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.