‘The Case Against the Sexual Revolution’: How feminism let women down

Louise Perry didn’t believe there was anything controversial about her new book, “The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.” On a video call, she laughs and admits, “I’ve been proven wrong on that front.” 

The British author, a columnist for the left-leaning magazine the New Statesman, majored in women’s studies. During her university years, she believed that hookup culture, pornography, and rough sex were all OK for consenting adults. A decade later, she’s changed her mind. Ms. Perry’s experience of working at a rape crisis center made her question the narrative she’d been taught that “rape is about power, not sex.” She then began to rethink other tenets of second-wave academic feminism.

Ms. Perry is grateful that the birth control pill and modern contraceptives have given women greater control over their lives. But, she argues, it’s come at a cost. Modern feminism has encouraged women to feel empowered by having “sex like a man.” Ms. Perry believes that many women can’t just unyoke sex from emotion and a desire for committed relationships, including marriage. She says there’s a power imbalance in today’s sexual marketplace that can make women feel devalued.

Ms. Perry’s book argues for a counter sexual revolution. “We should treat our sexual partners with dignity,” she writes. “We should not regard other people as merely body parts to be enjoyed. We should aspire to love and mutuality in all of our sexual relationships.” Her book has provoked strong reactions. The Guardian’s laudatory review concluded, “It makes you think, and it makes you want for a better world.” By contrast, Publishers Weekly called it an alarmist treatise with an essentialist perspective and slippery-slope arguments that “misses the mark.” 

The Monitor asked the author about some of the ideas in her book. The responses have been lightly edited for length.

In the decades following the sexual revolution, many feminists believed that liberation meant that a woman should be proud to flaunt her sexuality. You caution that women can all too easily fail to recognize that being desired is not at all the same thing as being held in high esteem. Can you elaborate on that idea? 

There’s a beautiful essay written by [former Playboy sex columnist] Bridget Phetasy a couple of weeks ago on her Substack, which went viral. ... She finished it after reading my book. She’d been writing it for many years but she decided to finish it finally. She describes this exact emotional journey of having had casual sexual relationships and having really convinced herself that she was the one in the driver’s seat, that this was good for her, that she wasn’t going to catch feelings, that this was empowering, etc., etc. – you know, really, really buying in to the sex-positive myth. And then she only subsequently realized the extent to which she had been lying to herself.

... Women do tend to get emotionally attached more easily than men do. Which is not to say that men don’t. But men in general find emotionless sex a lot easier than women do. You very often end up in this dynamic where women are having sexual relationships with men and they’re trying to suppress their emotional attachment.

In 2013, Joni Mitchell gave an interview to Uncut Magazine in which she railed against the “Summer of Love” culture that began in the 1960s. She said, “So much for free love. Nobody knows more than me what a ruse that was. That was for guys coming out of Prohibition.” That’s quite a statement from someone who has been described as an avatar of the sexual revolution.

One thing I’ve noticed about some of the responses to my book ... is that in general, the more critical responses are more likely to come from younger women. ... The really positive responses are more likely to come from middle-aged and older women, particularly those who have teenage children themselves. And I don’t think that’s a generational thing. I think that’s a life-cycle thing. I think that’s because many of these older women actually used to share that same view, used to really buy in to the sex-positive myth. But they’ve let go of it because of their own life experiences and because of life experiences of people that they know. And they’re eager for their own daughters not to make the same mistake, which is the reason I think they really welcome a book. That’s what they say to me. So I’m not surprised to hear Joni Mitchell saying that. Now, I don’t know if she would have said that in the 1960s and ’70s.

You argue that the sexual revolution has had deleterious consequences for women. But are there aspects of it that you believe were a positive development?

... We really can’t underestimate the extent to which women were slaves to their reproductive systems, really. So I think that is actually, absolutely, unambiguously a good thing. It just comes with trade-offs. ... What I’m arguing for in this book is not that we should go back, even if we could, because I don’t think it’s either possible or desirable. I’m arguing that there needs to be more of a social reckoning with where we are now because there has been among liberals a very simplistic narrative of the sexual revolution. That it has been unambiguously to women’s benefit. I think there is also a converse narrative among conservatives, although it’s much less dominant, that the social revolution has been an unambiguous disaster. I think the answer is probably somewhere in the middle. And I think if we had a more honest appraisal of the history – and we also really importantly had a more honest appraisal of some of the differences between the sexes – then I think it would be possible to collectively construct a sexual culture which protected the interests of women and children more effectively. 

What is preventing that honest conversation?

There is a real squeamishness among liberals to recognize differences between men and women. Definitely psychological differences no one wants to talk about. But even increasingly, physical differences have become weirdly taboo. ... A big part of the reason why a lot of liberals don’t want to acknowledge those differences is because, if you do, it becomes much, much harder to imagine a world in which men and women are perfectly equal and in which the differences between us are erased. There has been a utopian streak running through second-wave feminism, which has fallen very hard on the nurture side of the nature/nurture debate and has really pushed for the idea of the differences between the sexes really being quite trivial. 

Is there an idea that if women were to display emotion or a desire for attachment when it comes to sex, it might be perceived as a form of weakness? 

I think not just a form of weakness, but also a limit on your freedom. You know, I think that given that liberal feminism and liberalism in general sets its goal as far as freedom, that is the preeminent goal. ... I think the freedom has to be balanced against other virtues.

What are those other virtues?

I’d say that love, respect for other people, dignity, chivalry. There are all sorts of virtues which are now unfashionable, but also, I’d say, deeply pertinent to any kind of system of sexual ethics and also actually having deeply protective value for women. 

What is the underpinning of those virtues and values if you dived deep into what it gets down to? 

They are Christian virtues in the end. I recognize that. Part of what I am doing – and I’m aware that this is what I’m doing – is I’m making an argument for Christian virtues. But I’m making them from secular priors and to a secular audience. ...

There are clearly ways in which Christian conservatism places burdens on women that it does not place on men to the same degree. For instance, the fact that Christians take, historically, quite an unusual view of abortion, which obviously places burdens on women in particular. The emphasis on chastity clearly places burdens on women. ... 

However, there are a lot of alternatives to Christianity, which are by no means more feminist, and actually are potentially a lot less feminist. And Christianity is very unusual among ethical systems for expecting chastity of men. Most religions don’t do that, right? It’s very common for the sexual double standard to be completely enshrined in law and custom and say that actually men can pretty much do what they want – they can have sex with prostitutes, they can be unfaithful to their wives, etc., etc. It’s only women of whom chastity is expected. And Christianity does an extremely unusual thing when it arrives in the Roman world and says that actually men are expected to also be faithful to their spouses and men cannot use porneia, as Paul calls it. 

At times in the book, you use the phrase “moral intuition.” What is that? And should we cultivate, you know, listening to it and being aware of it?  

... I can’t claim to offer a kind of a neat answer, only to say that there clearly is such a thing as moral intuition. The complaint that I have against liberal feminism and sometimes against liberalism, too, is that there is a suspicion of moral intuition within the ideology. A feeling that it is incumbent on rational people to resist their moral intuition. And actually to suppress it. 

One of the psychological differences between the sexes, which I think explains some of what we’re seeing in our new sexual culture, is agreeableness. Psychologists call it agreeableness. Most people would call it niceness. ... Women are significantly more agreeable than men are on average. ... It’s clearly trivially easy to persuade women, particularly young women, to put their own interest second in sexual relationships and to be astonishingly tolerant of the most terrible behavior from their sexual partners and to really not protect their own interests. It’s amazing how often women will do this, and I think the younger they are, the more likely they are to do that. And I think that that’s the thing that I really resent about feminist ideology, is that it encourages that process in quite a subtle way, but because of that resistance to moral intuition. It trains young women to not listen to their gut instincts in a way that is actually really not self-protective.  

You also write that a truly feminist project would demand that it should be men, not women, who adjust their sexual appetites. What might that feminist project look like? 

I think that marriage does that, which is why I have a chapter making the feminist case for marriage. I think it’s an institution that helps to rein in male sexual misbehavior. Not perfectly by any means, but it seems to work better than pretty much anything else we’ve come up with. 

What advice would you give to young men? 

I’m the mother of a 2-year-old son. So it’s something that I think about a lot. ... One of the things that my husband and I feel about raising boys in this culture is that trying to deny sex differences doesn’t work and trying to suppress masculinity doesn’t work. ... 

I think there are clearly positive dimensions to masculinity and negative dimensions to masculinity, and the same is also true of femininity. I think men have more of a responsibility than women do to self-mastery – although women do as well, obviously – just by nature of being [physically] stronger. With strength comes responsibility to master that strength.