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

by Louise Perry

Social phenomena are a little more complicated, but, even so, the normal distribution is often a good approximation for what we see across human populations. Sociosexuality, for instance (an interest in sexual variety), is close to being normally distributed. Most people are close to average, and a minority of unusual people are found at one or other pole, meaning that there are some people who have no interest whatsoever in casual sex, and some people who are off-the-charts horny. Importantly, though – as I first laid out in chapter 2 – the bell curves for men and for women are somewhat different, with the male mean further towards the higher end of the sociosexuality spectrum. This means that there are a lot more super-horny men than super-horny women, and a lot more super-not-horny women than super-not-horny men. The problem of normal distribution is this: when you impose some change on a population, different people will experience it differently. It is very, very difficult to design a policy that will home in on just one group of people at just one point on the graph, leaving the rest of the curve unchanged. And when it comes to a big historical event such as the sexual revolution – which nobody designed, or even fully foresaw – that imprecision is even more marked.