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 counter-cultural 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 ultra-liberal era.
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Louise Perry. The Case Against the Sexual Revolution
CONTENTS
Guide
Pages
Dedication
The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century
Acknowledgements
Foreword
1 Sex Must Be Taken Seriously
Sexual liberalism and its discontents
Sexual disenchantment
Chronological snobbery
Notes
2 Men and Women Are Different
Human animals
Differences above the neck
Rape as adaptation
How to bear it
Notes
3 Some Desires Are Bad
The sexual free market
The wrong side of history
Breaking taboos
The virtue of repression
Notes
4 Loveless Sex Is Not Empowering
The sociosexuality gap
A hand held in daylight
Cads and dads
Mutual incomprehension
Notes
5 Consent Is Not Enough
The ‘Queen of Porn’
The crimes of MindGeek
Limbic capitalism
Logging off
Notes
6 Violence Is Not Love
The idea of possessiveness
The Sutcliffean woman
Choking
We Can’t Consent to This
Notes
7 People Are Not Products
An ancient solution
$20 and $200
Luxury beliefs
The redistribution of sex
Cultural death grip syndrome
‘Thanks to OnlyFans’
Notes
8 Marriage Is Good
My money, my choice
A baby and someone
The protection of an ordinary marriage
The faithless soldier
The reinvention of marriage
Notes
Conclusion: Listen to Your Mother
Notes
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‘Those feminists who assume this book is not for them – give it a go. Brilliantly written, cleverly argued, packed with fascinating ideas and information: agree or disagree with the central premise, it is fresh and exciting.’
Julie Bindel, feminist and writer, author of Feminism for Women
.....
Some of my conclusions might not be welcome, since they draw attention to the hard limits on our freedom that can’t be surmounted, however much we try. And I start from a position that historically has often been a source of discomfort for feminists of all ideological persuasions: I accept the fact that men and women are different, and that those differences aren’t going away. When we recognise these limits and these differences, then sexual politics takes on a different character. Instead of asking ‘How can we all be free?’, we must ask instead ‘How can we best promote the wellbeing of both men and women, given that these two groups have different sets of interests, which are sometimes in tension?’
I’m going to argue in this book that Western sexual culture in the twenty-first century doesn’t properly balance these interests – instead, it promotes the interests of the Hugh Hefners of the world at the expense of the Marilyn Monroes. And the influence of liberal feminism means that too many women don’t recognise this truth, blithely accepting Hefner’s claim that all of the downsides of the new sexual culture are just ‘a small price to pay for personal freedom’.
