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

by Louise Perry

She grinned, she posed, she pretended, she had affairs with famous and powerful men. A friend of hers claimed that she had so many illegal abortions wrongly performed that her reproductive organs were severely injured. She died alone, possibly acting on her own behalf for the first time … Her lovers in both flesh and fantasy had fucked her to death, and her apparent suicide stood at once as accusation and answer: no, Marilyn Monroe, the ideal sexual female, had not liked it.9

Marilyn Monroe was scraped out again and again by backstreet abortionists because she died almost a decade before the Pill was made available to unmarried women in all American states. Playboy magazine existed for twenty years in a country without legalised abortion.

the late Roman Empire, Georgian Britain, and the Roaring Twenties in America are the best remembered. But these phases of licentiousness were self-limited by the lack of good contraception, and thus straight men in pursuit of extramarital sex were mostly obliged to seek out sex either with women in prostitution or with the small number of eccentric women who were willing to risk being cast out permanently from respectable society. The Bloomsbury set, for instance, who famously ‘lived in squares and loved in triangles’, had plenty of illicit sexual encounters. They also produced a lot of illegitimate children, and were protected from destitution only as a result of the privileges of their class.

I’m using the term ‘liberal feminism’ to describe a form of feminism that is usually not described as such by its proponents, who nowadays are more likely to call themselves ‘intersectional feminists’. But I don’t think that their ideology actually is intersectional, according to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s original meaning, in that it does not properly incorporate an analysis of other forms of social stratification, particularly economic class. The advantage of using ‘liberal feminism’ instead is that it places these twenty-first-century ideas within a longer intellectual history, making clear that this is a feminist iteration of a much grander intellectual project: liberalism.

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.

In this book I’m going to ask – and seek to answer – some questions about freedom that liberal feminism can’t or won’t answer: Why do so many women desire a kind of sexual freedom that so obviously serves male interests? What if our bodies and minds aren’t as malleable as we might like to think? What do we lose when we prioritise freedom above all else? And, above all, how should we act, given all this?

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.

Sexual disenchantment is a natural consequence of the liberal privileging of freedom over all other values, because, if you want to be utterly free, you have to take aim at any kind of social restrictions that limit you, particularly the belief that sex has some unique, intangible value – some specialness that is difficult to rationalise. From this belief in the specialness of sex comes a host of potentially unwelcome phenomena, including patriarchal religious systems. But when we attempt to disenchant sex, and so pretend that this particular act is neither uniquely wonderful nor uniquely violating, then there is another kind of cost.

The stories that came out of Me Too included plenty of unambiguously criminal behaviour, but there were also a lot of women who described sexual encounters that were technically consensual but nevertheless left them feeling terrible because they were being asked to treat as meaningless something that they felt to be meaningful.

He slid inside me and I didn’t say a word. At the time, I didn’t know why. Maybe I didn’t want to feel like I’d led him on. Maybe I didn’t want to disappoint him. Maybe I just didn’t want to deal with the ‘let’s do it, but no, we shouldn’t’ verbal tug-of-war that so often happens before sleeping with someone. It was easier to just do it. Besides, we were already in bed, and this is what people in bed do. I felt an obligation, a duty to go through with it. I felt guilty for not wanting to. I wasn’t a virgin. I’d done this before. It shouldn’t have been a big deal – it’s just sex – so I didn’t want to make it one.24 ‘It’s just sex’ summarises the sexual disenchantment idea perfectly. This young woman wasn’t beaten, she didn’t get pregnant, and she actually quite liked the young man she had sex with, at least at first. So why did she experience this sexual encounter as such a big deal? Because sexual disenchantment isn’t actually true, and we all know it, including the liberal feminists who expend so much energy on arguing, for instance, that ‘sex work is work.’ You can tell because, when it became clear that Harvey Weinstein had been offering women career opportunities in exchange for sexual favours, these same liberal feminists immediately condemned him – not only for the violence and threats he had used in the course of committing his crimes but also for requesting sexual favours from his subordinates in the first place.

While in most cultures the elderly are regarded as sources of wisdom, and thus granted particular respect, in the modern West they are more likely to be disregarded and condescended to, shut away in nursing homes and assumed to be of no use to anyone.

A tour guide informs visitors cheerfully that the key elements of savage culture included ‘jealousy, competition, greed and strife.’ She’s not wrong, of course. The Savage Lands theme park is designed to demonstrate to New Londoners the perils of the old way of life, and its inclusion in the drama is designed to show us how tempting the twenty-sixth century could seem when set beside the twenty-first. These future people have successfully rid themselves of many of our flaws: their lack of privacy ensures a lack of crime; their lack of family ensures a lack of in-group preference; and their lack of monogamy ensures a lack of sexual jealousy. The cost that citizens pay for all this stability is that they must live under an authoritarian regime that suppresses any discontent with the pleasure drug soma. This regime encourages the citizens of New London to visit the Savage Lands theme park because demonising the past serves to justify the status quo.

But the would-be Hugh Hefners are also hurt by the pretence, albeit in a less obvious way. Mouldering away in the Playboy mansion doesn’t kill a person, but it does corrode them. True happiness is not to be found on a soiled mattress being ridden by a woman who doesn’t even like you.

Some evolutionary biologists believe quite strongly in the grim inevitability of ‘men will be men.’ A vocal handful of neo-Darwinians theorize that rape is a cost-effective strategy for males (embedded with drives for aggression, promiscuity, and reproduction) to spread their genes widely with a minimal amount of parental investment. What a fancy argument for rape, and for the failure to pay child support, as natural behavior!

Mothers were shown an adjustable sloping walkway, and asked to estimate the steepness of slope their crawling eleven-month-old child could manage and would attempt. Girls and boys differed in neither crawling ability nor risk taking when it came to testing them on the walkway. But mothers underestimated girls and over-estimated boys – both in crawling ability and crawling attempts – meaning that in the real world they might often wrongly think their daughters incapable of performing or attempting some motor feats, and equally erroneously think their sons capable of others.

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.

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

In fact, the very idea of there being evolved psychological differences between the sexes has become so taboo in some circles that even voicing the possibility is taken to be an indication of anti-feminist sentiment. In 2017, Google engineer James Damore circulated an internal memo in which he suggested that the under-representation of women at Google might partly be a consequence of (in his words) ‘differences in distributions of traits between men and women’.24 The scientific research that Damore cited was perfectly sound, but he was nevertheless fired for violating Google’s code of conduct, provoking a media storm.

In 2020, Will Knowland, an English teacher at Eton College – the oldest and poshest school in the UK – attracted a great deal of media attention when he was dismissed for producing a video titled ‘The Patriarchy Paradox’ as part of a course on critical thinking intended for older students.27 Knowland later alleged that he was disciplined because ‘the Head Master felt that some of the ideas put forward in my lecture – such as the view that men and women differ psychologically and not all of those differences are socially constructed – were too dangerous for the boys to be exposed to.’

And while his video covers some of the same ground that I have covered in this chapter, for instance strength and aggression differences between men and women, Knowland uses evolutionary biology to argue both that women are inherently inferior to men (not only smaller and weaker but also less creative and innovative), and that men have been uniquely victimised throughout human history, while women have been coddled.

I fully understand why so many feminists are repulsed by any association with the ideology of anti-feminists such as Knowland. But we should not respond to the misuse of a scientific discipline by rejecting that discipline altogether. The evidence itself is morally neutral and can be put to all sorts of political purposes, even feminist ones. A Natural History of Rape hit me like a ton of bricks because it alerted me to the feminist potential of evolutionary psychology, a discipline I had previously rejected as inherently suspect.

Social science has demonstrated a strong relationship between age and sexual attractiveness. Heterosexual men are sexually attracted to young women, while homosexual men are attracted to young men. The age preference explains why adult film stars, sex workers, exotic dancers as well as glamour models are often young, and why their earnings decline as they age.

Individual men differ in their proclivity toward rape. In one study, men were asked to imagine that they had the possibility of forcing sex on someone else against her will with no chance of getting caught, no chance that anyone would find out, no risk of disease, and no possibility of damage to their reputation. Thirty-five percent indicated that there was some likelihood that they would force sex on the woman under these conditions, although in most cases the likelihood was slight. In another study that used a similar method, 27 percent of the men indicated that there was some likelihood that they would force sex on a woman if there was no chance of getting caught. Although these percentages are alarmingly high, if taken at face value they also indicate that most men are not potential rapists.

So my advice to young women has to be this: avoid putting yourself in a situation where you are alone with a man you don’t know or a man who gives you a bad feeling in your gut. He is almost certainly stronger and faster than you, which means that the only thing standing between you and rape is that man’s self-control.

We see this play out in male and female sexual behaviour. The research is clear: we know that men, on average, prefer to have more sex and with a larger number of partners, that sex buyers are almost exclusively male, that men watch a lot more porn than women do, and that the vast majority of women, if given the option, prefer a committed relationship to casual sex.

Chesterton points out that the person who doesn’t understand the purpose of a social institution is the last person who should be allowed to reform it.

sex is a social activity: it requires the involvement of other people. If I am, for instance, a young female student looking for a boyfriend at my twenty-first-century university, and I don’t want to have sex before marriage, then I will find my options limited in a way that they wouldn’t have been seventy years ago. When sex before marriage is expected, and when almost all of the other women participating in my particular sexual market are willing to ‘put out’ on a first or second date, then not being willing to do the same becomes a competitive disadvantage. The abstinent young woman must either be tremendously attractive, in order to out-compete her more permissive peers, or she must be happy to restrict her dating pool only to those men who are as unusual as she is. Being eccentric carries costs.

One of Whitehouse’s first forays into public life was an anonymous 1953 piece for the Sunday Times that advised mothers on how best to inhibit homosexuality in their sons. This open homophobia was combined with a crusade against blasphemy that often called upon archaic legislation.

Arch-progressive Owen Jones, columnist at The Guardian, is among those who now use Whitehouse’s name as short-hand for being on the ‘wrong side of history’ (a phrase Jones often employs).14 Such a framing presents Whitehouse as villainy incarnate, set against the romantic heroes of Raymond Williams’s emergent strain – in this case, Sir Hugh Greene and his permissive allies. But this historical narrative only works if one is deliberately selective. Whitehouse has found herself condemned by ‘history’ on the issues of homosexuality, blasphemy, and the phallic use of microphones on Top of the Pops. But on one issue she was remarkably prescient: Whitehouse was one of the few public figures of her day who gave a damn about child sexual abuse.

At the same time that Sir Hugh Greene was lobbing darts at Whitehouse’s naked portrait, his organisation was enabling abuses perpetrated against women and children by many famous men, including – most notoriously – the TV presenter Jimmy Savile. It was only after Savile died, unpunished, in 2011 that the scale of his crimes became clear. It is now believed that, over the course of at least forty years, BBC staff turned a blind eye to the rape and sexual assault of up to 1,000 girls and boys by Savile in the corporation’s changing rooms and studios.15 He abused many more victims, young and old, male and female, in hospitals, schools, and anywhere else he could seek them out. Savile’s celebrity status enabled his sexual aggression, allowing him access to vulnerable victims, particularly children, and discouraging investigation.

Savile told the officer that, if the girl showed up at one of his clubs, he would be sure to hand her over to the authorities – ‘but I’ll keep her all night first as my reward.’

In Sweden, for instance, it emerged in 2009 that the Royal Library in Stockholm was in possession of a collection of child pornography acquired (legally) between 1971 and 1980 and still being loaned (illegally) to members of the public into the twenty-first century22 – an uncomfortable reminder of Sweden’s hyper-liberal past.

The claim, therefore, was not that consent is unimportant but, rather, that children are sometimes capable of consenting. And they pointed out, correctly, that paedophiles are a maligned sexual minority who suffer greatly as a result of the taboo maintained against them. Their project, therefore, was not a detour from the progressive path but in fact logically in keeping with it. The principles of sexual liberalism do, I’m sorry to say, trundle inexorably towards this endpoint, whether or not we want them to.

The sexual playing field is not even, but it suits the interests of the powerful to pretend that it is.

we should treat our sexual partners with dignity. We should not regard other people as merely body parts to be enjoyed. We should aspire to love and mutuality in all of our sexual relationships, regardless of whether they are gay or straight. We should prioritise virtue over desire. We should not assume that any given feeling we discover in our hearts (or our loins) ought to be acted upon.

‘Chivalrous’ social codes that encourage male protectiveness toward women are routinely read from an egalitarian perspective as condescending and sexist. But … the cross-culturally well-documented greater male physical strength and propensity for violence makes such codes of chivalry overwhelmingly advantageous to women, and their abolition in the name of feminism deeply unwise.

The ambiguous term ‘not-ideal’ is doing a lot of work here, because Sciortino does acknowledge that the playing field is not entirely even, with or without the continued existence of slut shaming. For one thing, there is the difference in physical strength that means that any heterosexual encounter will inevitably be more dangerous for the woman. For another, there is the risk of pregnancy. But the liberal feminist argument leads us to conclude that, if you are going to destroy the sexual double standard, then you must use your own body, and the bodies of other women, as a battering ram against the patriarchal edifice. The advice to young women is that you must ‘fuck back’ if you want to be a good feminist, and mostly it will turn out OK – and when it doesn’t? When a sexual encounter turns out to be ‘not-ideal’, or worse? Well then, we must fall back on liberal feminism’s old standby: ‘teach men not to rape.’

Men and women are not the same, either physically or psychologically. Casual heterosexual sex inherently carries much greater risks for women, and in return for much meaner rewards. And yet the (perfectly reasonable) insistence that women should be allowed to ‘fuck back’ without suffering criminalisation or social ostracisation slips all too easily towards the insistence that they therefore ought to.

Carrie Bradshaw and Stella Gibson are, crucially, aspirational characters: attractive, glamorous and professionally successful. Their model is one that we are supposed to follow, and Sciortino encourages her readers to do so. I don’t doubt that there are some women who genuinely enjoy casual sex and who decide, having weighed the risks and benefits, that it is in their best interests to pursue it. What I question is the claim that a culture of casual sex is somehow of benefit to women as a group.

The standard questionnaire used by researchers to assess sociosexuality asks respondents the following questions:3 With how many different partners have you had sex within the past 12 months? With how many different partners have you had sexual intercourse on one and only one occasion? With how many different partners have you had sexual intercourse without having an interest in a long-term committed relationship with this person? Do you agree that sex without love is OK? Can you imagine being comfortable and enjoying ‘casual’ sex with different partners? Do you only want to have sex with a person when you are sure that you will have a long-term, serious relationship? How often do you have fantasies about having sex with someone you are not in a committed romantic relationship with? How often do you experience sexual arousal when you are in contact with someone you are not in a committed romantic relationship with? In everyday life, how often do you have spontaneous fantasies about having sex with someone you have just met? Worldwide, there is a significant difference in average sociosexuality between the sexes, with men generally much keener to sow their wild oats than women are. And there is a compelling evolutionary explanation for this difference.4 As the biologist Anne Campbell writes: Biologically speaking, men’s investment is completed at conception and they are free to move on to pastures new. But women, unlike men, are quality not quantity specialists. Their inves...

Curiously, I am not aware of any word in the English language for a particular emotion that every woman to whom I’ve spoken has experienced at least once, but that the men to whom I’ve spoken don’t seem to recognise at all. It is a combination of both sexual disgust and fear – the bone-deep, nauseating feeling of being trapped in proximity to a horny man who repulses you. Being groped in a crowd, or leered at while travelling alone, or propositioned a little too forcefully in a bar – all of these situations can provoke this horrible emotion. It is an emotion that women in the sex industry are forced to repress. In fact, as the prostitution survivor Rachel Moran has written, the ability not to cry or vomit in response to sexual fear and disgust is one of the essential ‘skills’ demanded by the industry.

Male and female sociosexuality can be drawn (roughly) as two bell curves with a substantial overlap. But, as with any normally distributed trait, any average group difference will be most glaring at the tails. The people exceptionally high in sociosexuality are overwhelmingly men, and the people exceptionally low in it are overwhelmingly women. This means that, as a rule, any sexual culture that encourages women to ‘fuck back’ will, more often than not, just encourage women to fuck themselves over.

The heterosexual dating market has a problem, and it’s not one that can be easily resolved. Male sexuality and female sexuality, at the population level, do not match. On average, men want casual sex more often than women do, and women want committed monogamy more often than men do. Hook-up culture demands that women suppress their natural instincts in order to match male sexuality and thus meet the male demand for no-strings sex. Some women are quite happy to do this, but most women find it unpleasant, or even distressing. Thus hook-up culture is a solution to the sexuality mismatch that benefits some men at the expense of most women.

I propose a different solution, based on a fundamental feminist claim: unwanted sex is worse than sexual frustration. I’m not willing to accept a sexual culture that puts pressure on people low in sociosexuality (overwhelmingly women) to meet the sexual demands of those high in sociosexuality (overwhelmingly men), particularly when sex carries so many more risks for women, in terms of violence and pregnancy.

Hook-up culture is a terrible deal for women and yet has been presented by liberal feminism as a form of liberation. A truly feminist project would demand that, in the straight dating world, it should...

This argument is a long way from the feminist mainstream in the twenty-first century. Progressive media outlets churn out articles with such headlines as ‘Your 7-point intersectional feminist guide to hook ups’ and ‘5 fantastic ways to engage in feminist hookup culture’, all arguing that, with consent, anything goes.18 But this approach fails to recognise the relational nature of sex and the competitive nature of the sexual marketplace, overstating the extent to which any of us can make truly free choices in a system in which we are all radically restricted. And it leaves no space for the sociosexuality gap –...

Today’s young women are typically unaware that men are, in general, much better suited to emotionless sex and find it much easier to regard their sexual partners as disposable. Ignorant of this fact, women can all too easily fail to recognise that being desired is not at all the same thing as being held in high esteem. It isn’t nice to think of oneself as disposable or to acknowledge that other people view you that way. Often, it’s easier to turn away from any acknowledgement of what is really going on, at least temporarily. I’ve spoken to a lot of women who participated in hook-up culture when they were young and only years later came to realise just how unhappy it made them. I’ve yet to meet anyone who has travelled the same emotional journey, but in the opposite direction.

Sherry Argov, author of the best-selling dating advice book Why Men Love Bitches, puts it frankly: ‘What men don’t want women to know is that, almost immediately, they put women into one of two categories: “good time only” or “worthwhile.” And the minute he slides you into that “good time only” category, you’ll almost never come back out.’32 There is a straightforward scientific reason for the existence of these two categories: it is hard to dissuade men out of their instinct to care about what evolutionary biologists call ‘paternity certainty’. Men in ‘cad’ mode aren’t concerned with the welfare of their unknown offspring, since they are favouring quantity over quality, but men in ‘dad’ mode care a great deal and will often devote their lives to providing for their families.

When looking for a long-term partner, anonymous surveys suggest that the vast majority of straight men prefer to choose a wife with a limited sexual history and little interest in casual sex, past or present.

Women also prefer a husband who is not unusually promiscuous, but their preference is not as strong, and most are willing to accept a man who has historically enjoyed casual sex but has since settled down.