Case Against the Sexual Revolution
A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century
LOUISE PERRY
polity
Copyright © Louise Perry 2022
The right of Louise Perry to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2022 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5000-5
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2021953231
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Acknowledgements
I owe enormous thanks to my agent, Matthew Hamilton, and my editor, George Owers, without whom this book would never have been written. I am also indebted to the many people who read and commented on various proposals and drafts: Julie Bindel, Diana Fleischman, David Goodhart, Camille Guillot, Jessica Masterson, Dina McMillan, Nina Power, Katharina Rietzler, Rajiv Shah, Kathleen Stock and Randy Thornhill. I owe particular thanks to the brilliant Mary Harrington, who provided constant support and ideas, and to my other ‘reactionary’ feminist friends: Alex Kaschuta, Katherine Dee, Helen Roy and Mason Hartman. I am eternally grateful to Fiona MacKenzie, my friend and colleague, who founded We Can’t Consent to This. And I owe thanks also to Eve and Max for sticking by me, despite my terrible opinions – I really do appreciate it.
I depend, as ever, on the love and companionship of my husband and family, including my beloved son, who was born during the writing of this book, and my most faithful reader, my mum, who has read every word I’ve ever published.
The little respect paid to chastity in the male world is, I am persuaded, the grand source of many of the physical and moral evils that torment mankind, as well as of the vices and follies that degrade and destroy women.
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
he said they’d found a brothel
on the dig he did last night
I asked him how they know
he sighed:
a pit of babies’ bones
a pit of newborn babies’ bones was how to spot a brothel
Hollie McNish, ‘Conversation with an archeologist’
Foreword
by Kathleen Stock
What did the sexual revolution of the 1960s ever do for us? In this brilliant book, Louise Perry argues that it depends which ‘us’ you’re talking about. The invention of the contraceptive pill reduced women’s fear of unwanted pregnancy, enabling them to provide the kind of sex a lot of men prefer: copious and commitment-free. Many women claim to enjoy this kind of sex too. But, as Perry explains, there’s good reason to disbelieve at least some such reports. For we now live in a culture where, though it isn’t taboo for a man to choke a woman during sex, or anally penetrate her, or ejaculate on her face while filming it, it is taboo for a young woman to express discomfort about the nature of the sexual bargain she’s expected by society to make. This bargain says: sacrifice your own wellbeing for the pleasures of men in order to compete in the heterosexual dating marketplace at all.
As Perry documents in sometimes shocking vignettes, whatever ill effects the sexual revolution had for women in the twentieth century have been supersized in the digital age of the twenty-first. There is little doubt that contemporary sexual culture is destructive for younger women in particular. It sells them a sexbot aesthetic, pressures them into promiscuity, bombards them with dick pics and violent pornography, and tells them to enjoy being humiliated and assaulted in bed. It says that, as long as they choose it, being exploited for money is ‘sex work’ and that ‘sex work is work’. It also tells women not to mix up sex with love and to stay disconnected and emotionless from partners. It encourages them to change their bodies in ways that match pornographic ideals. And, worst of all, it says that to comply with all of this is empowering – ignoring the obvious fact that telling women to subdue their minds and submit their bodies to physically stronger strangers can be lethal.
Perhaps surprisingly, the taboo around discussing the costs of the sexual revolution is enabled by popular feminism. This is because popular feminism is a version of liberal feminism, and liberal feminism in its populist guise is focused mostly on a woman’s ‘right to choose’ or ‘consent’, construed incredibly thinly. Everything and anything goes as long as you choose or consent to it at the time. What this misses out, of course, is that people can be pressured – by peers or partners or wider cultural forces – into believing that they want things which later they come to recognise as bad for them. In a culture dominated by male sexuality, there’s an obvious interest in convincing women that they want to have sex like men do, and many women go along with things they later come to regret.
At this point, the inner liberal feminist in many readers may be howling: but what if I genuinely want all that stuff? Well, good for you if you genuinely do. But, as Perry shows, even if this sort of sex works for some women, there are many other women for whom it does not. And they aren’t ‘prudes’, or ‘frigid’, or ‘asexual’, or ‘in a moral panic’, or any of the other insulting words produced by the culture to keep the whole man-pleasing machinery working. Nor need they be religious. There are plenty of reasons to be wary of contemporary sexual mores that are perfectly secular.
Both liberal feminism’s narrow focus on
