The Bedevilments of Sex: Louise Perry’s “The Case against the Sexual Revolution”

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.