The legacy of the sexual revolution has been scrutinised, even called into question altogether recently. What was traditionally hailed as a liberation, in particular for women and sexual minorities, that abolished antiquated and oppressive sexual customs and taboos, so that individuals could pursue their erotic odysseys free of shame, guilt and legal sanction, is increasingly viewed as bringing about an anarchy and leading to anxiety in sexual relations, which have become oppressive for women, who still live in a society biased in favour of men.A lot has been made of the apparent sex negativity of Gen-Z. Despite being the most sexually flexible generation, they are having less sex and fewer children than their predecessors. Billie Eilish has been championed as the poster girl of this Zoomer backlash against sex positivity for her stance against pornography and her preference for baggy and otherwise “modest” clothing, designed to deter sexualised commentary about her body. Even the sex-positive feminist Laurie Penny fears that “we’re on the edge of a real anti-sex backlash.” The inference seems to be that the sexual revolution may have been a mistake.
Louise Perry isn’t shy about saying so. In her new book, The Case against the Sexual Revolution, she encourages this backlash. While she accepts that there has been modest progress for women, she questions the notion that the sexual revolution has been a gain or a liberation for women. Quite the opposite. “Women have been conned,” she declares. The sexual revolution, Perry emphatically argues, didn’t liberate them. Instead, it liberated the libidos of high-status playboys and lechers such as Hugh Hefner and Harvey Weinstein at the expense of women. “We have smoothly transitioned from one form of female subservience to another,” she writes, “but we pretend that this one is liberation.” The rule of St. Augustine has been replaced with the rule of Don Juan and thus: “It’s time for a sexual counter-revolution.” This isn’t your usual traditional religious moralism. Perry’s thinking is quite secular. It appeals to science (specifically, evolutionary psychology). But, like religious moralism, which is based on the idea of man as a fallen being, Perry’s use of evolutionary psychology reveals the supposed limitations of our evolved nature. And, like a religious moralist, Perry regards what Henry Miller called “the World of Sex” as dangerous, devilish and in desperate need of the shining light of virtue.
Perry advertises her book as an attempt to reckon with the immense change the sexual revolution has created throughout society and culture. She proclaims that she does not endorse either “the accounts typically offered by liberals, addicted to a narrative of progress, or conservatives addicted to a narrative of decline.” Instead, she makes the following arguments. First, men and women possess significant sexual differences due to their intrinsic biology and to evolutionary adaptations, and these differences have consequences for how men and women relate to each other sexually. Second, liberal feminism, in its arrogance, ignores and dismisses these consequences, to the detriment of women. Third, not all sexual desires are good. Some are bad and need to be stigmatised. Fourth, sex without love isn’t liberating, but spiritually and emotionally oppressive. Fifth, consent is an insufficient guarantee that sex is ethical. And, finally, she makes what she calls a feminist case for monogamous marriage.
Although Perry’s critique is clearly influenced by radical feminism—particularly in its hostility towards pornography and prostitution—she arraigns radical feminists for their wilful dismissal of biology. Most notably, she disagrees with the radical feminist orthodoxy that views rape as “an expression of political domination rooted in patriarchy.” Rather, she asserts, “rape is an aggressive expression of sexual desire.” However, the main antagonist in Perry’s critique is liberal feminism and “its wrong but also harmful narrative of sexual liberation.” Once a liberal, sex-positive feminist herself, she claims to have been mugged by reality when she witnessed male violence against women up close and began to grapple with humanity’s “biological limits.” She now sees liberal feminism as the handmaiden of the new patriarchy. Few liberal feminists, she writes, are “willing to draw the link between the culture of sexual hedonism they promote and anxieties over campus rape.” Her main philosophical gripe with liberal feminism is its attachment to human exceptionalism: it naively understands humans as “uniquely detached from the normal processes of natural selection” and is beholden to a blank-slatist view that presents human nature and sexuality as exclusively moulded by socialisation. Because of this they are “unwittingly imitating the religious fundamentalists who resisted Darwin” in their hostility to the insights of evolutionary psychology.
So, for example, men evolved to want casual sex more than women do (on average) because they need to spread their genes, while women have evolved to want committed monogamy more than men, because of their limited reproductive capacity and the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth. The advent of reliable contraception and abortion emancipated women from their biological limits and gave women the freedom to have commitment-free casual sex, like men. This has placed an intolerable burden on women, making them ripe for exploitation by the patriarchy with a human face.
The crux of Perry’s case rests on the argument that contemporary sexuality is defined by “sexual disenchantment” (an idea inspired by Max Weber). Sex has been evacuated of any mysterious, magical or holistic quality by the materialist philosophy that undergirds modern culture. It’s been reduced to meaningless leisure activity—“neither uniquely wonderful or uniquely violating.” Just as the rationalism of the Enlightenment reduced the “sacred grove” of the natural world to “mere timber” in the words of Hegel, Perry feels that the sexual revolution has reduced women’s bodies to mere flesh, meat, pussy: objects to be consumed by men at their pleasure, commodities that can be freely exchanged in the marketplace like any other commodity. This has interesting echoes of Margaret C. Jacob’s essay “The Materialist World of Pornography” in Lynn Hunt’s 1996 collection The Invention of Pornography. Jacob writes about the relationship between the rise of mechanistic materialism and the growth in pornography during the Scientific Revolution:
The pornographic discourse attempted to narrate a new universe composed solely of atomized, animate bodies in motion, mechanisms driven by pleasure. The universe of the bedroom created by materialist pornographers stands as the analogue to the physical universe of the mechanical philosophers.
But for Perry, the universe of the materialist pornographers is a lie. Sex isn’t a mere thing. It is infested with deep meaning. It isn’t “just sex.” Sex is unique; sex is special. It is intrinsically different from all other human social interactions. Despite the fact that liberal feminists lack the framework to grapple with the uniqueness of sex, the #MeToo movement has demonstrated, Perry argues, that they do unconsciously recognise this visceral fact. Perry views it as hypocritical of them to see it as a problem when a boss tries to obtain sexual favours from a female subordinate in exchange for a promotion, or when landlords promote sex for rent, and not to find it equally problematic when a prostitute exchanges sex for the means of subsistence.
The disenchantment of sex and naïve denial of biology have created, Perry argues, a sexual culture full of anxiety, alienation, ruthlessness and disappointment: a pornified sexuality based on violence and vulgarity, rather than on intimacy and dignity, and rife with abuse. Perry makes her case somewhat compellingly, in direct, terse prose. Her critiques of the clichés that attempt to divorce rape from sex and of the obsession with consent as the sole touchstone used to determine whether a sexual act is ethical, are well made. She is right that the fact that someone has consented to something doesn’t per se necessarily make that thing right.
But Perry seems perplexed as to why women have accepted this ethos of sexual liberation that goes against their natural inclinations and why they stubbornly refuse to acknowledge the facts that are staring them in the face. Like every Mrs Grundy, she seems unable to wrap her head around the fact that many women actively desire and enjoy sex in itself. She cannot accept that many women harbour “dark desires” and act upon them of their own volition. Despite stressing that sex is relational, she still presents it as something that is mostly done to women. In Perry’s universe, women with desires that Perry finds distasteful—such as those involving BDSM— are hardly rational agents, but victims of a false consciousness instilled in them by society’s ruling ideology of sexual liberalism. They are too infantilised to be condemned. She has a lot to say about the Mephistophelean underbelly of male sexuality and she readily condemns male desires for pornography, rough sex and anal sex with women, but she can’t bring herself to be as stern in her condemnation of those women who also desire such things. Perry’s efforts to fuse a radical feminist analysis—in which men and women are represented as different classes with distinct and antagonistic interests—with traditional conservative sexual morality lead to arguments that are inconsistent and unserious.
Moreover, her frequent use of evolutionary psychology as the ethical concrete holding together the edifice of her conservative sexual morality is telling. Debates on human nature and sexuality often take the form of arguments between biological determinists and environmental determinists, between those who argue that human sexuality is primary defined by our biology and those who emphasise the role of culture and society. What is lost in such debates is the sense of human agency: of humans as rational, social beings with the ability to transform themselves, nature and society. What makes humans unique in the natural world isn’t quite, as Perry states, “our unique intelligence” that allows us to “defy our instincts,” but our ability, alone among animals, to make our own history. Human sexuality, like human nature, isn’t simply natural; it is historical. That is why there is such great variation in human sexuality; it is why the debate over whether humans are naturally monogamous or polyamorous is misguided; and it is why what it means to be a man or a woman—beyond basic anatomical differences—has evolved over time. Perry’s pessimistic scepticism about the possibility of human agency blinds her to this fact.
This is why her solutions to the problem of our ailing sexual culture ultimately are thin. Her vision of a “sophisticated form of sexual ethics” that “prioritises virtue over desire” to reform our “broken” sexual culture ultimately boils down to tepid calls for men to simply stop watching porn (good luck with that!) and for heterosexual couples to get and stay married because of the civil and economic benefits of marriage—advice that ignores the fact that the current worsening economic conditions make it harder for couples to have some of the things that make it easier to get married and raise children together in the traditional way: a home (tough in today’s property market) and at least one stable income high enough to support the family.
Religion and tradition once provided the authoritative “ethical concrete” for sexual morality, laying down what was right and what was wrong, and setting the bounds of sexual behaviour for men and women. Modernity and social liberalisation have eviscerated these two authorities, largely because we are more conscious of their prejudiced and repressive nature. But in a sexual culture full of confusion, in which many people are desperate for some form of authority or guidance, attempts have been made to fill this void, either with the ideology of consent promoted by liberals or with Perry’s recycled conservative morality. The search for a sexual ethical concrete is an understandable endeavour, but it is doomed to fail because the condition of modern men and women is an inherently fragile, rootless one. There is no moral safety net to protect the individual in his or her quest for love and self-realisation. No divine or scientific law can protect us from the dangers that come with life itself. It is only through living that we can understand what our boundaries are. It is only by understanding humans as rational agents that we can begin to develop any kind of sexual ethics, and hope to overcome our perennial alienation from our sexuality. This is a disconcerting state of affairs: freedom is dangerous—but it is precisely this freedom that makes sex so exhilarating.
This new book illustrates a pattern in thinking about societal problems. Of course nothing is perfect but the desire for it to be so results in us regularly switching between working models and thereby suffering complications in the process. In general, personal choice is better than arbitrary and prejudiced codes of conduct, but of course plenty of mistakes will be made along the way. Consent is vital but is requires that consenting adults understand exactly who they are and what they want. To do that they need to be resilient in the face of fashions and peer pressure. And maybe we are seeing just that in the youngest of adults taking a more cautious approach. After all, there is more to life than bonking, especially with so many other interests and hobbies at our disposal. But once they turn to sex, they should talk about it amongst themselves, because there… Read more »
Excellent piece. Reminds me of a Germaine Greer quote about rape: “Society wanted women to believe that rape destroyed them. We haven’t been destroyed, we’ve been bloody annoyed is what we’ve been.” An increased risk of sexual exploitation &/or discontent is a price that’s worth paying for the potential of self realisation. It’s counterproductive to coddle our children in cotton wool for a reason. Why should women be an exception? Perry acts as if the negatives of sexual freedom are permanent or inescapable when in fact they can function as a door way to personal transcendence. Women aren’t as fragile as conservatives would have you believe so to assume they can’t overcome disappointments & hardships is to not only infantilise them but deprive them of growth. Leaving the comforts of Eden comes with its risks but its rewards justify them. Camille Paglia has raised the alarm regarding the safety culture that seems to be reemerging post… Read more »
[…] The Bedevilments of Sex: Louise Perry’s “The Case against the Sexual Revolution” by Ralph […]
«It is only by understanding humans as rational agents that we can begin to develop any kind of sexual ethics, and hope to overcome our perennial alienation from our sexuality» – Dear Ralph! Humans are not rational. It is a huge mistake to think that they are rational.
I was naturally pleased to see that Ralph Leonard most graciously thought my comments on his article the other day were “very thoughtful and illuminating.” For the benefit of those AREO readers who might not be as well-versed in modern Western intellectual and cultural history as Ralph, I’d just like to clarify and extend my comments of the other day. As I wrote the other day, I’ve long seen the Enlightenment as bequeathing two distinct if often intertwined visions of human nature and society to later generations of Western social thinkers, which have shaped both liberal/progressive and conservative/reactionary social and political thought throughout the 19th, 20th, and now the 21st centuries–with both visions being seen by their respective supporters as implied or even demanded by modern science. The Enlightenment heritage contained both a “Naturalist” (or, as I sometimes call it, “Physiospheric”) theme of human beings as natural creatures in a… Read more »
Ralph Leonard sees Louise Perry’s “frequent use of evolutionary psychology” to support “her conservative sexual morality” as illustrating the “[d]ebates on human nature and sexuality” that “often take the form of arguments between biological determinists and environmental determinists, between those who argue that human sexuality is primary defined by our biology and those who emphasise the role of culture and society.” Such “debates,” however, Leonard argues, ignore “the sense of human agency: of humans as rational, social beings with the ability to transform themselves, nature and society.” Humans, for Leonard, are “unique in the natural world” in “our ability, alone among animals, to make our own history.”Human sexuality thus “like human nature, isn’t simply natural; it is historical.” Leonard’s critique of Perry’s reliance on evolutionary psychology to support conservative sexual morality underscores my own observation of a basic duality in the Enlightenment view of human nature underlying many post-18th century arguments… Read more »
Many of the author’s criticisms could be applied word-for-word to political revolutions. Those like Burke and DeMaistre made nearly identical arguments about the alleged need for hierarchy and strict control of the soon-to-be (partially) liberated “lower orders”. They even insisted that not only was hierarchy necessary, but “natural”. Almost all the arguments are versions of the reactionary version of the naturalistic fallacy; that social arrangement track how human beings “really are”.
“This is a disconcerting state of affairs: freedom is dangerous—but it is precisely this freedom that makes sex so exhilarating.” A bit strange phrase when observing reality. Sex also depends on freedom to be interesting, but how interesting? As we see in surveys, young people are increasingly disinterested, something that surprised me. If freedom as we have today is greater than in the past, why does this happen? In fact, it seems to me that the modern world is more “freaked” about gender and pronouns than sex, we see this even in schools for minors today. The most interesting thing in my opinion that may or may not be controversial is that the Church did more for sex than the sexual revolution itself. Sex is most stimulating when there is taboo, when the mystery is instilled. The Church, in its craving for control, instigated the human mind to fantasize (fall… Read more »
Did Areo, like so many critical left-wing institutions lately, forget that feminism is far from perfect? Perry has some points, but her conclusion, like always the conclusion of feminists, is: ‘project (in this case: the sexual revolution) a failure; women most affected.’ Of course, to her a tiny minority of successful men are ‘the patriarchy’. The vast majority of men duped by female selectivity isn’t even mentioned. For those men, what we experience now is the worst of both worlds of strict monogamy and boundless promiscuity. Ignoring that is a lot bigger flaw in Perry’s arguments than the vague criticisms the article tries to mention.
Such a strange article. Leonard is given all the evidence he could possibly need of the terrible effects of the sexual revolution, the colossal hubris of eviscerating religion and tradition in the name of total liberation … yet he then concludes that because humans are “rational agents”, this must have been something that women/society actually wanted anyway – because they find casual sex so enjoyable and exhilarating! He describes in great detail the social problems caused by this change, then retreats to the tautology that since humans are “rational”, whatever they choose – whether due to short-sighted, shallow hedonism or otherwise – is necessarily in their best interest. What’s more, in criticising Perry’s solutions to our culture’s broken sexual ethics as too “thin” Leonard adduces conservative sexual morality from his own reasoning. While the economic precarity he then rightly describes only makes the need for this more pressing. Finally, he… Read more »
In regards to both feminism and the sexual revolution as they both apply to women, I am reminded of that song that says, “You got what you wanted, but you lost what you had.”