The Case Against the Sexual Revolution

Book Review (Louise Perry)

Louise Perry writes as a post-liberal feminist about the sexual revolution and its effects. That is, from the 1960s onward, the impact of contraceptive technologies, along with profound societal shifts around gender relations, equality, marriage and divorce, and sex. She situates her writing as post-liberal, precisely because she understands herself to be rejected the liberal feminism she previously embraced. That is, a view of the human being oriented towards freedom and autonomy.

In particular, liberal feminism combined with the social and technological changes of the last 70 years promises, advocates, and often insists, on freeing women from biology. Perry's argument in this book is that biology provides a certain kind of hard limit, both women's biology and men's biology, that in fact means the sexual revolution on the whole is bad for women.

I find it interesting that both Perry, and Reeves as we'll talk about next week, lean into the idea that there are clear biological differences between men and women, and that we should pay attention to them. This runs counter to the prevailing progressive position, that men and women are basically interchangeable and there are no meaningful differences. Which I think is probably just the (current) end-point of a trajectory that is at least Enlightenment originated. We wanted to stop thinking of humans as animals, and so we divorced mind and body, thinking of ourselves as minds with inconvenient bodies attached. Now we conceive of humans as mostly minds, and bodies are simply avatars of our true mental selves we can shape and reshape as we like.

Which isn't true, and biology keeps reminding us of the fact that we are embodied creatures. There are statistical differences in certain traits between the sexes. It's worth keeping a clear perspective on these though. None of these are defining traits, nor are they true of all men or all women. But, just as it's true that on average men are stronger than women, without altering the fact that any particular woman can be stronger than any particular man; so it's true that men, on average, are more prone to violence, are more sexually aggressive, have higher sociosexuality, are more inclined to risk-taking behaviour, and so on.

Perry leans heavily on evolutionary psychology for a lot of things, which I have reservations about. Not because I doubt that the fundamental premise of evolution is wrong (i.e., if individuals with trait X statistically survive and produce more offspring over time, then trait X will come to dominate the gene pool), more that I think talking about relatively abstract psychological features that are a complex product of nature/nurture is not well grounded in science or logic.

And so Perry begins with the issue of rape. Sexual violence is overwhelmingly perpetrated my men. The majority of victims are women, mostly between 12 and 30, and almost half of rapists are under 25. The evolutionary perspective is that male sexual violence is a strategy that generates more offspring. The progressive rejection of all biology holds the position that it's all about power, and it's the product of socialisation, and so the solution is simple: teach men not to rape. Perry's work leads her to believe that this is wholly inadequate. Rapists don't care what feminists think. Teaching women to avoid situations that make them vulnerable isn't victim blaming - we might like to live in a world where a woman can do anything and not fear sexual assault, but we don't live in such a world.

Perry goes on to make the argument that, simply, not all sexual desires are good. Consent and "I want to and it doesn't harm others" aren't thick enough accounts to ground sexual ethics, not least because when we test these against various hypotheticals, our moral intuitions buck up and tell us "hey, but this still doesn't seem right".

I think one of the most insightful sections is when Perry writes about hook-up culture, sociosexuality, and sex as a market(place). Firstly, sociosexuality refers to a preference to have more sex with a larger number of partners. This trait is on average higher in men. Men are far more interested in casual sex with strangers without ongoing attachment, emotional or otherwise. Prior to the sexual revolution, fear of pregnancy, disease, and social stigma, all functioned to somewhat repress casual sex, on both sides. The type of sexual liberation that the revolution presented is almost entirely one-sided in that it freed women to have sex 'like a man', but it never stopped to ask if this was what most women wanted. Perry argues that in fact most women don't want sex like this, that it's not just hang-ups and sex negativity that is the cause, and yet the marketplace has altered and not in their favour.

It sounds a bit distasteful to talk about sex as a market, but I think it's worth following this line of thinking. On a whole population level you have a certain amount of mismatch: men, on the whole, want more casual sex; women, on the whole, want more committed monogamy. Historically, on a society wide level, this problem gets "solved" in various ways. Prostitution, for example, solves this problem by subjecting the most economically impoverished women to meet the desires of a wide number of men. Slavery, too, provides a subject population for male sexual desire. Hook-up culture exerts societal pressure on women to have uncommitted sex with men, which involves suppressing female sexuality to indulge male sexuality. For all the talk of feminism, this is a culture that prioritises 'freedom' in a narrow sense, over and against both the happiness and wellbeing of women.

Perry works through the topics of porn, BDSM and sexual violence, and prostitution, with equal grimness. None of these make for pleasant reading, and in all of these women come up the losers. There is no ethical porn, consent is not enough, freedom when it's freedom governed by economic impoverishment is illusory, and none of these things are good. I found the section on divorce particularly interesting too. The way she talks about the normal distribution curve of marital satisfaction: "Most people report being quite happy in their marriages, with a minority who report being very happy and another minority who report being very unhappy." Divorce used to be exceedingly difficult to procure, with very heavy social sanctions - it was hard to get, and your life post-divorce was mostly over. Framed in terms of distribution, liberalising divorce laws made it easier for the very-unhappy tail of the bell curve to escape the confines of disastrous and damaging marriages.

But the effect of liberalising divorce laws (alongside other societal shifts, e.g. contraception) was massive social change around the institute of marriage. "When marriage became impermanent, the institution as a whole was changed, and with it much else." In particular, "When motherhood became a biological choice for women, fatherhood became a social choice for men." Perry also looks at the risk factors of a step-parent (much higher) and the outcomes of divorce of non-abusive parents on children (almost always negative). Liberal Feminism has little place for children.

At the conclusion of this, Perry despite being far from a social conservative, proposes that the best solution for women, in general, is monogamous marriage. She thinks monogamous marriage is "not our natural state", but as a social technology, it is "spectacularly successful" in terms of positive social outcomes.

I found this an engaging book. I recognise that lots of Christians liked it because Christians as a group love being able to say, "oh, look, a non Christian agrees with us about X, Y, Z", aka the Tom Holland effect. What I appreciated about it is that it took two things seriously: what the author thinks is genuinely good for women, and that there are real and meaningful gender differences that are biologically grounded but socially expressed, and what that means for the question at hand.