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Review of Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022.

            Some sort of reality may be attained in incremental steps, and Louise Perry’s critique of the sexual revolution of our times could be placed in a category of ‘A Half-Return to Sanity’. It is not a Christian critique, and ultimately may achieve little, but Mrs Perry, who gave birth while she was writing this book, has made some cogent points in speaking into our times.

            In eight clear chapters Perry sets out her case:

1. Sex must be taken seriously;
2. Men and women are different;
3. Some desires are bad;
4. Loveless sex is not empowering;
5. Consent is not enough;
6. Violence is not love;
7. People are not products;
8. Marriage is good.

The early feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote in 1792: ‘The little respect paid to chastity in the male world is, I am persuaded, the grand source of many of the physical and moral evils that torment mankind, as well as of the vices and follies that degrade and destroy women.’ She spoke more wisely than she practised, and it is not unfitting that it was her daughter who was to marry the poet of free love and radical politics, Percy Shelley, and to write the novel, Frankenstein. Reality has a way of re-surfacing after being sunk.

            This book review is longer than usual on the grounds that some quotations and summaries of each of Perry’s eight points might be helpful to many readers.

Sex must be taken seriously         

Perry begins with a highly symbolic note that Hugh Hefner was buried next to Marilyn Monroe. Hefner was the epitome of the commitment-free male view of sexual relations, which led to his own debased and pathetic lifestyle. Monroe – her life riddled with abortions and suicide attempts – was the promiscuous female who worked against her own well-being. Yet, in the eyes of the media, both were celebrities. With scant attention to reality, Hefner was lauded as some kind of feminist after he died in 2017. Both Hefner and Monroe drew on the new technology of the pill with abortion as a back-up, and pretended it all meant liberation.

            There have been sexual revolutions in the past: the late Roman Empire, Georgian Britain, and the Roaring Twenties in America. But even the Bloomsbury set who ‘lived in squares and loved in triangles’ did not take over the culture. Contraception in the 1960s changed that. Perry used to believe the liberal narrative, but has come to realise that the cost of the sexual revolution has fallen disproportionately on women. The strategy is to highlight the evils of the past in order to distract from the evils of the present. Then we are preyed upon by charlatans.

Men and women are different     

Susan Brownmiller in 1975 in Against Our Will defines rape as ‘nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.’ So to end rape, one must end the patriarchy. No wonder it is so militant, and so distant from the real world.

Second wave feminism believes that the differences between the sexes are largely due to socialisation, but, says Perry (very bravely), gender stereotypes reflect a deep reality. Adult women are approximately half as strong as adult men in the upper body and two-thirds as strong in the lower body. Men can outrun and outpunch women. Elaine Thompson cannot compete with Usain Bolt.

In 2016 the British feminist Laurie Penny asserted that ‘dividing sports by gender isn’t natural or inevitable.’ She claimed that this is because men fear being beaten by a woman – an assertion which ignores the very real differences between males and females.

Rape is not so much about power as aggressive sexual desire. Encouraging male commitment would do more for women than pretending that promiscuity works. In 2015 Sussex police advised women to stick together on nights out, and walked into a feminist backlash. There are two ways to reduce rape: constrain would-be rapists, and limit opportunities for them to act on their desires.

Some desires are bad

Famously, John Stuart Mill declared: ‘The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.’ It sounds freedom-loving, but there are problems with it. What about having sex with a dead chicken? Gayle Rubin says that kinky sex is just like eating spicy cuisine. Is it, really? This approach is inadequate, even woefully inadequate.

The student protesters in Paris in May 1968 proclaimed the slogan ‘Il est interdit d’interdire!’ (‘It is forbidden to forbid’). The morals campaigner, Mary Whitehouse, was so despised that a porn star changed her name by deed poll to ‘Mary Whitehouse’ – but she later committed suicide. Sir Hugh Greene, director general of the BBC from 1960 to 1969, despised her, and had a grotesque naked portrait of her hanging in his office. Yet for 40 years the BBC protected Jimmy Savile who sexually assaulted over 1,000 boys and girls. In 1977 a petition to the French parliament called for the decriminalisation of sex between adults and children, and was signed by Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, and Michel Foucault.

Chivalrous social codes are despised by most feminists today because they imply that egalitarianism has something wrong with it. 

Loveless sex is not empowering

The hook-up culture demands that most women suppress their natural instincts. It makes women obsessive and distressed. Sexually active women are not respected, but sexually active men are often treated like champions. Perry therefore warns: ‘The fact that a man wants to have sex with a woman is not an indication that he wants a relationship with her.’ We send young women out like cannon fodder in the battle against sexist double standards and then, when they return wounded, decry sexism all the louder.

Consent is not enough

Linda Lovelace (Boreman) told one story about the pornographic movie, Deep Throat, in 1972, but by 1980 she had  changed her tune: ‘I engaged in sex acts in pornography against my will to avoid being killed.’ Pornhub is the 10^th most visited website on the internet. In 2020 Nicholas Kristof in the ludicrously liberal New York Times wrote of the degradation associated with the website.

The result is that the porn generation is having less sex and worse sex, reminding Perry of Australian male jewel beetles which apparently began to prefer to attempt to mate with discarded beer stubbies rather than female jewel beetles.

Violence is not love

Many women responded favourably to Christian Grey in Fifty Shades of Grey. Even the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) has acquired a new popularity, being commemorated in several Parisian museums in 2015.

People are not products

In colonial India, British officials in the 1880s maintained a supply of Indian prostitutes for the soldiers. Josephine Butler, a Christian, was one who fought to end this practice, but she is unpopular with modern feminists. COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) was founded in San Francisco to glamourise sex workers, which pleased some rappers but debased more women.

Marriage is good

Nearly a half of divorced people in the UK regretted their divorce. Domestic violence is more common outside of marriage. If it is ‘My body, my choice’, the corollary for the man would be ‘My money, my choice’. Lara Bazelon in the New York Times in 2021 wrote: ‘I divorced my husband not because I didn’t love him. I divorced him because I loved myself more.’ One man who had deserted his partner and toddler defended his actions: ‘sometimes you have to prioritise your lifestyle’. This is slavery to selfishness and sin, not liberation.

The state has become a kind of back-up husband. ‘Votes for women, chastity of men’ was once a suffragist slogan. In Perry’s words, there are ‘cad’ and ‘dad’ modes of male sexuality. ‘But while the monogamous marriage model may be relatively unusual, it is also spectacularly successful.’

There is much more of the same. Perry’s language is unnecessarily coarse at times, and her advice is hardly inspiring nor ultimately effective. She confesses: ‘I’m treading a fine line in this book.’ Actually, it is more of a mixed line. She ridicules consent workshops as ‘mostly useless’, and praises chivalry. Not wanting to be judgmental, she advises women only to get drunk or high with other women, and to delay having sex with a boyfriend for a few months. On clear moral issues, like homosexuality and abortion, she misses the point as often as not.

Nevertheless, a glimmer of light is better than complete darkness. There are better books for the Christian to read, but this is useful mainly as an indication of a possible shift in the trends rampant in Western culture at the moment. ‘A Half-Return to Sanity’ has something going for it – in the providence of God it may be a stepping stone to a ‘Full-Return’.

– Peter Barnes