the past 60 years have worked out.
One of her most profound insights is gleaned from Chesterton - that you shouldn't reform things until you understand what they are for (p51). The sexual revolution has reformed sexuality without understanding its purpose, or how it really works. However, it is for this same reason that I can only give this book 4 stars; Perry's persistent attempts to explain every aspect of sexuality through an evolutionary perspective prevents her from understanding sex's real purpose. She is frequently tantalisingly close - at moments it genuinely seems like she recognises the beauty of Christian teaching (see, for example, her advocacy for marriage in the final chapter) - but she consistently falls just short. She is fixed in an anti-Christian posture that prevents her brilliant observations from finding the smooth landing that they so-nearly achieved.
A concise and refreshing indictment of the implications of the sexual revolution featuring spicy chapter headings: Sex must be taken seriously Men and women are different Some desires are bad Loveless sex is not empowering Consent is not enough Violence is not love People are not products Marriage is good
Now that political ideology has replaced traditional religion as the faith system of choice for the educated elites in Western cultures, it is not surprising that a new genre of books has appeared. In it, former communicants of the “progressive” church publish their “95 theses” which declare the church is corrupt and morally bankrupt. Like Luther, the alternative they propose turns out to be a call for a reactionary return to a more regressive, but somehow idealized and purified, past.
I first saw a summary of this book as an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal. I decided to read the whole book because I was interested to see how Perry would develop her arguments and what her alternative approach (only hinted at in the WSJ piece) might be. Sadly, I was greatly disappointed.
First, I do think the book is worth reading and if the author hadn’t made some outrageous, unsupported claims, it might have deserved three stars. Unlike the genre-sharing “Jews Don’t Count,” this book is not a personal screed nor an attempt to gain favor with the church (in this case) mothers. Some of the main points she makes are quite valid. It is maddening that they need to be stated in the first place.
Among her points that are obviously valid if one accepts the principles of Western Enlightenment 101: humans are a product of a million years of evolution that has made male and female representatives of the species behave differently and have different drives, desires and practices regarding sexual relations. Sex is at the center of both our biological and cultural activity and so needs to be taken seriously. Humans need to be treated with respect and dignity, and so sexual practices that demean people should be condemned and discouraged. Consent provides no protection from demeaning behavior. Violence causes suffering and so is always wrong behavior.
Of course, the “progressive” church (like some variants of the “right wing” alternative) reject and attack the ideas of the Western Enlightenment (in the “progressive” case mostly on the grounds that they are a creation of “white, straight, colonialist men”). So the fact that a former self-described disciple of the feminist denomination uses the weapons of the Enlightenment to attack this church, is somewhat amusing and a bit refreshing.
Where the book disappoints is that after having the epiphany that the feminist church is corrupt, Perry’s moral courage and imagination fails her. The only alternative she sees is a reactionary return to “traditional” values, despite her own acknowledgement of the harm and suffering these pre-modern ideas caused. It is not surprising that many of the positive reviews here are written by people who are members of traditionalists communities, who are adept at ignoring the violence and suffering being perpetrated in their own communities in the name of traditional sexual mores.
More disappointing, is Perry’s resort to propaganda instead of reasoned argument, to support both her criticism and call for reaction. All the rhetorical tricks are here - straw person arguments, misuse and abuse of research and statistics, the use of weasel words that without evidence or real justification stretch “might be” into “is”, the (mis)use of anecdotal stories to support her argument when there is no good evidence etc etc etc.
Ultimately what drives her propaganda is a set of alternate beliefs Perry creates for her new church, some implicit, others explicit: because males (on average) are stronger than females, females are overwhelmingly the victims of male violence and so require special protection. The invention of the pill along with male (on average) greater desire for casual sex leads to suppression of female goals and desires, which further encourages and exacerbates violence against females. Sexual liberty inevitably leads to sexual libertarianism, where humans are instrumentalized and commodified.
I deliberately put the “on average” in parenthesis, because Perry mentions repeatedly that normal distributions tell us nothing about any individual’s behavior nor even mass behavior. Yet Perry herself ignores this and repeatedly moves from arguing because some group of males may behave in a certain way (e.g. like casual sex), males in general behave in this way. She very quickly moves down the slippery slope because it’s the only way she can support her arguments.
This review is already getting way too long so I’ll first mention an alternative worth looking at on the topic of taking sex seriously and avoiding demeaning behavior in sexual relations. Specifically, Betty Martin’s “Wheel of Consent” directly addresses, in an intelligent and comprehensive way, how to redefine consent so that it addresses human dignity and respect, without reasserting traditional sex mores as the only reasonable alternative to being instrumentalized by casual sex. Martin’s approach undermines Perry’s argument that sexual liberty inevitably leads to libertarian exploitation, while agreeing with the point that traditional ideas of consent are not sufficient, and that having agency, doesn’t guarantee we act wisely.
I”ll conclude this review with a couple of examples of Perry’s propaganda which I found particularly maddening. To make the argument that females are the overwhelming victims of male violence, Perry attempts to criticize the “feminist” idea that rape is about misogynistic assertion of power not pleasure. In fact Perry notes that it was her epiphany on this point that led to her reappraisal of the “feminist” church. I should note that, as with all complex human behaviors, this is something really hard to prove one way or another, and there is no reason to assume that it might not be both or something else as well.
As part of her criticism, she quotes statistics on rape. While noting these statistics on rape are way under reported, she quotes a statistic of 2-5% for males being raped. She then states that this seems to correlate with the number of homosexual males, thereby proving that males who love males are also doing it for pleasure.
Where to begin? We don’t know how many males are exclusively attracted to other males. When asked how many have engaged in same sex behavior the number (in some studies) is closer to 10%. Again this is almost certainly an underestimate. We know as well that in many male dominated cultures and sub-cultures, a very large number of males engage in male on male sex, and it is considered normative, even desirable (e.g. Athenian elites). From an evolutionary behavioral perspective, it is quite possibly the case that males who are purely heterosexual are on the fringe of the distribution and most males are inherently bi-sexual. We don’t and can’t really know. What we can know is that far, far more males than 3-5% have been raped and that many self-identifying heterosexual males rape other males (cf. prison sexual violence). This doesn’t disprove Perry’s argument that rape is for pleasure, but it illustrates how she plays fast and loose with statistics.
It also illustrates a more important point. Perry seems to have an enormous blind spot about violence against male bodies. In the beginning of her chapter on prostitution, she brings up the appalling fact how modern armies see prostitution as a necessary recreation for conscripts. This serves as a segue into her argument that prostitution is always violence against women and casual sex is ultimately a variant of prostitution. But why is it surprising that the army—an institution that instrumentalizes male bodies, that causes enormous numbers of deaths, injuries and psychological trauma almost exclusively to males, that justifies this violence as part of some greater good—would have no problem setting up brothels? In fact, by bringing up the army Perry is ignoring the elephant in the room: it is quite likely that male on male violence, sexual and otherwise, is far more prevalent in every society than male on female violence. Obviously this doesn’t justify any type of violence, but it does undermine her thesis that females require “special” protection because they are overwhelmingly the victims of male violence.
One last example. In her argument in support of traditional monogamous marriage Perry notes that post the pill and the rise of a culture of sexual liberty, the number of single family households has risen dramatically. She argues that with the availability of casual sex, men are less incentivized to sacrifice freedom for parental responsibility.
The statistics on this are quite interesting. First, in the US at least, single family households have been trending down again for a number of years, and now are once again below 1995 levels although still more than double the numbers in the seventies. But if sexual liberty is the dominant paradigm, one would think that a younger generation of males raised in this paradigm would be even less willing than their fathers to hang around. Moreover, the big difference between the present and 1995 is that a small but still significant increase in these single family households are led by males.
In addition the US and the UK are outliers, with 23 and 21 percent of single family households, as compared to 12% in Germany. Which raises an interesting question: Is sexual liberty the cause of sexual libertarianism as Perry contends, or is sexual libertarianism a reflection of cultures that highly value economic liberalism and individualism, such as the US and the UK? Germany and other countries where fraternity is a value are inherently more family oriented and so have less unwanted babies raised by single mothers. Keep in mind prostitution is legal in Germany, which further undermines Perry’s arguments.
I could go on and on and on. Bottom line: if you read this book, read it critically, and carefully fact check Perry’s arguments. Try to reimagine a way to balance liberty, equality and fraternity in your dealings with others and to live a life of dignity and respect of your own self and others.
Definitely 4.5 stars, maybe more. Louise Perry is a young Oxford Union debate winner on the topic of whether to welcome the era of "new porn." Porn star Jenna Jameson had won a similar debate some 20 years previously, only arguing on the other side. Perry points out that Jameson would be taking the opposite view today having long since left the industry and become an outspoken critic of its deleterious effects, particularly on women.
Perry in her book walks through the history of the sexual revolution which primarily hit its stride in the 1960s with the advent of the Pill and other contraceptive methods including abortion. She contrasts Hugh Hefner with Marilyn Monroe. The former profited enormously by exploiting the likes of the latter. Hefner ultimately purchased the plot and was buried next to Monroe many decades after death, which itself is an irony of the power imbalance between men like Hefner and women like Monroe.
This book is a brilliantly argued and written take-down of the myriad harms that the sexual revolution has wrought on women and men. It is a thoroughly secular analysis of a problem that faith groups have long recognized and sought to prevent and mitigate. Perry is a young feminist well educated in gender studies and experienced in working with domestic abuse and rape crisis victims. She recognizes and acknowledges the fact that indeed men and women differ, both biologically and psychologically. And, as a result, the normal distributions of sexual interests and proclivities vary between the sexes. This cannot be denied, although feminists have long sought to do exactly that, largely to the detriment of women.
Perry argues effectively that people are not commodities, that violence is not love, and that consent cannot alone be the rationale for permitting harms to continue. We are in the midst of seeing an ever increasing appetite for sexual violence, and a normalization of it through pornography in media. And yet people are more isolated, unhappy, and anxious than ever before. This book demonstrates how women in particular are harmed by a system that primarily benefits a relatively small sector of men with a high sociosexuality index.
Ultimately, Louise Perry argues for marriage, a return to the norms that have been undone by decades of hostility, but long served the interests of women and men alike. She does so by citing a wide ranging spectrum of feminist scholars and writers from Mary Harrington to Andrea Dworkin to Shulamith Firestone (who incidentally died sad and alone). At the same time, Perry casually observes that changing norms have rendered opposition to same-sex marriage as "cruel and nonsensical," but without much analysis and in contradiction to the points she makes about how complementarity, numericity, and permanence benefit men, women, and their biological offspring within the protection of marriage (something that is an impossibility with same-sex participants whose interests are ineluctably at odds). Nevertheless, she makes a persuasive case that the harms of sexual independence brought on by the individualism within the last century far outweigh the benefits. I think this is a must-read for anyone who is serious about women's rights.
When people ask if I'm a feminist, I can't help but to answer, “I guess so, but also not really?”
Whether you agree with her or not, Louise Perry's writing is really thought-provoking. There were many parts of this book I really enjoyed and found myself agreeing with — from her firm attitude towards porn, to open discussions about loveless/violent sex.
An unyielding feminist and as someone who has worked closely with vulnerable women, Louise Perry writes from a unique perspective arguing against the belief that modern-day ‘sexual freedom’ is truly liberating. She is right, mostly.
But I can also imagine someone countering her argument by deeming it self-serving and insufficient. She encourages readers to ‘get married’, and that (monogamous) ’marriage is good’ - while her core argument for marriage is its commitment and stability (which I do agree with), where the institution of marriage is no longer respected in society, divorce seems like an eventual outcome anyway. (I suppose I think that as individuals we shouldn’t *just* get married as a solution, but rather we should envision a culture that respects marriage more.)
I don’t know if she addressed this, but there was also an inherent belief that women would/should end up with a significant other. In one of the last chapters she brought up that the older wave of radical feminists who pushed for childlessness ended up dying alone, because feminist friends and family would eventually isolate as their ‘bonds’ were not ‘durable’ (as compared to having a partner+children to look after her). I’m not convinced this was an issue of being childless/unmarried per se - but rather, the lack of strong companionship/friendships. Surely, if I'm reading her thesis correctly, unmarried women - comme the Rich Single Aunt Trope - should also be able to live just as fulfilled lives, without men? Happy to be proven wrong on my reading though.
I actually really enjoyed this book, and I think this makes some really interesting arguments.
All my life’s experience as a 1960s feminist lead me to agree with this wise and well researched book. The sexual revolution has not been good for most women, but great for most men. Most men and most women have different sexualities, and denial of the difference harms women. Pornography harms male and female sexuality and endangers women.Monogamous marriage is the best option for bearing and raising children.
Removed one star for repetitiousness. Otherwise very good. Just reading the chapter titles is depressing. How sick are we as a society that we need someone to argue that “Some Desires Are Bad,” “Violence Is Not Love,” “Marriage Is Good,” etc?
It’ll be tempting for intellectually serious religious people to say “I told you so” here, but let’s just be glad if the society-wide backlash against the sexual revolution finally arrives, helping solve the collective action problem (we need to go “Lysistrata” to some extent, but that’s impossible right now), and hopefully producing a more just and flourishing culture.
Some 🔥passages:
“Women are still expected to please men and to make it look effortless. But while the 1950s ‘angel of the house’ hid her apron, the modern ‘angel of the bedroom’ hides her pubic hair. This waxed and willing swan glides across the water, concealing the fact that beneath the surface she is furiously working to maintain her image of perfection. She pretends to orgasm, pretends to like anal sex, and pretends not to mind when her ‘friends with benefits’ arrangement causes her pain. I’ve spoken to women who suffered from vaginismus for years without telling their partners that being penetrated was excruciating. I’ve also spoken to women who have had abortions after hook-ups and never told the men who impregnated them because, while sharing the inside of their bodies was expected, revealing the inconvenient fact of their fertility felt too intimate.”
“Studies consistently find the same thing: following hook-ups, women are more likely than men to experience regret, low self-esteem and mental distress. And, most of the time, they don’t even orgasm. Female pleasure is rare during casual sex. Men in casual relationships are just not as good at bringing women to orgasm in comparison with men in committed relationships—in first-time hook-ups, only 10 per cent of women orgasm, compared to 68 per cent of women in long-term relationships. . . . One typical study found that 30 per cent of women experience pain during vaginal sex, that 72 per cent experience pain during anal sex, and that ‘large proportions’ do not voice this discomfort to their partners. These figures don’t suggest a generation of women revelling in sexual liberation—instead, a lot of women seem to be having unpleasant, crappy sex out of a sense of obligation.”
“The liberal feminist narrative of sexual empowerment is popular for a reason: . . . Adopting such a self-image can be protective, making it easier to endure what is often, in fact, a rather miserable experience.”
“Research conducted by ComRes in 2019 found that over half of eighteen-to-24-year-old UK women reported having been strangled by their partners during sex, compared with 23 per cent of women in the oldest age group surveyed, aged thirty-five to thirty-nine. Many of these respondents reported that this experience had been unwanted and frightening, but others reported that they had consented to it, or even invited it. And here lies the complication, because you don’t have to look hard to find women who say they love being strangled, and these willing women—girls, really, many of them—are held up as mascots by those who defend the fashion for sexual strangulation. . . . With consent, anything goes. . . . Dr. Helen Bichard rejects on medical grounds the idea that strangulation can ever be done safely, describing this as an urban myth: ‘I cannot see a way of safely holding a neck so that you wouldn’t be pressing on any fragile structures.’ And, given the possible consequences of strangulation, until recently only partially understood, Bichard argues that the vast majority of laypeople are not capable of giving informed consent to it.”
“Many of the women who seek out strangulation have a very particular—and very misguided—understanding of what strangulation means when men do it to them during sex. . . . They think strangulation indicates a man’s love, passion and desire for them. More often than not, it indicates none of these things, but, in a culture in which the differences between male and female sexuality are routinely denied, particularly by liberal feminists, it shouldn’t surprise us that many of these young women take the lead from erotic fiction . . . not realising that real-life Christian Greys usually have no interest whatsoever in the well-being of the women they (to use a nasty piece of porn terminology) ‘hatefuck.’”
“I don’t know what men think we are supposed to do with their dick pics, but I know of no woman who would masturbate to an image in which the rest of the person has been cropped away, leaving only a slab of flesh ready to be laid out on the anatomist’s table.”
“Sex workers can act as sources of sex advice only if we understand sex to be a skill set that must be learned and refined across different partners with goodness a result not of intimacy but of good technique. In this framing, sex becomes something that one person does to another person, not with another person. All of the emotion is drained away, leaving the logic of the punter triumphant. We must resist that logic at all costs. If we try to pretend that sex has no special value that makes it different from other acts, then we end up in some very dark places. If sex isn’t worthy of its own moral category, then nor is sexual harassment or rape. If we accept that sex is merely a service that can be freely bought and sold, then we have no arguments left to make against the incels who want to ‘redistribute’ it.”
The most miserable thing about this book (and modern radical feminism of its ilk) is just how bleak the outlook is for straight women. At least separatism is creative, interesting,,,,what's the word,,,, oh yeah -- radical?
The thesis is that men and women differ (on average) in their desire for sexual novelty and therefore the normalisation of casual sex brought about by availability of contraception and legal abortion benefits some men at the expense of most women. Sure. But since men can adopt multiple mating strategies ('cad or dad') and women invariably can't (because evolution!) the only solution to the discrepancy in sociosexuality is monogamous marriage*. And if it isn't enough to imagine the benefits for women, then do think of the children.
It stands on a shaky foundation of evolutionary psychology - I say shaky because Perry admits that humans likely evolved to be somewhat polygynous but she still states that monogamy is the ideal mating strategy because "successful" societies employ it (would have liked some more citations here). Many of the citations cover only partial claims (and she frequently cites opinion columns, blogs etc). Evolutionary psychologists are called evolutionary biologists, presumably to lend credibility since the outputs of the field of evolutionary psychology are widely criticised by evolutionary biologists. She does not thoughtfully or genuinely engage with opposing viewpoints on sex differences in humans or animals, trans athletes or the psychology and sociology of human sexuality. This is of course not the goal, but since she is praised for her academic rigor it's worth pointing out that this effort is not at all academic!
I agreed with parts of the analysis, as I find myself agreeing with a number of radical feminist arguments! She opposes herself to liberal feminism and argues thoughtfully that consent is an inadequate framework to understand sexual ethics. The question of whether women can truly consent to X under patriarchy is interesting and worth discussing, obviously! But the book then veers rightward into transphobia, promotion of the nuclear family and lamentation of no-fault divorce, and hand-wringing about porn, bdsm and the sex lives of young people. I sympathise with Perry's viewpoint as an activist working against 'rough sex defences', but ultimately her diagnosis does not match my own experience as a woman growing up post-sexual revolution or of women I know. Could we all be wrong?
Can we not imagine a better world for ourselves, with systems of care outside of the nuclear family? In later chapters Perry even warns anti-natal feminists that they will die alone if they don't marry and have children (!!) through the story of Shulamith Firestone whose body was sadly left undiscovered for days after her death. Forgive me if I think women (and all people) should be cared for and supported without being coerced into marriage or child-rearing. Can't we imagine a world where people can experience intimacy and family however they like!!! Can't we!!!
*Aside: she dismisses ethical non-monogamy or polyamory with a quick "I looked on reddit and all of the polyamorous people are ripped apart by sexual jealousy or deluded! so that's that!"
An outstanding read - compelling, challenging, and radical in its analysis. Perry effectively challenges the "progressive" narrative of the Sexual Revolution - noting that while many good things have been gained for women and men, there is a dark side to the Sexual Revolution that serves capitalism, commodifies desire and intimacy, and harms human relationships, society, and the human spirit - socially and individually. Perry's analysis is refreshing as it is not rooted in religious hang-ups, or prudishness, but rather in a genuine and sobering analysis of the excesses of the unchecked progressive narrative of the Sexual Revolution. She effectively critiques the prevailing attitudes and counters the argument that "only consent matters." Perry's book is ultimately a sobering indictment of our pornified society which has, it seems, taken the same disenchantment of nature that it took to the world following the Enlightenment and applied it to the disenchantment of sex following the Sexual Revolution. That is to say that while the Enlightenment and the Sexual Revolution both brought about beneficial changes for individuals and society, they also carried with them excesses and ideas which caused more harm than good. Perry's call is to a corrective and transcendent opt-out of the sexual mores of the dopamine hijacked and disenchanted herd - and a call, not to a return to tradition, but to a transcendent new morality based fundamentally in the primacy of human dignity.
Meh. Closed minded. Judgmental. Homophobic. Transphobic. Kink shaming. Slut shaming. She seems to think that just because something isn’t for her, that it’s not for anybody. To her sex should only be for passionate lovemaking between married individuals solely to make a baby but thinks men can’t control themselves enough to do that. There is nothing wrong with sex just because. This isn’t the 50s and women enjoying sex is not the scandal it once was.
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.”
In this book, Perry assembles a host of data--everything from scientific studies to TikTok trends--and argues that the "freedom" that the sexual revolution promised women has in fact only benefited men, pushing women to stop serving men by caring for their households and instead start serving men by freely offering up their bodies. Perry is neither religious nor conservative--she's a feminist who has seen the damage that has been done to women in the name of sexual freedom and takes a very clear-eyed look at the subject, not afraid to challenge some of the sacred cows of feminism and liberalism.
Interestingly, what the book ultimately boils down to is an affirmation that a Biblical sexual ethic is the best way to support human flourishing. She doesn't get to that conclusion via the Bible, but rather by seeing the destruction wrought by the rejection of Biblical principles. She's not interested in the subject "because God said" but because she is grieved and angry by the way women have been used and abused, tricked by society into consenting to an encounter or a lifestyle that they don't truly want and that leads to their harm.
The book itself is not a fun read. It's a sobering reminder of the toxic disaster that is hook-up culture: the culture our daughters are going to have to navigate. But it is encouraging that there are some outside the conservative world who are able to set aside ideology and look clearly at the consequences of our choices, even if those consequences point to hard truths. Perry's conclusion is one that is both simple and incredibly weighty. To have the best chance at flourishing, "we need to re-erect the social guard rails that have been torn down. And, in order to do that, we have to start by stating the obvious. Sex must be taken seriously. Men and women are different. Some desires are bad. Consent is not enough. Violence is not love. Loveless sex is not empowering. People are not products. Marriage is good. And, above all, listen to your mother."
Warning: this is full of very frank discussions of all aspects of sex (including the hard-to-read ones) and there are plenty of four-letter words. I found them all appropriate to the context, but if you prefer your books more kid-friendly, this is not one for you.
The best and most interesting book I have read all year. Tore through it in just two days. A must read for anybody with questions regarding different perspectives on feminism, and potentially, a must-read full stop.
Very easy to dive in to and also to follow along with the author. Well constructed arguments. Very poignant and impactful.
I thought I was going to end this year without rating a single book five stars. This changed that, and may in fact be, in my opinion, the most important book I've ever read.
Sure, I already agreed with most of her points, but I wasn't sure *why*. They were intuitive feelings I held once as a teenager, and regained in recent years when I began questioning the liberal feminist, progressive, 'sex positive' dogma on sex that I'd been fed for years. And that's actually a point she makes- a lot of us intuitively *know* a lot of this stuff, we don't need academia to justify it. But today's society tells us we should. We should do-away with our stuffy monogamy, our 'kink shaming', our aspirations of marriage and family.
When I expressed my desire to read this book I had one person reach out to me to try and dissuade me because the author was 'problematic' (has conservative leanings). I ignored them and read it anyway, done with being told by the authoritarian left what I am and aren't allowed to engage with.
Earlier in this year, frustrated with being single and deeply lonely, ashamed of my lack of intimate experience, an older millennial cousin gave me some very bad advice that I gratefully didn't follow: have casual sex. This woman isn't necessarily a progressive or a liberal, and is deeply apolitical. How I wish I could persuade her to read this book so she would understand why I was so repulsed by that suggestion.
There's a lot that can be said about this book, things I deeply loved, but my favourite has to be the section on marriage. As a feminist, for years I'd been told marriage was bad for women, that it enabled abuse, that it was invented to control female sexuality. Deep inside, I rejected this narrative, while paying some lip service to the parts of the argument that were admittedly either hard to argue with our just demonstrably true. I now am able to put in to words *why* I reject it: because the reverse is true. If marriage is designed to curtail anyone's sexuality, it's mens, and protects women.
I need more feminists and liberals to read this book. Most of Perry's audience are antifeminist people on the political Christian right and I'd be willing to put money on a guess that this is being used against her by progressives. But I don't think that would be the case. I think plenty of feminists would agree with most or all of the ideas expressed in this book if they actually read it, but the progressive left often discourages people from reading 'problematic' 'cancelled' authors, or familiarising themselves with ideas of those they disagree with. However, if genuine feminists (and not just liberal misogynists paying lip service to feminism) gave this a chance I strongly believe it would resonate with many of them and Perry's audience would balance itself out.
This is the feminism I've been looking for. Disillusioned years ago with liberal feminism, disagreeing with enough elements of radical feminism that it wasn't the right fit, I turned to cultural feminism, and while that's still roughly where I'd place myself enough of it is still tied in with elements of radical feminism I disagree with that it still wasn't a perfect fit for me. But whatever Perry's brand of feminism is, that's me. A common-sense feminism. A feminism combining the best of traditional and progressive values. A feminism that benefits the largest amount of women, not just the rich, protected ones (liberal feminism) or childfree female separatists (radical feminism). A feminism for the issues we face as women today, with the hindsight of our past mistakes to guide us.
The book makes a lot of very important points about the pitfalls of liberal feminism and so-called “sex positivity” in the context of an enduringly patriarchal society - but the author lost me a bit with the last chapter / proposed solutions (which felt perhaps a bit too conservative and literal).
But - this is still very much worth reading, and I felt spoke to a lot of the discomfort I have felt through my 20s, encouraging a lot of important reflection at this juncture of my life (as a woman nearing 30 who has experienced many of the ups and downs of modern dating and relationships), about what I have been conditioned to accept as “normal”. I think anyone would benefit from reading this
A shallow, one-sided presentation of the cycle of violence and sexual dysfunction. There was some interesting analysis on divorce laws and its aftermaths and about the philosophical origins of the sexual revolution but most else was either shallow or rather ridiculous.
For example, the author attempts to argue that consent doesn’t really matter when it comes to sexual activities between adults, so then when a man chokes a woman during sex, it means that this man likes to “beat up” women to get hard and even though the woman consented, the man should be criminally charged because this kind of sex isn’t “good”. Furthermore apparently these kinds of “bad” fantasies are really liked only by men and women mostly like regular “good” kind of sex. It appears as though she’s desperately trying to depict women as some Victorian era manifestations of purity, who faint at mere mention of penises. She even manages to argue that the music video “Wet ass pussy” by Cardi B has nothing to do with female sexuality and somehow is a representation of male sexuality. I mean I agree that the video is pretty distasteful but can we allow some accountability on the part of women? Also the problem of violence and sexual violence is obviously a male problem, because men are violent and rapey.
This kind of biased, one-sided take on a complex problem like the cycle of violence really serves no purpose other than to divide men and women and to claim that one team is better than the other. It will take us further from any possible solution.
On the one hand, if we wish to broaden our understanding, we could look at some statistics, like for example that women start about 50% of domestic violence incidents in many Western countries or that in the 2010 CDC intimate partner sexual violence survey, there were the same number of male victims during the year 2010 than there were female victims, only that male victims were categorized not as “rape” but dismissed as “made to penetrate”. Still a long way to go to recognize male victims of sexual violence, even in the Western world.
The real taboo topic still seems to be female violence and how it relates to this cycle that we’re talking about. Has anyone ever heard any feminist talk about the violence mothers commit against their babies and toddlers?
I mean yes, men are generally more violent than women but there is one very important thing to consider. Before men are men, they are boys. When they are boys, they are parented, educated and disciplined by women. They are raised by women. And those women scream at them and hit them a lot. 80% of British mothers hit their babies before the babies are even 1 year old. An estimated 25% of pedophiles are women. According to a US study, middle class mothers hit their babies and toddlers an average of 900 times a year. The fact that endlessly bashing defenseless babies has never come up in the discourse of the cycle of violence among feminists or really anyone for that matter is absolutely ridiculous and serves as a reminder of credible these people really are.
The sexual revolution is bad primarily for women, but also for the family unit, men and society. Young women are being fooled (by feminist and popular culture) into thinking that promiscuity (but more specifically the idea of sex as meaningless) is empowering, when in fact it is unnatural, confusing and even potentially traumatising. Finally a book written by a woman addressing these issues, and I hope that the fact it is written by a woman who calls herself a feminist will mean it finds its way into more young women’s hands. It is not perfect, I share differing views on some issues, and in parts her arguments are left not quite complete … but all in all a worthwhile read.