Monday, June 13, 2022

Down with the Sexual Revolution

It’s symptomatic of our generalized mental derangement. Reviewing a new Louise Perry book for the Guardian, Rachel Cooke finds that she must defend Perry against the presumption that she has written a conservative book. After all, Perry’s book is called, The Case against the Sexual Revolution

True enough, Perry is not the first to make the case against the sexual revolution, but in the current cultural climate, especially in the world of book publishing, Cooke finds it surprising that Perry could get her book published at all. 


You see, it is not a radical feminist tract, an exercise in hating on the patriarchy, an affirmation of the need for violent cultural revolution. And it does not encourage women to go out and have sex like a man. It does not even recommend that they spend their time hooking up with men they do not know.


One was somewhat surprised and pleased to read the following sentence in The Guardian, not a conservative broadsheet:


In this cultural moment, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution could hardly be more radical. It is an act of insurrection, its seditiousness born not only of the pieties it is determined to explode, but of the fact that it is also diligently researched and written in plain English.


As you know, the intelligentsia, apparently in Great Britain and America, is at war against sedition and insurrection. That is, it is at war against opinions that do not toe the party line.


Cooke continues, indicting the publishing world for continuing to produce feminist garbage:


All I can tell you is that while most mainstream publishers are seemingly content to publish feminist books that are both fact-free and clotted to the point of unreadability with jargon, her utterly sane and straightforward text comes to us courtesy of Polity, a small academic press.


And, as it happens, Perry has understood a point that others have emphasized, namely that the sexual revolution, not to mention sex positive feminism advantages only one group-- men. If one were so inclined, one might call it misogynistic.


For all the gains that the sexual revolution has brought women – chiefly the freedom to have sex without the fear of getting pregnant – those who have benefited from it most, according to Perry, are men. In a world in which sex is now just another leisure activity, and in which to be anything other than “sex positive” is to be, at best, a killjoy and, at worst, someone who is harbouring deep internalised shame, women must remain eternally silent about certain behaviours. They must celebrate “kinks”; they must enjoy porn; they must consider “sex work” a valid choice (even as, say, they disapprove of clothing sweatshops). Above all, they must fuck like a man, celebrating this as hard-won equality, and never, ever texting afterwards.


Yes, indeed. It is good that a woman, one who calls herself a feminist, comes out and says this clearly and succinctly. Again, it ought not to be news. It ought not to be news to readers of this blog. But, effectively, the sexual revolution has taught women to let themselves be used by men for their sexual gratification. The only take-away, if you wish to call it thus, is the unfettered right to abortion. 


Was that a worthy trade-off?


Cooke continues, providing us with much more than we needed to know about the vagaries of sexual experience in today’s Great Britain:


At one end of the scale, this means women who might once have worried (wrongly) about being seen as promiscuous are now almost as anxious to avoid being thought of as “clingy” (or “too intense”, as a man who’d spent four years telling me he loved me described me, when I dared to wonder about our future). At the other, it means that juries are increasingly prepared to buy “rough sex” defences in court (about half the homicide cases that deploy such a defence now end without a conviction for murder). Throttling? It’s just another “kink”, isn’t it? As for those who worry about the exploitation involved in prostitution or the porn industry, they’re just reactionaries and prudes. Alison Phipps, a professor of gender studies at the University of Sussex, has likened present-day anti-trafficking campaigns to the “white slavery” panics associated with 19th-century temperance.


This suggests, if I may extrapolate, that women feel that they have no leverage in their intimate relationships. They feel that they must go along with whatever a man might want-- which often includes Hunter Biden level fetishes-- because otherwise they will have to consider themselves to be prudes, or reactionaries. Worse yet, these men, who need fetishes to feel any attraction, will likely just go elsewhere-- because many women today are just giving it away. That this is a sign of insecurity ought to have crossed everyone's mind.


Apparently, these women do not feel that they cannot hold a man’s attention or interest unless they allow him to choke them during an act of coitus. Say what?


As for consent, Perry understands that it means very little. Making it the barrier for entry, so to speak, suggests that other aspects of sexual experience are trivial:


She also has a lot to say about the limitations of an ethics based only on consent (consent is a low bar, one that gives us no framework in which to talk about decency, kindness or the many cultural pressures that are all around us all the time).


Cooke is not especially happy with the fact that Perry offers some comments on the need for stable and durable marriages. One tends to side with Perry here. Cooke trots out the notion that people who are miserable should be allowed to divorce, without noting that people who are miserable when married might just not know how to conduct marriages.


At a time when far too many children are born out of wedlock and when far too many are brought up in broken homes, a few words encouraging marriage do not seem to be out of line. All told, we applaud Perry for having written an excellent and much needed exploration of sexual relations in a time of advanced feminism.


10 comments:

Anonymous said...

The HORROR!!!!!!! The horrorrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr...

But then, I'm old.

"As you know, the intelligentsia, apparently in Great Britain and America, is at war against sedition and insurrection. That is, it is at war against opinions that do not toe the party line." DEMOCRATS DELENDA EST!!!!!

370H55V said...

I can't believe anyone is still buying into the canard that feminism has been a great deal for men, ever since the recently departed Midge Decter first suggested it fifty years ago in her book "The New Chastity".

Charlotte Allen got it right in the pages of the defunct Weekly Standard, 2/15/10:

As might be expected, many males would like to help themselves at this overladen buffet. But there’s a problem: While it’s a truism that the main beneficiaries of the sexual revolution are men, it is only some men: the Tucker Maxes, with the good looks, self-confi dence, and swagger that enable them to sidle up successfully to a gaggle of well turned-out females in a crowded and anonymous club where the short-statured, the homely, the paunchy, the balding, and the sweater-clad are, if not turned away outside by the bouncer, ignominiously ignored by the busy, beautiful people within.

To which I would add that the men excluded from the party now find that those who might have been their mates in an earlier, less enlightened time, are now competing ferociously with them for lucrative positions of power in business and government.

Maybe the leftists are right. Incels will become dangerous if their being starved to death.

Anonymous said...

I disagree. For women sex is power. To have that power over men they must "play it" or at the least make the man believe it will happen. But once played they are in the power seat. All women figure this out and all women play the power game. For men it is simply about pleasure and while sex may be pleasurable for some women most simply use it for power. But the problem is if you don't give them sex then you don't get the power. Simple as that. Yes there are exceptions especially for younger men who are "in love" you can string them along for awhile. But for most of a women's adult years she either plays the game and gets power or she doesn't play the game and gets nothing.

Anonymous said...

@Anonymous Try to imagine yourself in the "power seat" when you're being sodomized and choked.

jabrwok said...

women who might once have worried (wrongly) about being seen as promiscuous

The reviewer misspelled "rightly" in the parenthetical.

Anonymous said...

"@Anonymous Try to imagine yourself in the "power seat" when you're being sodomized and choked."

You are in the wrong discussion. Obviously have an ax to grind. Do it somewhere else.

The power of sex is in the offer, implied or stated and the act depending on quality and the need that men have for those two things. All women over the age of 15 have figured this out, men not so much because they think women enjoy it (and some do) and want it as much as they do. But the power is exactly because of this mismatch. The women don't need the sex but they become hooked on the power trip. The men need the sex and will give over their own power to get it. Simple as that.

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Walt said...

And so. The old battle of the sexes seems to rage on even in the comments here. Each sex seeing the other as exploitive. My take? Back when it started, women were indeed liberated from the old Nicegirls Don’t and its corollary “If they do, they don’t like it.” And somewhere in there, at least for a time and among those truly liberated to follow their own nature, was good, healthy, mutually satisfying sex, along with—as always—the kind of sex that seems to partner with actual (how can I put this) love. But then somewhere in there, the prescription changed into Nicegirls Must and also (like Sally in Katz’s deli) Must—if they don’t like it—Fake It and sex became a fashion as well as a commodity and turned into a game in which everyone loses. The only way out of the current mess (in which women seem much more confused and inauthentic than men) is for women to return to acting on their own actual desires and neither on fashion or ulterior goals.

Anonymous said...

It is a mistake to believe that girls/women started having casual sex because of the feminist movement or the sexual revolution. The real and simple reason is because of better birth control including abortion. It is natural for teens to 20 something men and women to want sex and experiment. In the past the women paid a higher price for this (out of wedlock children) and that caused them to self limit their sexual desires. But those reasons are gone and women are free to chose and they do. I don't know if this is good or bad but I believe that it is better to understand the facts/truths in this in order to decide what to do with your life. If we simply decide that women should chose celibacy to spite men or because they aren't supposed to like sex then they aren't making an informed decision. Personally I would avoid casual sex simply because of sexually transmitted diseases.

Anonymous said...

Can anyone tell me or show me what the flag is for the Sexual Revolution? I'm just wondering...