her daddy, fuck her daddy!”’13
Other women spoke of soiled mattresses, a bizarre playmate uniform of matching pink flannel pyjamas, and carpets covered with dog faeces.14 It was revealed that Hefner took an obsessive and coercive attitude towards his many girlfriends, dictating how they wore their hair and make-up, keeping a detailed log of all his sexual encounters,15 and becoming angry if refused sex.16 His acolytes forgave ‘Hef’ when he was still young and attractive, but as time went on he was revealed to be little more than a dirty old man. The glamour of the playboy – or the ‘fuckboy’, in modern slang – doesn’t last forever.
Hefner’s reputation may have diminished over time, but he never experienced any guilt for the harm he perpetrated. Asked at the age of eighty-three by the New York Times if he regretted any of the ‘dark consequences’ of the Playboy revolution he set in motion, Hefner was confident in his innocence: ‘it’s a small price to pay for personal freedom.’17 By which he meant, of course, personal freedom for men like him.
After his death in 2017, the original playboy was described again and again in the press as a ‘complex figure’. The Huffington Post wrote of his ‘contradictory feminist legacy’,18 and the BBC asked ‘was the Playboy revolution good for women?’19 One British journalist argued that Hefner had ‘helped push feminism forwards’:
[Hefner] took a particularly progressive stance to the contraceptive pill and abortion rights, which the magazine often plugged, and kept readers up-to-date with the struggles women were facing; leading up to the legalisation of abortion in 1973, Playboy featured at least 30 different commentaries on the Roe V. Wade case and large features from doctors.20
None of these eulogists seemed to recognise that Hefner’s commitment to decoupling reproduction from sex had nothing to do with a commitment to women’s wellbeing. Hefner never once campaigned for anything that didn’t bring him direct benefit, and, when fear of pregnancy was one of the last remaining reasons for women saying ‘no’, he had every reason to wish for a change that would widen the pool of women available to him.
Marilyn Monroe was scraped out again and again by backstreet abortionists because she died almost a decade before the Pill was made available to unmarried women in all American states. Playboy magazine existed for twenty years in a country without legalised abortion. The sexual revolution began in a society fresh from the horrors of the Second World War and enjoying a new form of affluence, but its outriders initially bore a lot of illegitimate children and suffered a lot of botched abortions. The 1966 film Alfie stars a gorgeous young Michael Caine bed-hopping around London and enjoying the libertine lifestyle promised by the swinging sixties. But his actions have consequences and, in the emotional climax of the film, Alfie cries as he is confronted with the grisly product of a backstreet abortion he has procured for one of his ‘birds’.
The story of the sexual revolution isn’t only a story of women freed from the burdens of chastity and motherhood, although it is that. It is also a story of the triumph of the playboy – a figure who is too often both forgotten and forgiven, despite his central role in this still recent history. Second-wave feminists were right to argue that women needed contraception and legalised abortion in order to give them control over their reproductive lives, and the arrival of this technology was a good and needful innovation, since it has freed so many women from the body-breaking work of unwanted childbearing. But the likes of Hefner also wanted this technology, and needed it, if they were to achieve the goal of liberating their own libidos while pretending that they were liberating women.
Sexual liberalism and its discontents
In Sophocles’ Antigone – a play particularly attentive to the duty and suffering of women – the chorus sing that ‘nothing that is vast enters into the life of mortals without a curse.’ The societal impact of the Pill was vast and, two generations on, we haven’t yet fully understood both its blessing and its curse. There have been plenty of periods in human history in which the norms around sex have been loosened: the late Roman Empire, Georgian Britain, and the Roaring Twenties in America are the best remembered. But these phases of licentiousness were self-limited by the lack of good contraception, and thus straight men in pursuit of extramarital sex were mostly obliged to seek out sex either with women in prostitution or with the small number of eccentric women who were willing to risk being cast out permanently from respectable society. The Bloomsbury set, for instance, who famously ‘lived in squares and loved in triangles’, had plenty of illicit sexual encounters. They also produced a lot of illegitimate children, and were protected from destitution only as a result of the privileges of their class.
But the sexual revolution of the 1960s stuck, and its ideology is now the ideological sea we swim in – so normalised that we can hardly see it for what it is. It was able to persist because of the arrival, for the first time in the history of the world, of reliable contraception and, in particular, forms of contraception that women could take charge of themselves, such as the Pill, the diaphragm, and subsequent improvements on the technology, such as the intrauterine device (IUD). Thus, at the end of the 1960s, an entirely new creature arrived in the world: the apparently fertile young woman whose fertility had in fact been put on hold. She changed everything.
This book is an attempt to reckon with that change, and to do so while avoiding the accounts typically offered by liberals addicted to a narrative of progress or conservatives addicted to a narrative of decline. I don’t believe that the last sixty years or so should be understood as a period of exclusive progress or exclusive decline, because the sexual revolution has not freed all of us, but it has freed some of us, and selectively, and at a price. Which is exactly what we should expect from any form of social change ‘that is vast’, as this one certainly is. And although I am writing against a conservative narrative of the post-1960s era, and in particular those conservatives who are silly enough to think that returning to the 1950s is either possible or desirable, I am writing in a more deliberate and focused way against a liberal narrative of sexual liberation which I think is not only wrong but also harmful.
My complaint is focused more against liberals than against conservatives for a very personal reason: I used to believe the liberal narrative. As a younger woman, I held the same political opinions as most other millennial urban graduates in the West – in other words, I conformed to the beliefs of my class, including liberal feminist ideas about porn, BDSM, hook-up culture, evolutionary psychology, and the sex trade, which will all be addressed in this book. I let go of these beliefs because of my own life experiences, including a period immediately after university spent working at a rape crisis centre. If the old quip tells us that a ‘conservative is just a liberal who has been mugged by reality’, then I suppose, at least in my case, that a post-liberal feminist is just a liberal feminist who has witnessed the reality of male violence up close.
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’. But I don’t think that their ideology actually is intersectional, according to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s original meaning, in that it does not properly incorporate an analysis of other forms of social stratification, particularly economic class. The advantage of using ‘liberal feminism’ instead is that it places these twenty-first-century ideas within a longer intellectual history, making clear that this is a feminist iteration of a much grander intellectual project: liberalism.
The definition of ‘liberalism’ is contested – indeed, the first line of the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy entry tells us that ‘liberalism is more than one thing’ – which means that, whatever definition I choose to work with, I’ll leave some critics unhappy. But I’m reluctant to bore readers by offering a long-winded defence of my working definition, so I’ll be brief.
I’m not using
