The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century

by Louise Perry

(Talk of animals is not insulting. We are all animals, though hubris tries to make us forget it.)

about healthy bodies as obstacles to freedom.

Second-wave feminists were right to argue that women needed contraception and legalised abortion in order to give them control over their reproductive lives, and the arrival of this technology was a good and needful innovation, since it has freed so many women from the body-breaking work of unwanted childbearing. But the likes of Hefner also wanted this technology, and needed it, if they were to achieve the goal of liberating their own libidos while pretending that they were liberating women.

The atomised worker with no commitment to any place or person is the worker best able to respond quickly to the demands of the market. This ideal liberal subject can move to wherever the jobs are because she has no connection to anywhere in particular; she can do whatever labour is asked of her without any moral objection derived from faith or tradition; and, without a spouse or family to attend to, she never needs to demand rest days or a flexible schedule. And then, with the money earned from this rootless labour, she is able to buy consumables that will soothe any feelings of unhappiness, thus feeding the economic engine with maximum efficiency.

Liberal feminism promises women freedom – and when that promise comes up against the hard limits imposed by biology, then the ideology directs women to chip away at those limits through the use of money, technology and the bodies of poorer people.

women have every reason to chafe against the constraints imposed on us by our societies and our bodies,

This is the idea that sex is nothing more than a leisure activity, invested with meaning only if the participants choose to give it meaning.

Everyone knows that having sex is not the same as making coffee, and when an ideology of sexual disenchantment demands that we pretend otherwise the result can be a distressing form of cognitive dissonance.

forced to recognise that they have done a terrible thing in advising inexperienced young women to seek out situations in which they are alone and drunk with horny men who are not only bigger and stronger than they are but are also likely to have been raised on the kind of porn that normalises aggression, coercion and pain.

I reject the poisonous dichotomy that insists that the past must be either all good or all bad.

Women are still expected to please men and to make it look effortless.

We have smoothly transitioned from one form of feminine subservience to another, but we pretend that this one is liberation.

male and female members of our species are different in certain important ways – both physiologically and behaviourally.

almost all women are weaker than almost all men, and any feminist analysis of the power dynamic between men and women has to begin with the recognition of this fact.

The women’s category has traditionally been protected in elite sports because, if it were not protected, there would be no women in elite sports – men would out-compete them every time.

almost all men can kill almost all women with their bare hands, but not vice versa. And that matters.

Liberal feminists and trans activists may do their best to deny this, but it is still true that only one half of the human race is capable of getting pregnant,

‘differences in distributions of traits between men and women’.

‘many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.’

misleading in its framing.

rapists don’t care what feminists have to say.

posters that say ‘don’t rape’ will prevent precisely zero rapes, because rape is already illegal, and would-be rapists know that. We can scream ‘don’t rape’ until we’re blue in the face, and it won’t make a blind bit of difference.

the only thing standing between you and rape is that man’s self-control.

Because rape isn’t only about power, it’s also about sex.

‘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.’