This young woman wasn’t beaten, she didn’t get pregnant, and she actually quite liked the young man she had sex with, at least at first. So why did she experience this sexual encounter as such a big deal? Because sexual disenchantment isn’t actually true, and we all know it, including the liberal feminists who expend so much energy on arguing, for instance, that ‘sex work is work.’ You can tell because, when it became clear that Harvey Weinstein had been offering women career opportunities in exchange for sexual favours, these same liberal feminists immediately condemned him – not only for the violence and threats he had used in the course of committing his crimes but also for requesting sexual favours from his subordinates in the first place.
There was an intuitive recognition that asking for sex from an employee is not at all the same as asking them to do overtime or make coffee. I’ve made plenty of coffees for various employers in the past, despite the fact that coffee-making wasn’t included in my job description, and I’m sure most readers will have done the same. But, while it might sometimes be annoying to receive this request, no worker who makes coffee for their boss will expect to end up dependent on drugs or alcohol as a consequence. No one will expect to become pregnant or acquire a disease that causes infertility. No one will expect to suffer from PTSD or other mental illness. No one will expect to become incapable of having healthy intimate relationships for the rest of her life. Everyone knows that having sex is not the same as making coffee, and when an ideology of sexual disenchantment demands that we pretend otherwise the result can be a distressing form of cognitive dissonance.
And liberal feminists don’t have the conceptual framework necessary to resolve this distress. The Guardian’s Jessica Valenti, for instance, described the phenomenon of violating sex that doesn’t actually meet the legal threshold for rape in a column written at the height of Me Too: ‘It’s true that women are fed up with sexual violence and harassment; but it’s also true that what this culture considers “normal” sexual behavior is often harmful to women, and that we want that to stop, too.’25
But an anthology of essays on the subject of Me Too, edited by Valenti and published in 2020, demonstrates the inability of her brand of liberal feminism to respond properly to the problem she identifies.26 The contributors to the anthology all want sexual violence to end, and rightly so. But they’re queasy about using the power of the state to arrest and imprison rapists, and they don’t want women to have to change their behaviour in order to avoid exposure to dangerous men, since even raising this possibility is regarded as ‘victim blaming’.
Rather than propose alternatives – vigilante justice, anyone? – the writers avoid contending with difficult questions at all. They limit themselves to milquetoast ideas such as helping men to overcome their ‘masculine insecurities’ (Tahir Duckett) or creating community spaces in which perpetrators can seek ‘healing and justice’ (Sarah Deer and Bonnie Clairmont). Contributors such as the campaigner Andrea L. Pino-Silva write of the need to ‘talk seriously about ending sexual violence’ but propose nothing more concrete than workshops on university campuses that, among much else, ‘celebrate and empower queerness’. Pino-Silva believes that such workshops won’t work unless they also tackle every form of oppression under the sun, from colonialism to biphobia. I don’t believe these workshops will work at all, so I suppose that’s one point we can agree on.
Some contributors not only reject ideas that might go some way towards alleviating the problem of sexual violence, they actually propose ideas that will make the problem worse. Sassafras Lowrey encourages rape survivors to seek out sexual partners with a taste for violence, otherwise known as ‘joining the BDSM community’, and Tina Horn presents prostitution as a benign career route for young women. This is the central principle of liberal feminism taken to its logical conclusion: a woman should be able to do anything she likes, whether that be selling sex or inviting consensual sexual violence, since all of her desires and choices must necessarily be good, no matter where they come from or where they lead. And if anything bad comes from following this principle, then we return to the only solution that liberal feminism has to offer: ‘teach men not to rape.’
But then what else can liberal feminists advise? They have made the error of buying into an ideology that has always best served the likes of Hugh Hefner and Harvey Weinstein, his true heir. And from this they derive the false belief that women are still suffering only because the sexual liberation project of the 1960s is unfinished, rather than because it was always inherently flawed. Thus they prescribe more and more freedom and are continually surprised when their prescription doesn’t cure the disease.
This fact becomes clear when we look at the twenty-first-century university campus, where the gospel of sexual liberation is preached loudest and where BDSM societies27 and ‘Sex Weeks’28 are the new normal.29 At the beginning of term, freshers are given a lecture on the importance of consent and sent on their way with ‘I heart consent’ badges and tote bags. The rule they’re taught is simple enough: with consent, anything goes. And yet this simple rule is broken again and again, both through rape and through the more subtle forms of coercion that so many women recounted during Me Too. Few liberal feminists are willing to draw the link between the culture of sexual hedonism they promote and the anxieties over campus rape that have emerged at exactly the same time.
If they did, they might be forced to recognise that they 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 are also likely to have been raised on the kind of porn that normalises aggression, coercion and pain. But in liberal feminist circles you’re not supposed to talk about the influence of online porn, or BDSM, or hook-up culture, or any of the other malign elements of our new sexual culture, because to do so would be to question the doctrine of sexual freedom. So young women are forced to learn for themselves that freedom has costs, and they are forced to learn the hard way, every time.
Chronological snobbery
This book began as a standard piece of cultural analysis, but I realised when I began writing that it needed to go further. It wasn’t enough just to point out the problems with our new sexual culture and leave it at that – I needed to offer readers some real guidance on how to live. Advice on sex is too often trivialised and shoved to the back of the magazine, with feminist arguments over sexual culture dismissed as so much girly bickering. But what we’re concerned with here is not only the most important relationships in most people’s lives but also the continuation of our species. So when I chose the title of this chapter, I was thinking not only of the problem of sexual disenchantment but also of the role of the advice columnist, who is rarely taken as seriously as she should be. Having sex should be taken seriously, and so should talking about it. It’s a serious matter.
The advice I’m offering applies almost exclusively to heterosexuals, particularly heterosexual women, because the effect of the sexual revolution on relations between the sexes is the subject of this book. And none of it is ground-breaking: anyone who has spent enough time living in the world and learning from her mistakes should be able to cobble together a set of rules that look much like mine. But while a lot of my advice will seem like common sense to most older readers, my experience of talking face-to-face with men and women under the age of thirty is that it is shocking enough to make a person’s jaw drop (literally, in several cases).
I would probably have been just as shocked a decade ago, because I didn’t know any of this when I was a younger woman. I thought, stupidly, that I understood life better than anyone else, as teenagers typically do, and I realised my mistake only years later, having learned the hard way and having watched my friends do the same. This wasn’t because my parents or other adults in my life failed me – far from it – and I wasn’t in any way unusual among my peers. But I was raised in a liberal environment that leant too heavily on a simplistic ‘progress’ narrative of history, and the problem with this narrative is that it encourages us to ignore both the ways in which things may have become worse over time and the
