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

by Louise Perry

The fact that a man wants to have sex with a woman is not an indication that he wants a relationship with her.

Linda Lovelace (real name Linda Boreman), star of the 1972 hardcore film Deep Throat, is perhaps the most famous example of a woman who entered porn literally, as she later detailed in her autobiography Ordeal, at gunpoint.

Here is the pattern I have seen over and over again in my 7 years in this industry: Girl gets into porn, shoots regularly for about 6 months to a year doing relatively tame sex scenes. Work starts to slow down, so girl decides to do more hardcore scenes (things like anal, multiple men etc.). Work slows down again. Girl now starts escorting and becomes ‘open’ to doing just about anything on camera to get work. Eventually, there is no company willing to shoot her and porn work is dried up. Girl usually has no work history and often no schooling, and now is essentially stuck with escorting, stripping, webcamming and any porn work she might be able to scrape up.

In 1981, a pair of insect specialists observed a male jewel beetle attempting to mate with a discarded beer bottle (known in Australian slang as a ‘stubbie’). Upon further investigation, they found that male jewel beetles were not only frequently mistaking stubbies for females of their species, they actually preferred the stubbies, ignoring potential mates in order to hump the glass bottles because these bits of litter were more glossy and more golden than the female jewel beetles, and thus more sexually exciting to the males.32

Video games and social media already undermine the native psychological mechanisms that make us work towards status – they supply more immediate rewards and take far less effort than anything we work towards out in the real world. Sex robots are only going to make that worse, especially for young men.

one perverse feature of the twenty-first-century dating market is that the average young person is now having sex less often than their parents and grandparents once did, and there is an increasingly large and frustrated population of men who remain virgins into their twenties and beyond. This subset of men is particularly vulnerable to the purveyors of limbic capitalism.

Put simply, the porn generation are having less sex, and the sex they are having is also worse: less intimate, less satisfying and less meaningful.

Linda Lovelace was an enthusiastic defender of the porn industry during her promotion of Deep Throat: it was only years later that she said that viewers were ‘watching me being raped’.

There is no good reason to use porn. Giving it up costs the consumer nothing. It is easier by far than giving up factory-farmed meat or products made by sweatshop labour because, although we all need to eat and clothe ourselves, not a single one of us needs to watch porn ever again. The sexual liberation narrative tells you to keep going; I’m telling you that you have an obligation to stop. Notes

Prostitution has never been a matter of personal choice or female empowerment. Rather, the role of ‘buyer’ versus ‘seller’ has always been determined not only by sex but also by race, nationality and – above all – class.

One of the most important differences between the sexes is that men are higher in the quality that psychologists call ‘sociosexuality’ – the desire for sexual variety. This means that, on average, men are much more likely than women to desire casual sex. This sexuality gap produces a mismatch between male and female desire at the population level. There are a lot more straight men than there are straight women looking for casual sex, meaning that many of these men are left frustrated by the lack of willing casual partners.

The Pill has existed for seventy years, while Homo sapiens has existed for approximately 200,000 years. We evolved in an environment in which sex led to pregnancy, and these psychological adaptations remain with us. Of course nature can be overcome, to an extent – we all live modern lives that are very different from those of our ancient ancestors – but it is very hard to remove deeply embedded adaptations from the human mind.

The whole point of paid sex is that it must be paid for. It is not mutually desired by both parties – one party is there unwillingly, in exchange for money, or sometimes other goods such as drugs, food or shelter. The person being paid must ignore her own lack of sexual desire, or even her bone-deep revulsion. She must suppress her most self-protective instincts in the service of another person’s sexual pleasure. This is why the sex industry typically attracts only the poorest and the most desperate women – these are the people who don’t have the means to resist it.

Prostitution denies women what they are evolved to want: the opportunity to choose their mates. Instead, prostitutes are forced to have unwanted sex with men that they do not find even remotely attractive. And, in the era before reliable contraception, unwanted pregnancy was often the result, as is evident from archeological evidence such as that found in an excavation in Buckinghamshire, England, which uncovered ninety-seven infant skeletons buried under a Roman brothel.11 Even in the modern world, in low- and middle-income countries, where access to contraception can be unreliable, female prostitutes have about a one in four chance of being impregnated by a client in any given year.12 Sex may be meaningless fun for the clients, but it is neither fun nor meaningless for the women, or for the children they bear.

There is a strange thing that happens in the political discourse on the sex industry. Usually, people who identify with the liberal left are concerned with championing the interests of the most economically marginalised people – the poor over the rich, the worker over the boss, and so on. But when it comes to prostitution, that position is slyly reversed. Rather than talking about the women at the bottom of the industry – the very poor, drug addicted or trafficked – it is more common to see liberal feminists drawing attention to those in the most elite slice of the industry. It is the highest earning, rather than the lowest earning, who find themselves with the most vigorous allies on the left.

In the global sex industry, it is poor countries that provide the ‘product’ and rich countries that provide the demand.

At euphemistic massage parlors and steam baths all over South Vietnam, soldiers could get fellatio or intercourse for as little as $2. Military authorities dismissed brothels on American bases with a nod and a wink, providing medical care to prostitutes and Johns alike, which sent a strong signal to American soldiers that their exploitation of Vietnamese women was not only excused but also sanctioned as a bonus for a year’s worth of service.

I find it perplexing that so many liberal feminists who argue vigorously that ‘sex work is work’ are hyper-sensitive to any suggestion of sexual impropriety in their own workplaces. These women recoil at being asked out for dinner by a male colleague or being touched casually on an arm or leg, describing such acts as ‘sexual harassment’. But if that is sexual harassment, then how should we describe what goes on in a brothel?

Remember the memorandum from the quartermaster general in 1886, quoted at the beginning of this chapter: ‘it is necessary to have a sufficient number of women [and] to take care that they are sufficiently attractive.’

most men take a very negative attitude towards what they consider to be a history of promiscuity in a potential marriage partner, even if they don’t necessarily admit to this publicly. This means that, although an OnlyFans account may provide a woman with a short-term injection of self-esteem, and perhaps also an injection of cash, it will also limit the pool of men who are willing to marry her, because OnlyFans is to the marriage market as a criminal record is to the jobs market.

We must resist that logic at all costs. If we try and pretend that sex has no special value that makes it different from other acts, then we end up in some very dark places. If sex isn’t worthy of its own moral category, then nor is sexual harassment or rape. If we accept that sex is merely a service that can be freely bought and sold, then we have no arguments left to make against the incels who want to ‘redistribute’ it or the army officials who want to offer their troops ‘convenient arrangements’. If we voice no objection to the principle of ‘sex sells’, then we can hardly complain when our public spaces are saturated with hyper-sexuality and we find ourselves scrolling through would-be sexual partners on a dating app in the same way we scroll through any other kind of consumable. Once you permit the idea that people can be products, everything is corroded.

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.

Most modern divorces are not a consequence of domestic abuse12 – most involve a couple growing apart, falling out of love, and trying for a fresh start. But, in many of these cases, the promise of happier alternative relationships remains unfulfilled, particularly for women, who are more likely than men to remain permanently single following divorce.13 What’s more, between a third and a half of divorced people in the UK report in surveys that they regret their decision to divorce.14 There is a lot of space between ‘happy’ and ‘irreparably unhappy’. In the past, those people remained married; now they usually don’t.

It often seemed more polite to sleep with a man than to chuck him out of your flat. True, we’d been brought up to say ‘no’ to sex, but the only reason for that was because we might get pregnant … But now, armed with the pill, and with every man knowing you were armed with the pill, pregnancy was no longer a reason to say ‘no’ to sex. And men exploited this mercilessly. Now, for them, ‘no’ always meant ‘yes’.

‘Not only do [women] have the right to choose, I don’t believe they should have to consult anybody except for a physician…. Gentlemen, that is fair. But ladies, to be fair to us, if you decide to have the baby, the man should not have to pay … My money, my choice.’

Children who grow up in a household with only one biological parent are worse off, on average, than children who grow up in a household with both of their biological parents, regardless of the parents’ race or educational background, regardless of whether the parents are married when the child is born, and regardless of whether the resident parent remarries.

Fatherlessness is associated with higher incarceration rates for boys,25 higher rates of teen pregnancy for girls,26 and a greater likelihood of emotional and behavioural problems for both sexes.27 This is not only because children are denied the material support their fathers might have given them but also because single mothers are obliged to take on the almost impossible task of doing everything themselves: all of the earning, plus all of the caring, socialising, and disciplining of their children. Then there’s the sometimes malign influence of step-parents – mostly, in practice, stepfathers, since in the vast majority of cases it is mothers who are awarded primary custody, and therefore mothers who are likely to bring a new partner into a young child’s home. Evolutionary psychologists refer darkly to a phenomenon known as ‘the Cinderella effect’: the higher incidences of child abuse by step-parents than by biological parents. The effect is so marked that Steven Pinker has described step-parenthood as ‘the strongest risk factor for child abuse ever identified’. A step-parent is forty to one hundred times more likely than a biological parent to kill a child,28 and stepfathers are also far more likely than genetic fathers to sexually abuse children. Stepchildren, on average, find home life more stressful than other children do. They leave home younger and are more likely to report that family conflict was their key reason for moving out. They have chronically higher level...

Some people consider the death of marriage to be a good thing, and many of those people are feminists. Opposition to marriage was a common theme in much of the writing of the second wave, with feminists including Andrea Dworkin, Germaine Greer and Kate Millett all arguing for its abolition. ‘The institution of marriage is the chief vehicle for the perpetuation of the oppression of women,’ insisted the American sociologist Marlene Dixon in 1969, summarising the dominant feminist critique of the time. ‘It is through the role of wife that the subjugation of women is maintained.’33

it’s no coincidence that most of the feminists who opposed marriage never had children. I’ve written earlier in this book about the conflict between liberal feminists and radical feminists on issues such as prostitution and porn, issues on which there are clear and important differences between these two feminist traditions. On motherhood, however, the differences have always been paper thin. Both groups have no answer to the question of how women are supposed to reconcile their search for freedom with a condition that necessarily curtails it. If you value freedom above all else, then you must reject motherhood, since this is a state of being that limits a woman’s freedom in almost every possible way – not only during pregnancy but also for the rest of her life, since she will always have obligations to her children, and they will always have obligations to her. It’s a connection that is only ever severed in the most dire circumstances.

Feminists have historically succeeded in challenging this restriction on freedom through advocating for greater availability of contraception and abortion, which has been effective up to a point, in that it has allowed women more of a say in when or if they have children. But what about when the children are actually born? Here, we come upon an anti-natalist streak in both liberal and radical feminist traditions that leaves mothers shut out, which means – even with historically low birth rates – that at least three-quarters of women are shut out. Motherhood is discussed in fewer than 3 per cent of papers, journal articles or textbooks on modern gender theory34 – but then, less than half of tenured female academics have children,35 which makes the omission somewhat less surprising. The whole topic has slipped out of sight.

The psychoanalyst and paediatrician Donald Winnicott has written that ‘there is no such thing as a baby. There is only a baby and someone.’ The writer Leah Libresco Sargeant expands the point: The liberal theory of the independent individual as the basic unit of society is full of exceptions … It would be fairer to say that dependence is our default state, and self-sufficiency the aberration. Our lives begin and (frequently) end in states of near total dependence, and much of the middle is marked by periods of need.36

it isn’t possible to reject dependency altogether because, even if a woman chooses never to have children, she will one day grow old and depend on other people as if she were an infant all over again.

Shulamith Firestone herself – having become estranged from her family in later life, and having never married or produced children – spent the final years of her life in a state of profound vulnerability caused by severe mental illness. She was supported for a time by a network of feminist friends and admirers, but eventually the group dissipated, since they were not tied together by blood or marriage, and relationships based on mutual liking or idealism are not as durable as those that entail a lifelong obligation. Firestone was left uncared for, and she died alone in her home aged sixty-seven, with her body left undiscovered for some days. It was assumed by the coroner that she had died of starvation.

The vast majority of women find it difficult to detach emotion from sex, meaning that an encounter with a cad who doesn’t call is likely to leave a woman feeling distressed, even if she attempts to repress those feelings. Women did not evolve to treat sex as meaningless, and trying to pretend otherwise does not end well.

Before I start sounding too quixotic, I should make one thing clear: lifelong monogamy is not our natural state. Only about 15 per cent of societies in the anthropological record have been monogamous.46 Monogamy has to be enforced through laws and customs, and, even within societies in which it is deeply embedded, plenty of people are defiant. To date, monogamy has been dominant in only two types of society: small-scale groups beset by serious environmental privation and some of the most complex civilisations to have ever existed, including our own.47 Almost all others have been polygynous, permitting high-status men to take multiple wives. But while the monogamous marriage model may be relatively unusual, it is also spectacularly successful. When monogamy is imposed on a society, it tends to become richer. It has lower rates of both child abuse and domestic violence, since conflict between co-wives tends to generate both. Birth rates and crime rates both fall, which encourages economic development, and wealthy men, denied the opportunity to devote their resources to acquiring more wives, instead invest elsewhere: in property, businesses, employees, and other productive endeavours.

I began this book at the beginning of my pregnancy and completed it when my son was six months old. Writing is probably one of the easiest jobs to combine with motherhood, but even so there were weeks on end during which I didn’t write a word because I was too busy caring for my baby.

I have just one piece of advice to offer in this chapter, and you’ve probably already guessed what it will be. So, here it is: get married. And do your best to stay married. Particularly if you have children, and particularly if those children are still young. And if you do find yourself in the position of being a single mother, wait until your children are older before you bring a stepfather into their home.

Distrust any person or ideology that puts pressure on you to ignore your moral intuition. Chivalry is actually a good thing. We all have to control our sexual desires, and men particularly so, given their greater physical strength and average higher sex drives. Sometimes (though not always) you can readily spot sexually aggressive men. There are a handful of personality traits that are common to them: impulsivity, promiscuity, hyper-masculinity and disagreeableness. These traits in combination should put you on your guard. A man who is aroused by violence is a man to steer well clear of, whether or not he uses the vocabulary of BDSM to excuse his behaviour. If he can maintain an erection while beating a woman, he isn’t safe to be alone with. Consent workshops are mostly useless. The best way of reducing the incidence of rape is by reducing the opportunities for would-be rapists to offend. This can be done either by keeping convicted rapists in prison or by limiting their access to potential victims. The category of people most likely to become victims of these men are young women aged about thirteen to twenty-five. All girls and women, but particularly those in this age category, should avoid being alone with men they don’t know or men who give them the creeps. Gut instinct is not to be ignored: it’s usually triggered by a red flag that’s well worth noticing. Get drunk or high in private and with female friends rather than in public or in mixed company. Don’t use dating ap...

Sex must be taken seriously. Men and women are different. Some desires are bad. Consent is not enough. Violence is not love. Loveless sex is not empowering. People are not products. Marriage is good.