‘The Case Against the Sexual Revolution’ Asks: Can Women ‘Have Sex Like Men’?
‘The Case Against the Sexual Revolution’, by Louise Perry, reviewed; Polity, 2022.
By the time Louise Perry had graduated from London’s SOAS university, having studied anthropology and women’s studies, she, like her course-mates, was convinced that porn was great, B.D.S.M. was fun, and sex work was work. And then she went to work at a rape centre, where the perceived one-sidedness of the ‘sexual revolution’ was plain to see. Day after day, Louise saw the results of the ‘liberation’ of women from their biology: benefits to a tiny number of well-educated, well-connected, upper-middle-class women, perhaps — but hell for many of the rest of them. The invention of the pill, the legalisation of abortion, the lifting of taboos around casual sex — these had mainly served the male half of the species. For men could now sleep around without paying a price. Louise does not think, on balance, that the creation of the pill was a bad thing; but it did set something vast in motion. And, to quote Sophocles, ‘nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.’
So Louise comes to her subject not as a liberal or conservative but a post-liberal: someone who sees the ruling order as showing cracks so wide that something must replace it. That something, for Louise, is not the world of the 1950s, but something new: something that grants that changes cannot be reversed and, more important, that personal freedom must be balanced with other values. Perhaps she has in mind the words of the Colombian reactionary writer Nicolás Goméz-Dávila: ‘Liberty is not an end, but a means. Whoever mistakes it for an end does not know what to do once he attains it.’ Louise is certainly with the reactionaries when she says that the sexual revolution has been disastrous for women. Our best bet, she says, given we cannot reverse technological change, is take on the ideology of that revolution. And that involves showing how, in respect of sexuality, women and men are — well, completely different. For Louise, quaint-sounding notions of chivalry might in fact have their uses.
Perry is certainly with the reactionaries when she says that the sexual revolution has been disastrous for women.
She starts her book with the tale of Marilyn Monroe and Hugh Hefner. Desperate for cash, Marilyn agreed to pose for nude photos on the condition she could not be identified in them. These were then bought and used by Hugh to push his new gig, Playboy. Hugh neither paid Marilyn nor asked her if he could publish her photos. Yet these photos were the key reason for Playboy’s success. And at the same time, they ushered in a new age of sexual licence. Marilyn, meanwhile, was humiliated. She never even got a thank you for the millions her photos made others. She later told a friend she had to buy a copy of Playboy just to see herself in it. So for Louise, descriptions of Hugh Hefner as a complex feminist type are laughable. His early support for the pill and abortion had nothing to do with the well-being of women, and everything to do with the pleasure of men. And the story ends happily. After enjoying a retirement pumped full of viagra and surrounded by identikit Barbified women young enough to be his granddaughters, Hugh had himself buried next to Marilyn. They had never met.
One strong thread that runs through Louise’s book is that sex cannot be detached from biology, and to claim otherwise is to doom women to suffering. Sex is not just a product, to be exchanged on the free market like everything else in our world, Louise says; and in fact, liberal feminists know this, whatever they might say. If your male boss asks you to make a cup of coffee, you might not complain: in the end, it is only a coffee. If he asks you for sex, however, it is quite another matter, as #MeToo made plain. Women often speak of sex that leaves them with a sense of shame they find it hard to justify, or feel pain during sex they are too embarrassed to admit to. Men and women are different, Louise says: men punch harder, run faster, and show far more interest in sexual variety. Almost any man can choke almost any woman to death. For women, the cost of a bad sexual choice could by pregnancy. The cost for men is far smaller. Pretending all this is irrelevant, says Louise, is delusional. And it only serves men. The liberal feminist battle-cry of ‘have sex like a man’, a trope found in shows like Sex and the City and The Fall, is both impossible and disempowering. Even a cursory look at the differences in the sexual practices of gay men and gay women, Louise says, as well as in the profile of those who use sex workers, throws the radically different male and female approaches to sexuality into sharp relief.
Louise has at least two problems. To make her case, she leans heavily on evolutionary psychology, which has been attacked for over-simplification, lack of evidence, explaining behaviour after the fact, and other things. (Evolutionary psychologists have responded strongly to attacks.) Louise argues, for example, that since men can produce children almost every time they orgasm, whereas women pay a high price for pregnancy, it follows that men would see sex rather differently (something called the ‘socio-sexuality gap’). Discussing rape, she notes that the massive energy cost involved in the development of big shoulders points to the evolutionary value of male aggression — something that helps to show why male violence in the bedroom and outside of it cannot just be put down to socialisation. A corollary of this is that teaching very violent men not to be violent is a waste of time. (After a course of this kind for rapists at a Welsh prison, their reoffending rate actually went up.)
She notes that the massive energy cost involved in the development of big shoulders points to the evolutionary value of male aggression.
Her second problem is that she is arguing against personal freedom — or rather, the exercise of personal freedom. Over the past 100 years, riding on the coat-tails of free-market ideology, it has climbed our hierarchy of values to take the top spot. Hugh Hefner invoked it when challenged on his legacy. ‘It’s a small price to pay for personal freedom,’ he said, as if there were no other values against which freedom should be balanced — or as if exercising freedom and feeling free were the same thing (which, as Hegel tells us, they are not). Personal freedom goes hand in hand with a blank-slate theory of human behaviour, which runs against evolutionary psychology by arguing it is nurture, not nature, that counts. If men are more likely to commit rape, it is because their society encourages or allows it. If women feel ashamed after casual sex, it is because they have been fed certain views about female behaviour. The blank-slate theory is useful, for it suggests that by shaping our surroundings, we can shape ourselves. But, noting that evolutionary psychology studies replicate far more often than social psychology studies, Louise says the socialisation theory is not the only way to explain how we behaviour. Nature counts.
Louise’s conclusions go against the grain, and her points are bound to bridle many liberal feminists (who, she claims, rarely live in line with their beliefs). Her book will strike many as inconvenient; though, perhaps because she is ‘of the left’, reviews of her book, which imply gender-critical ideas she has expressed explicitly elsewhere, and which run dead against the liberal consensus, have been positive even in papers like the Guardian. What is clear is that she is not a contrarian. She argues well, marshals a wealth of evidence, draws on experience and, insofar as you think it counts for something, invokes the wisdom of the past. She also quite clearly cares about women. At the very least, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution asks good questions.
